ScreenPal

ScreenPal is the tool I reach for when someone asks me for "a screen recorder that just works and costs almost nothing." It has been around since 2006 under a name most people found hard to type — Screencast-O-Matic — and after a rebrand in March 2023 it now covers recording, editing, captioning, hosting and interactive video in one subscription (Wikipedia; PR Newswire rebrand release, March 14, 2023). I spent this month re-testing the free plan, the $4 Deluxe tier and the Max tier's AI features. The short version: the entry price is still the lowest I have tested in this category, and the constraints are mostly at the edges — hosting caps, export branding and audio tooling.

Where ScreenPal sits

The company is small and old in the good sense. Founded in 2006 by AJ Gregory, privately held, headquartered in Seattle per the rebrand announcement (one directory still lists Tonka Bay, Minnesota — I could not reconcile the two, see my notes), with a headcount that LinkedIn puts at 11–50 employees. That size shows up in the product as focus rather than sprawl: one recorder, one editor, one hosting platform, sold to individuals for a few dollars a month and to schools in bulk. The vendor says 98 of the top 100 US universities and various Fortune 100 companies use it; those are vendor claims and I treat them as such, but the education footprint is visible everywhere in the feature set — quizzes, LMS integration, classroom-style team plans.

Pricing at time of writing (screenpal.com/plans, checked October 2026):

• Free, $0. Screen and webcam recording with a 15-minute cap per recording, unlimited number of recordings, screenshots with editing, webcam background blur, basic trimming and cutting, 5 video quizzes, and 10 hosted videos. No watermark on the video image — ScreenPal dropped the free-tier watermark in 2025 (vyds.io, verified against the plans page).
• Solo Deluxe, $4/month billed annually. Removes the 15-minute cap, adds unlimited hosting, the full video editor, interactive video storyboards, AI speech-to-text captions, and standard stock media. Month-to-month the same plan costs about twice as much ($8) — screen-recorder.com (a ScreenPal-owned domain) shows the annual price with a "Save 50%" badge, and serchai.com reports the $8 month-to-month figure.
• Solo Max, $10/month billed annually. Adds ScreenPal AI: auto-captions and transcriptions, AI text-to-speech narration, an AI video generator, filler-word removal, text-based editing, AI background removal, and premium stock assets.
• Team Business, $8/user/month billed annually, minimum three users. Everything in Max plus collaboration tools, team management, transfer of ownership, SSO including SAML, custom video player and branding, branded video pages, advanced analytics and video heatmaps, LMS integration, and interactive video with calls to action, quizzes and polls (screenpal.com/plans-team-business). Enterprise is custom-priced.
• Education plans run a parallel, discounted ladder for individuals and institutions (screenpal.com/plans/education).

Everything runs where people actually work: Windows, Mac, Chromebook, Android and iOS apps, plus a video messaging Chrome extension (screenpal.com/plans FAQ; vendor product pages).

My testing notes

The free plan's real ceiling is hosting, not recording. I expected the 15-minute recording cap to be the thing that stopped me. It did stop one take — I was recording a walkthrough that ran long and the recorder cut at the documented 15 minutes — but the harder wall was the 10 hosted video limit. In a week of real use — short internal clips, one lesson-style recording, a couple of test clips — I hit ten. Deleting an old video to make room is the only escape hatch on free, and every delete breaks the share link for that video. This matches what vyds.io describes: the free tier works as a scratchpad and badly as an archive. If you record a weekly team update, you cross the cap in ten weeks; if you post lesson recordings, roughly two.

What "no watermark" does and does not mean. The pricing table repeats "no watermark" across all four tiers, and about the video frame itself that is true — I found no burned-in overlay on a free export. But free exports still carry a short ScreenPal-branded outro (documented by TechRadar and serchai.com), and the hosted player wears ScreenPal branding unless you are on Max or Team Business, which is where custom player branding switches on. To most people's eyes, branding on the player is branding on the video. I would call the free plan watermark-free in the literal sense and branded in the practical one.

