Self-Hosted Loom Alternative: Open Source Screen Recording for Privacy-First Teams

Most screen recording tools are SaaS, which is fine until your security team asks where the video files are stored, who has access, and what happens if the vendor's storage bucket is misconfigured. For regulated industries — healthcare, finance, legal, defense — those questions don't have happy answers when your data lives on someone else's infrastructure.

This guide is for teams who can't (or won't) put internal screen recordings into a third-party SaaS, and want a self-hostable, open-source alternative to Loom.

Why teams move off Loom for security reasons

Three pressures usually trigger the migration.

Data residency requirements. EU teams under GDPR, financial institutions under sector-specific rules, or government contractors often need to keep recordings in a specific jurisdiction. SaaS vendors with US-only or AWS-only hosting can't meet this.

Recordings contain unintended PII. Engineers record bug repros that include customer dashboards. Support agents record troubleshooting sessions that include patient data. Once a video is in a third-party tool, you've effectively shared that PII with a sub-processor — and your DPIA needs to reflect it.

Vendor lock-in around video storage. Exporting hundreds or thousands of recordings out of a closed SaaS is painful. If the vendor raises prices or sunsets a feature, you're stuck.

What "self-hosted" actually means

Self-hosted isn't the same as open source. You can have:

Open source, SaaS-only: source code is public, but you can only use it via the vendor's hosted instance.
Source-available, self-hostable: you can run it yourself but the license restricts commercial competition.
Truly open source and self-hostable: permissively licensed, and you can deploy on your own infrastructure with no commercial restrictions for internal use.

OpenKap falls into the third category. The full Laravel application, frontend, and Chrome extension are public, and you can deploy them on your own infrastructure.

What you control when you self-host

Where recording files live. Local disk, your own S3 bucket, MinIO, or a CDN you contract with directly.
Who can authenticate. Replace Google OAuth with your own SSO or restrict access by email domain.
Retention policies. Set automatic deletion windows that match your data-handling rules.
Network access. Run the entire stack inside your VPC — no recordings leaving your network perimeter.

What you give up

Self-hosting trades convenience for control:

You're responsible for upgrades, backups, and scaling.
Video transcoding to HLS is CPU-heavy — you'll either need beefy workers or a managed transcoding service.
Bandwidth costs for video playback can add up. Most self-hosters pair their app with a managed video CDN.

For most teams, the right answer is hybrid: self-host the app and metadata, use a managed CDN for delivery.

OpenKap's self-host stack

OpenKap is built on Laravel 12 with these defaults:

App: PHP 8.3+ Laravel app — runs anywhere PHP runs (Docker, Forge, Kubernetes).
Database: MySQL or MariaDB for metadata (users, videos, comments).
Auth: Sanctum plus Google OAuth out of the box; pluggable for any OAuth or SAML provider.
Video storage: Bunny Stream by default for HLS streaming; can be swapped for any S3-compatible store.
Queue: Standard Laravel queues for background jobs (transcription, HLS conversion, notifications).

Deployment is a standard Laravel deployment. If your team can run a Laravel app, you can run OpenKap.

When to self-host vs use the hosted version

Situation	Recommendation
< 50 users, no compliance requirements	Use the hosted version — not worth the operational overhead
EU team with GDPR DPIA concerns	Self-host in EU region
Healthcare/finance with sector regulations	Self-host inside existing compliant infrastructure
Air-gapped recording for internal-only use	Self-host without external CDN
Mixed: external sharing plus internal recording	Hybrid — self-host metadata, managed CDN for delivery

Getting started with self-hosting

The README walks through deployment, but the short version:

Clone the repository.
Configure .env with your database, mail, and storage credentials.
Run migrations and start the queue worker.
Point your domain at the app.
Optionally configure Bunny Stream or another S3-compatible backend.

If you're evaluating, the hosted version at openkap.com runs the same code — try the product there before committing to self-hosting infrastructure.

A note on "free" vs "open source"

Some Loom alternatives advertise as "free" but are SaaS with a generous tier. That's not the same as being able to take the code and run it yourself. Before committing to any tool, check the license file and the actual repository. If the repo is just marketing material and "contact sales for source," it's not really open source — it's a marketing tactic.

Have questions about deploying OpenKap inside your own infrastructure? Reach out via GitHub Issues or our Discord community.