# Screen recordings that onboard SaaS customers while you sleep
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It's Thursday afternoon and your calendar has the eleventh live onboarding call of the month. Same demo, different account. The new admin at a 40-seat customer is about to ask the three questions the last six admins asked, and you'll answer them again, even though you recorded the answers months ago and sent the links on day one. What you can't see is whether anyone watched them.
That's the proof problem, and it's why screen recording for customer onboarding either shows what happened after the link went out or it doesn't count. Your goal this quarter, the one on the slide in the leadership review, is simpler than it sounds. Every new user reaches first value without another live call on your calendar, and you can open a dashboard and name the videos they actually watched.
Cap gets close to that sentence literally. It's a screen recorder, open source, native on macOS, Windows and Linux plus a Chrome extension, and its Pro plan is built around viewer analytics for people with your job title. Here's what matters for onboarding specifically, what a five-seat CS team pays against Loom seats, and an honest list of where Cap loses.
Watch tracking, for the QBR
Cap Pro adds viewer analytics and engagement tracking to every cloud link. You send it, and Cap tells you who watched. That is the whole difference between "we sent the onboarding videos" and "eight of the eleven users on this account finished the permissions walkthrough, and the admin who skipped it is the one who opened the ticket on Tuesday."
So you can run the follow-up sequence on watched state instead of calendar days. A day-3 nudge goes only to people who never opened the setup video, which stops the nagging emails the ones who already did the work were getting. Before a renewal call you know which explainer landed and which one your champion never saw. And when leadership asks whether onboarding video is earning its budget, you bring a screenshot instead of a feeling.
None of that is on the free tier. Cap's $0 plan gives you unlimited recording in the app and cloud links capped at 5 minutes; watch tracking starts at Pro.
One link, one page, one source of truth
Every Cap link gets a page of its own, and the page collects what used to scatter across your support inbox.
- Comments and reactions pinned to a timestamp. A user confused at 1:47 leaves the question at 1:47, not in an email that says "the video is confusing." After one month you know exactly where your script fails.
- A searchable transcript. Someone looking for "how do we import users in bulk" finds it in the transcript with a text search instead of opening a ticket.
- Auto-generated titles, summaries and clickable chapters from Cap AI, with no usage limits on Pro. Your 9-minute reporting walkthrough becomes five chapters a user can skip to.
- Password-protected shares. A link sent under one customer's contract can carry a password.
- Custom domain, cap.yourdomain.com. The customer lands on a page that looks like your company rather than a third-party recording site. In an onboarding flow that's brand trust, and it's a settings toggle.
- Team workspaces, so CS, support and product share one library instead of a pile of personal links.
Moving an existing Loom library
Cap's Loom importer takes pasted links or a CSV export and re-hosts the whole library with titles, transcripts and chapters. My honest take: this is what turns the switch from a grudge project into a two-week one. Migration effort is the reason CS teams stay on video tools they've outgrown, and Cap deletes most of that cost.
The cost math for a 5-person CS team
Cap Pro is $12/user/month billed monthly, so five seats run $60 a month, $720 for the year. Billed annually it's $8.16/user/month, which brings the same team to $489.60.
The Loom comparison depends on which seat you actually need. Viewer analytics, transcripts and AI chapters are the features driving your decision, and on Loom that puts you in the Business + AI tier at $24/user/month billed monthly, or about $20 billed annually. If your team can do without the AI features, Loom Business is $18/user/month (roughly $15 annual). Remember that Loom's annual billing charges the whole year upfront per seat.
| Option | Per user/month | 5 seats, 1 year |
|---|---|---|
| Cap Pro, billed monthly | $12 | $720 |
| Cap Pro, billed annually | $8.16 | $489.60 |
| Loom Business, billed monthly | $18 | $1,080 |
| Loom Business, billed annually | ~$15 | ~$900, paid upfront |
| Loom Business + AI, billed monthly | $24 | $1,440 |
| Loom Business + AI, billed annually | ~$20 | ~$1,200, paid upfront |
Source: vendor pricing pages, Sep 2026.
