A Free Screen Recorder for Mac — Editor Included

"Free screen recorder" usually means one of two catches: a trial with a countdown, or a recorder with no editor. ScreenTailor's free plan is neither — it's a native macOS recorder with the full editor included, free without an account, forever. The actual limits are two, and they're listed right below, not in the fine print.

What's actually free

• Recording — capture the whole screen or a pixel-exact region, with microphone narration and pause/resume. Checkpoint Recording lets you re-record just the take you flubbed.
• The entire editor — zoom & emphasis, captions, effects including blur for sensitive info, trimming and retiming on a zoomable timeline, and annotated screenshots from any frame. Nothing in the editor is paywalled.
• Share-ready MP4 export — plays everywhere: QuickTime, VLC, the web, social platforms.
• No account, no credit card — download, record, done.

The limits, plainly

The free plan has exactly two constraints:

• 5 minutes per recording. At the cap, the recording pauses and you choose how to continue — nothing is thrown away.
• A small watermark on export.

That's it. Free doesn't expire, and there's no feature that stops working after a month.

"Isn't Shift + Cmd + 5 free too?"

It is — and for a plain capture it's genuinely good. If all you need is a raw recording of your screen, use it; here's how. The gap appears the moment the recording is for someone else: the built-in tool can't zoom into the action, caption a step, blur an email address, or cut the fumbling — so you end up importing the file into a second app anyway. ScreenTailor's free plan is the recorder and that second app in one window.

When you outgrow free

Recordings longer than 5 minutes, or exports without the watermark — that's the whole upgrade. Start a 14-day Pro trial (one per device, no card) to try it, then keep it with a one-time Lifetime license at $39, or a Yearly ($39) or Monthly ($4.99) plan for up to 3 Macs. See plans and pricing.

Frequently asked questions