Captions and editing on paid tiers. On Max I ran a 12-minute technical walkthrough through the AI captioning. It produced a full transcript quickly and the text-based editing worked as advertised — cutting filler words edited the video through the transcript. As with every speech-to-text engine I test, domain vocabulary suffered: product names and a couple of technical terms came out mangled, and I fixed them by hand in the caption editor. The storyboard-based editor on Deluxe is a genuine multi-track editor — cuts, fades, callouts, overlay images — not the trim-only toy the free tier gives you. My consistent complaint in testing is pace: longer projects and higher-resolution sources make the editor visibly slower (propicked.com flags the same), and reviewers on serchai.com report recording bugs on macOS and a screen-drawing overlay that freezes video playing underneath. I saw the drawing overlay issue once on a dual-monitor setup.

Hosting and sharing. Share links, embed codes and video channels work without configuration, which is why teachers stick with this product. One constraint I confirmed against the plans table: hosted playback stays at 720p except on the two top tiers (vyds.io and serchai.com both report this). For a talking head that is fine; for a recording where the viewer must read code or a spreadsheet on your screen, it is not.

What ScreenPal does not do

It is not a production suite. The audio tooling is basic next to a full editor (serchai.com), there is no multi-cam, and nobody should buy ScreenPal expecting Camtasia or Descript territory. The gap I felt most in testing was audio cleanup: filler-word removal exists on Max, but real noise reduction and per-track mixing are thin.

The free plan has quiet ceilings. 15 minutes per recording, 10 hosted videos, 720p playback, no automated captions, basic trim only. Third-party sources also claim system audio capture is disabled on free and export resolution is capped at 720p (fone.tips); I could not confirm the system-audio claim against the current product because the vendor's own pages are silent on it, so I flag it rather than assert it.

Team tooling stops at the Team Business tier. LMS integration and team collaboration are excluded from every Solo plan (screenpal.com/plans comparison table), and the three-seat minimum on Team Business means a two-person shop stays on Solo accounts with no shared administration. There is no self-serve path to Enterprise — it is quote-based.

Documentation consistency is a real problem for buyers. Third-party reviews still publish the retired Deluxe/Premier tier names at $3–6/month (fone.tips, propicked.com, creatorstackclub.com), Capterra lists a $3.00 starting price, and ScreenPal's own plans page contradicts itself on free hosting: the comparison table says 10 hosted videos while the FAQ says you can "host unlimited videos for free." The table matched my testing (the cap is real). Small company, loose docs — verify against the plans table before you buy.

Verdict

ScreenPal is the value pick of this category and I say that without hedging: $4 a month for unlimited recording, a real editor, AI captions and hosting is less than half what most rivals charge for less. I rate it 4.0, weighting depth of core functionality at 40% — the capture-to-host pipeline covers the whole workflow but the editor and audio tooling top out below production-suite depth, and free-tier ceilings bite quickly — with value for money at 20% pulling the score up strongly on the lowest paid entry point I have tested, usability at 20% good despite dated interface chrome and slow editing on long projects, support and ecosystem at 10% modest given a 11–50 person company and LMS integration locked to team tiers (though Capterra reviewers praise human support replies), and reliability/reputation at 10% solid on 4.5 on G2 and 4.4 on Capterra across a product that has shipped continuously since 2006. For solo creators, teachers and small teams publishing short recordings, this is the buy. For teams needing enterprise seat management, SSO on cheap seats or pristine audio, look at the heavier tools instead.

Sources

• https://screenpal.com/plans
• https://screenpal.com/plans-team-business
• https://screenpal.com/plans/education
• https://screenpal.com/screen-recorder
• https://screen-recorder.com/plans
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenpal
• https://prweb.com/releases/screencast-o-matic-rebrands-as-screenpal-to-reflect-company-s-evolution-innovation-and-growth-817210531.html
• https://vyds.io/blog/screenpal-review
• https://techradar.com/reviews/screencast-o-matic-free-screen-recorder
• https://serchai.com/en/reviews/screenpal
• https://propicked.com/business/screencast-o-matic
• https://fone.tips/screencast-o-matic-review
• https://creatorstackclub.com/software/screenpal
• https://www.g2.com/sellers/screenpal
• https://www.capterra.com/p/203114/ScreenPal