// the find
CapSoftware/Cap
Open source Loom alternative. Beautiful, shareable screen recordings.
Cap is an open-source screen recording app targeting Loom users who want data ownership or self-hosting. It ships a Tauri v2 desktop app for macOS and Windows with a SolidStart frontend and custom Rust crates for capture and encoding, backed by a Next.js web app for sharing and collaboration. At 20k stars it's genuinely active and well past the prototype stage.
The Rust capture pipeline is the real story here — separate crates for recording, camera, audio, encoding, rendering, and muxing rather than a thin wrapper around system APIs. Instant Mode (share link generated while still recording) requires chunked upload and progressive processing; they got it working, which is non-trivial. Self-hosting is actually thought through: Docker Compose, support for S3-compatible storage (R2, MinIO, Backblaze, Wasabi), and a desktop setting to point at your own server — not just a checkbox in the README. The monorepo structure is clean with clear boundaries between the desktop app, web app, CLI, Chrome extension, and shared packages.
The tech stack is genuinely overloaded — Rust, TypeScript, SolidStart (desktop), Next.js (web), Drizzle/MySQL, and `@effect/platform` for the web HTTP layer. That last one in particular is a high friction choice that will slow down most contributors without meaningful payoff. Linux desktop support is absent; there are Linux tray icons in the tree but the desktop app itself targets only macOS and Windows, which is a gap for a self-hosting audience that skews Linux. The AGPLv3 license for the core (web app, desktop app) is a commercial adoption blocker — any company self-hosting and modifying it must open-source their changes, which legal will flag immediately. MySQL as the database is a limited choice for collaboration and analytics features; PostgreSQL would give you better JSON handling, full-text search, and a much richer extension ecosystem.