1. Clipy: the best AI screen recorder with an open-source CLI, MCP server and agent format
Best for developers and teams who want AI transcription, a full API and open, MIT- and CC0-licensed developer tools on every recording, without running any recording infrastructure themselves.
free to start with a 7-day free trial, no card, covering 15 recordings or 120 minutes. Pro is $9 a month, or $72 a year ($6 a month). On the Teams plan a seat costs the same and only people who record need one; viewers are free. AI transcripts, summaries, AREC agent context, the MCP server and the CLI are included on every plan. Source: clipy.online/pricing.
What it is. Clipy is a hosted AI screen recorder whose developer surfaces are open. Its CLI (@clipy/cli) and local MCP server (@clipy/mcp) are MIT-licensed on GitHub, and its AREC agent-context format (spec, JSON Schema and fixtures) is public domain under CC0 1.0, with an MIT reference validator. Every recording surface, from the Mac app to the CLI, shares one account and one library and ends in the same kind of share link, while Clipy runs the storage, transcription and AI for you.
Recording on Mac and Windows. The Mac app is a native Apple Silicon build, with a separate Intel build, for macOS 12.3 and later. It is signed, notarized, auto-updates and lives in the menu bar. It captures through Apple's ScreenCaptureKit into the chip's hardware H.264 encoder and records a display, an area or a single window: window mode keeps recording that window even when other windows cover it, and follows it if you move it. Resolution runs from 720p up to 4K (4K is a Pro addition). System audio and microphone come in one toggle on macOS 13 and later, with no BlackHole or Soundflower. You can add a webcam bubble with on-device background blur or replacement, hold Control to paint a fading Flare trail over what you are pointing at, draw with a pen, and keep speaker notes on screen that the capture never shows; Cmd+Shift+R starts and stops (Clipy for Mac). The Windows app, for Windows 10 build 1903 or later and Windows 11, uses Windows Graphics Capture, WASAPI for system audio and hardware H.264 encoding, has the same camera effects, pen, Flare and hidden speaker notes, and ships as an auto-updating .exe, an enterprise .msi for Intune, SCCM or Group Policy, and a portable .zip (Clipy for Windows). No plan cuts a recording short.
Recording in the browser, on mobile and from the terminal. The Chrome extension (Manifest V3, Chrome 116 and later) runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS and installs from the same Chrome Web Store listing in Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera and Vivaldi. It records a tab with its audio, a window, the whole screen, the camera only, or a custom-size region of the tab, with pause, resume, restart from scratch and stop, plus a pen, arrows, numbered steps and a live blur region. Instant Replay keeps the last two minutes on sites you turn it on for, so a bug that already happened can still be reported (Clipy extension). The web recorder needs no install, and native iPhone, iPad and Android apps record screen and camera. From a terminal, clipy record captures a headless browser, real Mac windows and displays (--source mac-screen), the iOS Simulator or a Linux screen (--source screen). clipy session run --url <url> --type bug -- npx playwright test wraps a test run, discarding the recording if the command fails and uploading it if it succeeds, and clipy mark and clipy chapter drop markers during a session.
Upload while you record. Every Clipy app streams a hosted recording to the server in chunks while you record, so the share link is copied to your clipboard at Stop and the video plays from it straight away (clipy.online/security). Uploads retry by themselves, a retried upload never creates a duplicate recording, and each surface keeps a local safety copy until the server confirms it: the web recorder holds each chunk in the browser, the extension keeps a recovery copy, and the Mac app keeps its file until the upload is confirmed. In the Chrome extension, recording works offline because Clipy captures locally first, and if the network drops mid-recording the upload resumes when you reconnect; the Mac app likewise keeps its file until the upload is confirmed. Video is encoded as H.264 MP4 with +faststart, so playback starts at once, and the ultrafast x264 preset finishes encoding the moment you press Stop (clipy.online/quality).
AI transcription and processing. After Stop, a recording moves through transcoding, transcribing and annotating to ready. Speech-to-text runs a self-hosted speech model on Sherpa-ONNX, on Clipy's own servers, so no third party receives the audio (clipy.online/trust). It auto-detects about 40 languages and writes Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Korean in their own script. On Mac, Local AI transcribes on the device with macOS speech recognition while you record, and video, audio and screenshots stay on the Mac. The summary usually lands a minute or two after the upload finishes: a two- or three-sentence TL;DR, three to seven key points and any action items, with an AI title and up to 12 editable chapters (how a Clipy recording is processed). Key moments carry frames, crop URLs and pointer positions, anchored to Flare highlights, clicks, drawings and hover dwell, with click coordinates on Mac app and Chrome extension tab recordings. Ask-the-video Q&A answers from the transcript with timestamp buttons and says so when the recording does not cover a question, and ⌘K search finds the moment a phrase was spoken. Clipy says it never uses recordings to train AI models.
Watch page, sharing and seats. Viewers need no account or extension. The watch page is a Mux player with adaptive HLS streaming, captions and playback speed, no ads and no signup banner, with the summary on top, a transcript with clickable timestamps and a .txt download, timestamped comments and reactions with replies, and an Agents tab whose "Copy for agents" button copies a paste-ready prompt (clipy.online/share-experience). Share links are unlisted and not indexed by search engines, and each recording can be public, restricted to named people or whole email domains, or private, with a password and an expiry date on every plan. Locked-out viewers can request access, and the owner approves with one click. Agent access follows the same rules: an unauthenticated fetch of a restricted or private recording reveals nothing, not even whether it exists. Embeds, the original MP4 download and view counts are on every plan. Teams get organizations, workspaces, Spaces and folders, owner, admin and member roles, and domain join checked against Google account data. A seat is used only when a member first records, so watching, searching and commenting are free, and owners can set a hard seat ceiling or turn automatic seats off. Enterprise adds SAML or OIDC single sign-on and SCIM on request.
