Loom, Scribe, Tango and Guidde all promise to turn "someone doing a task on screen" into documentation — but they hand you very different things. Loom gives you a video. Scribe and Tango give you a written, step-by-step document. Guidde gives you both from one capture. That split — video-first vs document-first — is the decision this guide is built around.
Per user, billed annually. Business is $18/mo on monthly billing; Business + AI is $20/mo annual / $24 monthly.
Per seat, billed annually. Pro Team is $13/seat (5-seat minimum); Pro Personal is $25/seat.
Per user, billed annually for teams of 3+; 1–2 users pay $22/mo annual. Every workspace member needs a paid seat on Pro.
Per creator, billed annually. Pro is $19/creator; Business is $39/creator. Viewers are free.
| Loom | Scribe | Tango | Guidde | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A video with a transcript | A written step-by-step guide with screenshots | A written step-by-step guide with screenshots | A narrated video and a written step-by-step document |
| Best for | Fast updates, walkthroughs and explanations a team watches once | SOPs and how-tos people search and re-read | Internal process guides a small team shares and tracks | Customer-facing and onboarding how-tos that need narration plus text |
| Free plan — the wall you hit | 25 videos per person, 5 minutes per screen recording, up to 720p (meeting recordings have no length cap) | No published cap on guides created — but browser capture only, no PDF / HTML / Markdown export, no branding, and sharing is limited | 5 shared workflows for the whole workspace, up to 10 users, browser capture only, no PDF download | 25 videos in total, web apps only, watermark on videos |
| Paid plans from | Business $15/user/mo billed annually ($18 monthly). Business + AI $20 annual ($24 monthly) | Pro Team $13/seat/mo billed annually ($17 monthly), from 5 seats. Pro Personal $25 annual ($35 monthly) | Pro $15/user/mo billed annually ($20 monthly) for 3+ users; $22 annual ($26 monthly) for 1–2 users | Pro $19/creator/mo billed annually ($29 monthly). Business $39 annual ($59 monthly) |
| Who gets billed | Per user on paid plans — check how your workspace counts creators, as seat rules are changing under Atlassian | Per seat, and a plan applies to the whole team at once; Pro Team starts at 5 seats even if only 3 people create | Every member of a Pro workspace needs a paid seat — viewers included | Only Admins, Content Managers and Creators consume paid seats; viewers are free |
| AI features & where they are gated | Transcripts and captions on all plans. Auto titles, summaries, chapters, filler-word and silence removal, edit-by-transcript and video-to-text workflows: Business + AI only | Automatic step text and screenshots are the core product. Auto-redaction, SSO and translation are Enterprise | AI-generated step content is a Pro feature per the vendor's plan table; workflow translation (15 languages) is Enterprise | Auto captions on paid plans; AI text-to-voice narration in 200+ voices is Business and up — on Pro you record your own voice. Translation is Enterprise |
| Exports | Download and upload videos on Business and up | PDF, HTML, Markdown (and Word) on Pro; link and embed sharing on free | PDF, Markdown, HTML on Pro; link, embed and paste on free | Video (MP4 / GIF), PPT and PDF exports on Pro and up |
| Trade-off to know | A video is fast to make and fast to watch once — but hard to search, skim or partially update when a process changes | Web-app processes only on free; anything on the desktop needs Pro. The output is a document, not a watchable video | The lowest headline per-user price here can become the highest team bill, because every member is a paid seat (see the cost example below) | The headline Pro price does not include the AI narration most people picture — that is the Business tier |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026 (Loom's annual figures are the per-month equivalent of annual billing). Loom is mid-migration into Atlassian billing and some workspace rules differ between older and newer accounts; Scribe's Pro Team price has changed recently, so re-check it at signup. Plans change — always confirm the current price, limits and seat rules on the vendor's site before you buy.
Per-seat prices make these four look closer than they are. The real difference is who counts as a seat. Take a team with 3 people who create documentation and 20 people who mainly read or watch it, producing about 20 guides or recordings a month (240 a year), on annual billing:
| Tool & plan | How the bill is built | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Loom — Business + AI | $20/seat/mo × 3 creating seats × 12 months (assumes read-only members are not paid seats — verify for your workspace type) | $720 |
| Scribe — Pro Team | $13/seat/mo × 5 seats × 12 months (the 5-seat minimum applies even with 3 creators) | $780 |
| Guidde — Business | $39/creator/mo × 3 creators × 12 months (viewers are free; Business is the tier with AI narration) | $1,404 |
| Tango — Pro | $15/user/mo × all 23 workspace members × 12 months (upgrading a workspace to Pro requires a paid seat for every member) | $4,140 |
Two lessons fall out of the arithmetic. First, the tool with one of the lowest per-user prices (Tango) produces the largest bill in this shape of team, purely because of its seat rule — while Guidde, with the highest per-creator price, lands in the middle because viewers are free. Second, minimums matter: Scribe's team plan charges for 5 seats before you have 5 creators, and still costs less than buying 3 individual Pro Personal seats ($25 × 3 × 12 = $900). Run this same calculation with your own creator/viewer split before comparing headline prices.