Cap Pro annual comes to about a third of Loom Business + AI billed monthly. The $950 you don't spend is the easy part to explain in a budget meeting.
Where Cap loses
Loom was bought by Atlassian, and its integration surface across Google, Slack and Jira runs deeper than anything Cap has. If your org truly lives inside Jira, where every support ticket links back to a recording, Loom's fit may beat Cap's price and I'd keep the Loom seats rather than pretend otherwise. Cap is also a younger company with a smaller ecosystem, and the free tier's 5-minute cap on cloud links is annoying while you're still testing, though Loom's free tier caps you at 25 videos and 5 minutes too.
Three honest notes for a security review: SAML SSO isn't included in Pro, it's a $199/month flat add-on at Enterprise; team admin depth is thinner (SCIM "can be arranged" on Cap versus Loom Enterprise's mature SSO/SCIM); and Linux comes as .deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu, not every distro. What Pro does carry is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, HIPAA coverage through a signed BAA ($99/month per org), and storage that can live in your own S3 bucket or Google Drive instead of Cap's cloud, which makes "who holds our customer videos" an easy answer in procurement rather than an exception request.
A 30-day rollout
Week 1. Audit. Export every onboarding recording you've accumulated in Loom and mark which ones cover a real day-one task. Most libraries hold fifteen videos where the sequence needs six. Old links won't have watch data, so judge from the tickets that keep arriving.
Week 2. Import. Feed the CSV to Cap's Loom importer, then set up the team workspace, the custom domain cap.yourdomain.com, and password protection on anything customer-facing. If nobody on your team has touched a subdomain before, this is one meeting with whoever runs your web properties. We do this kind of plumbing constantly on client SaaS builds (web app development).
Week 3. Re-record the top five. Use Instant mode when a customer needs an answer today (hotkey, record, the link is on your clipboard while the upload finishes), and Studio mode when the screen shows someone else's data, since its editor blurs and masks sensitive areas before you share. Send the new sequence to the next cohort of signups.
Week 4. Read the numbers. Compare watched rates against ticket volume for accounts that got the Cap links, then walk into the leadership review with the dashboard and start clearing live calls off next month's calendar.
If onboarding content volume, rather than the recording tool, is your bottleneck, that's a separate fix and we set up those pipelines at auto content generation.
Start with one video
Record your worst-performing explainer on Cap today. The free plan gives you unlimited recording in the app, so the test costs an afternoon, and Pro at $12/user/month (or $8.16 billed annually) is where watch tracking starts if you decide to try Cap for real.
How long should an onboarding screen recording be?
One task per video, five minutes or less. That length matches the practical ceiling on both free tiers, Cap's 5-minute cloud links and Loom's 5-minute cap, so it's an easy default to test. When a walkthrough genuinely needs longer, Cap AI on Pro generates a summary, clickable chapters and a searchable transcript, so a user jumps to minute six instead of watching all nine.
What happens to my shared videos if I cancel Cap?
Shares stay active, you get a full export, and the recordings stay yours forever. Because Cap is open source and self-hostable, you can also run your own instance after cancelling and keep the features you were paying for.
Does Cap replace a product tour tool?
No, and it shouldn't try. Product tours handle in-app, click-by-click step guidance and give you quantitative funnel data. Screen recordings carry the human voice, the why behind a setup, and give you the qualitative signal instead: who watched, where they commented, which timestamp they reacted at. Teams that run both see the tour cover the mechanics and the videos cover judgment calls.
Will Cap pass our security review?
For most SaaS buyers, faster than you'd expect. Pro includes SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, HIPAA needs the signed BAA add-on at $99/month per organization, and you can point storage at your own S3 bucket or Google Drive. The code is open source and auditable on GitHub if your reviewer wants to read it.
