The Short Version: Tella is the Loom Alternative I Actually Pay For
Short version: Tella is the Loom alternative I’ve paid for with my own money for the last two years. Loom is fine for quick, disposable recordings, but if you want to create anything that looks intentional—like a tutorial, a sales demo, or a course lesson—Tella is the clear winner. It’s not perfect, but its editing workflow saves me from wanting to throw my laptop out the window.
Full disclosure: some links below are affiliate links. I only recommend tools I’ve paid for and actually use.
Why Even Look for a Loom Alternative?
Loom is the Kleenex of screen recording. It’s the default. It’s easy, it’s fast, and for a long time, it was generous enough that nobody bothered to look elsewhere. But things have changed. Loom’s free plan got nerfed into near-uselessness with its five-minute recording limit, pushing more people onto its paid plans. And once you’re paying, you start to notice the cracks.
The biggest problem with Loom is its editor. It’s primitive. You can trim the beginning and the end, and… that’s about it. Ever tried to cut out a sneeze or a long pause in the middle of a Loom video? You can’t. You have to live with it or re-record the whole thing. Stitching multiple clips together is a complete non-starter. This makes it fundamentally a tool for ephemeral communication, not for creating lasting assets.
If you just need to send a quick bug report to a developer or a casual update to a teammate, Loom works. But the moment you need to create a polished product demo for a landing page, a tutorial for a new customer, or a lesson for an online course, you hit a wall. You end up recording in Loom, downloading the giant MP4 file, and then importing it into a proper video editor like Descript editor or Screenflow just to make basic cuts. It’s a clunky, time-consuming workflow.
That’s the exact problem Tella solves.
What’s Actually Great About Tella? The Timeline Editor
Tella’s entire philosophy is different from Loom’s. It’s built around the idea that you record in small, manageable clips and then assemble them. This is the one feature that makes it worth paying for.
Here’s a real scenario. Last week, I had to create a 7-minute tutorial on setting up a specific automation. In Loom, I would have had to nail a perfect 7-minute take, which is basically impossible. I’d stumble over my words, a notification would pop up, or I’d forget a step.
With Tella, my process was completely different:
- Clip 1: Record the intro with my webcam full-screen. Done.
- Clip 2: Record the first part of the screen share, showing the setup. I messed up, so I just deleted that clip and re-recorded it. Took 30 seconds.
- Clip 3: Record the second part, showing the automation running.
- Clip 4: Record the outro, again with my webcam.
All these clips automatically drop onto a simple timeline editor right in the browser. From there, I could drag them around, trim the awkward pauses between sentences, and even add production value. For one clip, I changed the layout to have my camera on the left and the screen on the right. For another, I applied a zoom effect to focus on a specific button I was clicking. I even set a custom background that matched my brand colors.
This entire process took about 15 minutes, and the result looked like I’d spent an hour in a dedicated video editor. In Loom, this would be impossible. Tella turns video creation from a high-pressure performance into a simple assembly process. That’s my concrete love: the editor isn’t just an afterthought; it’s the core of the product.
What Sucks About Tella?
It’s not perfect. My biggest gripe is the reliability of the Chrome extension, especially on resource-heavy websites. I was once recording a complex walkthrough inside Figma, which is a notorious memory hog. About eight minutes into a ten-minute recording, the Tella extension just… crashed. No warning, no recovery. The recording was gone. I was furious.
This has happened to me twice. Now, I have a simple rule: if the recording is going to be longer than five minutes or involves a complex web app, I use the Tella desktop app. The desktop app (for Mac and Windows) is much more stable and has never failed me. But it’s an annoying workaround, and I wish the extension was as bulletproof as the app. If you live and die by Chrome extensions, this is something to be aware of.
The other minor annoyance is that exporting can sometimes feel a bit slow for longer videos (10+ minutes). It’s not a dealbreaker, but if you’re used to Loom’s near-instant share links, you’ll notice the extra minute or two Tella takes to render your final, edited video.