Online Observations

When it comes to recording what is going on your screen, TechSmith is by far the leader – be it Screen Capture (through SnagIt) or Screen Recording (through Camtasia). However, these tools cost money. And since I am always trying to help people who don’t really need ALL the features of the paid software (only some) and don’t want to spend the money to pay for the software, I present two free alternatives to Camtasia (neither comes close to the feature set that Camtasia offers).

The Jing Project

This is a piece of software that is sponsored by TechSmith. What this does is that it brings in a lot of goodies from Camtasia in (though not all). It allows both Screen Capture and Screen Recording functions. And it has a tie-up with Screencast.com (which is what it uses for storing the data) that allows you to share whatever you have captured or recorded.

The fact that you cannot use it without a Screencast account comes as slightly negative to me. But at least for the meantime, if you are using Jing, then there is no limit on your Screencast trial account (which is a good thing). But still, this tie up disqualifies Jing as being a stand alone desktop utility. Head over to the Jing Project website to get started. You can see a video story (funny) from the home page to learn what Jing allows you to do.

CamStudio

This is an Open Source alternative to Camtasia. This is a standalone screen recording software that you can use to perform the basic function of recording the actions you are performing on your screen and then allowing you to playback these recordings later. The great thing about this product as of now is that a recent release was made (version 2.5) which fixes a lot of bugs that the old version of the product used to have.

There you have it, two alternatives to spending a lot of money to buy a license of Camtasia.

However, in case your needs are a little above the free versions, but not as much as the premium software out there, you may want to check out ScreenFlick (for Mac) and BBFlashBack (for Windows).