Hey folks,

I want to build the best screen recorder and a great AI assisted video editor: ScreenKite.

We are a small team of Mac developers who got frustrated with two trends:

1. Screen recording tools that are bloated Electron apps, which eat up system memory and take a long time to render videos.
2. The shift toward subscription-only pricing models for utilities that should just be tools you buy once.

We built ScreenKite to address this. It is a native macOS screen recorder and editor written in Swift and Metal. It is local-first, feels lightweight but powerful, and focused on helping people create product demos and tutorials quickly.

We put together a short video showing how the recording and editing flow works.

A little bit background of myself, I'm Mike, used to work on OneDrive iOS/Web, Outlook iOS, with some experience creating great hackathon demo videos back in Microsoft. Now I'm working independently as a youtuber and app creator. The philosophy / wish of ScreenKite: everybody should be able to build great demos and tutorials without spending hundreds of hours recording or editing.

Key features

1. Native performance (No Electron bloat) - 3x faster than Screen Studio

Because ScreenKite is built directly on Swift and Metal, timeline scrubbing and exports are at least three times faster than web-wrapper tools like Screen Studio. It uses very little memory and does not heat up your Mac during rendering.

Real benchmark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDKs0StnwBM&

Also if you want to compare the app size, ScreenKite is less than 100MB where Screen Studio is 670MB

2. Dynamic layouts and layout coding

ScreenKite supports side-by-side configurations, picture-in-picture, split screens, and 3D perspective transforms. You can adjust layouts interactively in a visual inspector, snap to grids, or use a semi-code Layout DSL for precise framing. That means your AI Agents can also do beautiful layout of the video between visuals, screen, and your camera.

3. AI-assisted video editing (Antigravity, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Antigravity) - MCP & CLI support

Editing video by manually trimming waveforms is slow. ScreenKite includes a built-in AI assistant panel. You can connect your preferred model (Claude, Gemini, or our latest update, Antigravity) to edit the timeline through chat. For example, you can type "remove the sections where I stumbled," "trim this video to 60 seconds," or "insert supporting visual assets here," and the app applies the edits to your timeline. It also integrates with ElevenLabs if you want to generate text-to-speech voiceovers for gaps in your video.

In 2026, with Hyperframes, and remotion, you can also ask AI to generate key visuals (b-rolls) for your video and ScreenKite is the fastest final rendering platform for your creatives.

You can even use this app to create faceless TikTok / Youtube Shorts channels with AI coding agents.

We're working on some opensource agent skills here https://github.com/ScreenKite/awesome-ai-video-editing

Also if you'd like to you can also use like ElevenLabs , Azure Speech to generate AI voiceover for your app demos.

4. Audio processing and captions

• Filler Word Removal: Detects and deletes filler words like "ums" and "uhs" plus awkward pauses automatically. It comes best with ElevenLabs api (free with your own API to start)
• Offline Noise Reduction: Filters out background noise, keyboard clicks, and fan hum entirely offline on your device.
• Word-Level Captions: Generates transcription overlays that highlight each word in real-time as it is spoken.

5. Additional options

• Transparent exports: Export your recording with a transparent background for easy compositing in other tools or slides.
• Smooth zoom controls: Configure automatic zoom tracking with custom speed and smoothing parameters.
• Keystroke visualization: Render keystrokes as customizable HUD overlays.
• Screenshots: Like ClearShot/ShotX we have screenshot as well!
• Annotations: For both screen recordings (videos), screenshots, we have arrow, box based quick annotations

Built for creators, by creators

We have also tried other alternatives in this space, such as OpenScreen, Recordly, Screen Charm, and Smooth Capture. However, we found that they do not feel like they were built by actual content creators. The gap in software quality, feature completeness, and daily usability is very noticeable.

I am a YouTuber myself and have spent a lot of time creating paid tutorial courses. My experience has been that you really need to be a video creator to build a tool that addresses the real-world friction of editing screen recordings.

In fact, Paul Millerd, author of "The Pathless Path" and "Good Work", recently used ScreenKite to record and edit his upcoming AI consulting course. The videos on his landing page are 100% recorded and produced with ScreenKite: Strategy Consulting AI Skills

If you are looking for a fully functional, reliable alternative to Screen Studio and Loom, I believe ScreenKite is your best option. I encourage you to try other apps, compare the results, and see the difference for yourself.

We want your feedback

Our goal is to make r/ScreenKite a faster, more flexible alternative to Screen Studio and Loom. To get there, we need to know what you think.

• What features are we missing?
• How does the rendering speed compare to other tools you use?
• What is your experience with the AI editing?

You can download the app here: Download ScreenKite for macOS

We would appreciate your honest feedback and suggestions in the comments. We will be checking this thread to answer questions.

ScreenKite Team

https://x.com/screenkite_com https://threads.com/@screenkite