I have been using Loom as a way to create screen recordings and communicate to clients about the progress of their projects, demonstrate new features I have added, and do small training. So far it has been satisfactory, but I am concerned about the limits in terms of number of recordings and the time limit of 5 minutes on the free plan. I recently discovered that Vimeo now has a free screen recording service with similar features as well as unlimited recordings and recording time. I made a couple of quick videos which I have embedded below for comparison.
The bottom line: Vimeo Record seems to be a viable alternative, but I have concerns.
The first recording I made with Vimeo was of too low quality (360p) to work as a screencast. I tried it again and somehow it magically recorded in 1080p which is actually better quality than Loom (720p). There was some other jank with Vimeo though - the webcam insert of myself did not show up on the video as expected and I found that deleting the first video I made was buggy (refreshing the page brought it back!).
In preparing this post I also noticed a couple of other issues with Vimeo. Somehow the native embed block is not working with the link provided by Vimeo. Also I found that the embed code generated by Vimeo was inconsistent depending on where I grabbed it from on the site. The video below was embedded using a fixed width and height iframe code I got from the Vimeo record edit page. loom on the other hand provides a nice responsive embed code block as you can see below.
A further problem with Vimeo is that it relies on a Chrome browser extension. It seemed that this browser extension was dogging the performance of my browser. After disabling the Chrome extension I was rewarded with a much smoother browsing experience. Loom on the other hand provides a native app which works smoothly on my Mac, another plus in their favor.
For the time being I am going to continue working with Vimeo and Loom together. If the bugs get sorted out of Vimeo I will probably end up using that service because of the restrictions on the free Loom plan. Also the size and longevity of Vimeo as a company is attractive. Still I remain impressed with Loom and it currently is a pretty clear winner as far as utility and user experience are concerned. Vimeo is ahead in terms of video quality and value.
Below are the test videos: