Looking for the best alternative for Camtasia? Here’s my run down.

I’m not affiliated with any of these companies by the way. I’ve used, and tested some versions of the software I mentioned in this article. I do teach courses on using some of the software.

Short summary

What is Camtasia Studio? In a nutshell, it is a software that allows you to record your computer screen, and/or webcam, make videos with chroma key aka green screen effects, and allows you to edit your videos.

There is really no true alternartive to Camtasia Studio in Windows. For Mac computers, there is ScreenFlow, which I’ve not used personally, but heard good things about.

The closest to Camtasia Studio, is Screen-Cast-O-Matic but as far as I know, Screen-cast-o-matic can’t do green screen videos, but I could be mistaken.

Another thing I didn’t like about Screencast-o-matic is the FPS or frames per second. I found it a bit too low. What this means is if there is a lot of movement on your screen, the quality of the recording will suffer.

Overall, I feel the quality of videos that results, is not good enough for me.

Best alternative to Camtasia

In my opinion, the next best option is to use a screen capture software to record, and a different editing software to edit your screen captures.

Why do I suggest this option?

Well, most software available is good at doing one thing or the other. Which means, that they are great at recording your screen and/or webcam but not so great in terms of editing. Some examples will be Open Broadcaster Software, Jing, etc.

Software that does editing well, but does not have a screen recording function will be Sony Vegas, or Sony Movie Studio, Lightworks (free), Shotcut (free) etc.

In my opinion, Camtasia is quite pricey for what it does. Furthermore, whenever a new version is released, you need to pay again, if you choose to upgrade. So, if you are after a cheaper alternative to Camtasia Studio, you may want to use two separate software.

My method