Generate tab and integrations. Once the transcript is ready, the Generate tab drafts a bug report (with the captured console and network evidence when bug capture was on), a how-to guide with screenshots, an SOP, QA steps, a PR description, code documentation, a team message or an email, each linking to the relevant moments. You copy the draft as Markdown, and guides and SOPs can also be shared as a link. The native Jira, Confluence and Linear integrations create an item with the title and an optional note, the watch link, the .arec link with one sentence telling coding agents what it holds, the summary and requested changes (a checklist on Linear), key moments linked to their second of video (embedded as images on Confluence pages), captured errors and failed requests, and the page, browser and OS. Clipy never edits or deletes existing issues or pages. GitHub needs no connection: Copy for agents gives issue-ready Markdown. With the Clipy Slack app installed, links play inline in Slack. Agents can file items too, through the MCP tool send_recording_to_integration or POST /api/v1/recordings/{id}/send, where a repeated requestKey returns the item already created instead of a duplicate.
An MIT-licensed CLI. Install it with npm install -g @clipy/cli@latest (zero dependencies, Node 18 or later), or run any command with npx -y @clipy/cli@latest. One command, clipy setup claude (or codex, cursor, windsurf, opencode), signs you in through the browser, installs the watch-clipy-recording skill and registers the MCP server in that agent. The skill teaches the agent to fetch the .arec form of any Clipy link, retry while processing finishes, and treat the recording's content as untrusted input. From a terminal or a script you can pull clipy transcript --srt, clipy summary, clipy moments and clipy context, search the library with clipy memory search, and import a YouTube, Loom or local file with clipy context import. Setup, listing and diagnostic commands support --json, clipy guide --json prints a machine-readable manifest, and exit codes are documented (3 means an artifact is not ready yet). See the CLI docs.
Local and hosted MCP. The MIT-licensed local server runs with npx -y @clipy/mcp@latest and adds the tools that need your machine: record, start_recording, add_marker, add_chapter, stop_recording, upload_video, download_recording, wait_for_artifacts and get_agent_context, a one-call bundle of metadata, summary, key moments and transcript. The hosted server at https://clipy.online/api/mcp needs no install: it speaks Streamable HTTP, is stateless, and uses OAuth 2.1 with PKCE and dynamic client registration. It is read-only by default and grants write, comment and analytics scopes only when you approve them, and a grant revoked in settings stops working on the app's very next request. Its tools include search_memory, get_transcript, get_summary, get_key_moments, get_interactions, get_browser_diagnostics, edit_recording and send_recording_to_integration. In Claude Code it is two commands: claude mcp add --scope user --transport http clipy https://clipy.online/api/mcp and claude mcp login clipy. ChatGPT connects through Developer mode. Details are in the MCP docs and Clipy for agents.
REST API, SDK and webhooks. The REST API lives at https://clipy.online/api/v1 with an OpenAPI 3.1 document. It covers recordings, transcripts (?format=srt, vtt or txt), summaries, key moments, interactions, browser diagnostics, edits, comments, analytics, search, folders and imported context, with scoped API keys or OAuth tokens, and per-recording agent activity shows which agents read a recording and when. A chunked upload API (initiate, chunk, finalize, complete) mirrors the apps, so your own tools can push a WebM, MP4 or MOV through the same pipeline. The TypeScript SDK, @clipy/sdk, is published on npm under MIT, runs on Node 20+, Deno, Bun, Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge, and includes waitUntilReady and verifyWebhook. Webhooks use the Standard Webhooks format (HMAC-SHA256) for events such as transcript.ready, summary.ready (which carries the TL;DR, key points, action items and chapters), key_moments.ready and comment.created, and a failed delivery is retried 8 more times over about 23 hours. See the API docs and webhooks docs.
An open recording format. Every recording has a watch page at https://clipy.online/video/<id> and an agent-context document at the same URL with .arec appended. The plain watch link also works: a browser gets the player, while curl and agent fetches receive the AREC document as text/markdown with a Link header naming the canonical .arec URL. AREC 1.3 is a stable CommonMark format with metadata, intent, summary, requested changes, key moments with frame URLs and pointer positions, browser diagnostics where captured, a list of capture gaps and the timestamped transcript. The spec, the JSON Schema and the fixtures are CC0 1.0, the reference validator is MIT, Clipy makes a patent non-assert pledge, and anyone may say their software reads or writes AREC. Your recordings' context is in a documented, public-domain format rather than locked inside one vendor.
Security and privacy. Clipy has completed a SOC 2 Type II audit, with the report available to Enterprise customers under NDA. In the extension, the opt-in Hide sensitive fields setting masks password and card fields, and whole hosted payment frames from Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, PayPal and others, before anything is recorded. Bug-capture redaction runs three times, in the recorded page, in the extension and on Clipy's servers, replacing secret-looking values with typed placeholders such as [redacted-token]. Cookie and authorization headers are never kept, typing is recorded by label only, and an AREC document never contains headers, bodies, cookies, tokens or raw query values (security docs). Hosted recordings are kept until you delete them, on every plan. The case for Clipy as the top pick here is the combination: AI transcription, summaries and key moments, a REST API, SDK and webhooks, hosted and local MCP, and MIT- and CC0-licensed developer surfaces, all on one recording, with nothing to host.