The free plans run out in different places, too. At 20 items a month, Tango's free plan reaches its 5 shared workflows within the first week; Loom's 25-video cap arrives after roughly five to six weeks for a solo creator (and its 5-minute cap can bite on day one); Guidde's 25 videos last into the second month; Scribe's free plan has no creation cap to hit, but the first time you need a PDF export, a desktop-app capture or your own branding, you have reached its wall instead.
Loom records your screen (and optionally your camera) and turns it into a link you can send immediately. That speed is the product: it fits release notes, bug reports, quick walkthroughs and "watch this instead of a meeting" updates. Transcription in 50+ languages and closed captions are included even on the free Starter plan, which allows 25 videos per person of up to 5 minutes each at up to 720p — meeting recordings are exempt from the length cap. Business ($15/user/mo billed annually, $18 monthly) removes the video and length caps, raises quality to 4K and adds downloads, uploads and branding removal. The AI layer — auto titles, summaries, chapters, filler-word and silence removal, editing by transcript, and workflows that turn a video into text — is a separate tier, Business + AI ($20 annual, $24 monthly). If what you ultimately need is a written procedure, note that a Loom video is still a video: the transcript helps, but it is not structured as an SOP.
Scribe works the opposite way from Loom. You click through a process in a web app with its browser extension running, and Scribe assembles an editable, written guide: one step per action, each with a screenshot and generated text. The output lives where documents live — it can be linked, embedded, searched and, on paid plans, exported. The free Basic plan covers capture in any web app and sharing by link or embed, with no published cap on the number of guides you create; what it withholds is capability rather than volume — no desktop or mobile capture, no exports to PDF, HTML or Markdown, and no custom branding. Pro Personal ($25/seat/mo billed annually, $35 monthly) unlocks desktop capture, screenshot editing and redaction, branding and exports. Pro Team ($13/seat/mo billed annually, $17 monthly, from 5 seats) adds comments and collaboration and is cheaper per seat than Personal once the 5-seat minimum fits your team.
Tango is Scribe's closest relative: a browser extension captures your clicks and produces a tidy step-by-step guide with annotated screenshots, ready to share by link or embed. Its free plan is best understood as an evaluation: up to 10 users can join the workspace, but only 5 workflows can be shared in the team library, capture is browser-only, and PDF download is not included. Pro (from $15/user/mo billed annually for teams of 3 or more; $22 for 1–2 users) removes the workflow cap and adds desktop capture, voice transcription, AI-generated step content, branded exports to PDF, Markdown and HTML, screenshot annotation and blurring, viewer insights and 14-day version history. The Enterprise tier adds the in-app layer — Pins and Guide Me walkthroughs — plus automatic PII redaction and translation into 15 languages, priced with a platform fee. The number to check first is not the per-user price but the seat rule: upgrading a workspace to Pro means paying for every member of that workspace.
Guidde starts from a screen capture like Loom, but treats it as raw material for two outputs: a short narrated video and a written step-by-step article you can edit in its document editor. That makes it the natural fit when the same procedure has to work for new hires who prefer to watch and for a help center that needs text. The free plan includes up to 25 how-to videos from web apps, with your own recorded voiceover, and carries a watermark. Pro ($19/creator/mo billed annually, $29 monthly) removes the video cap and the watermark and adds a brand kit, exports to video, PPT and PDF, and manual blurring of sensitive information — narration on Pro is still your own voice. The AI text-to-voice layer (unlimited generation across 200+ voices), desktop-app capture, turning PDFs and slide decks into videos, interactive demos and analytics arrive on Business ($39/creator/mo billed annually, $59 monthly), sold for up to 5 creators per workspace with viewers free. Translation and automatic "Magic Redaction" of personal data are Enterprise features.
If people will watch once and move on — a change announcement, a bug report, a quick explanation — video (Loom) is enough and fastest. If people must find step 7 again next month, copy a field name, or work through it silently, you need a written guide (Scribe or Tango). If the same procedure serves both audiences, that is Guidde's specific case.
Write down how many people will create and how many will only view. Then apply each tool's seat rule: Tango charges for every workspace member on Pro, Scribe charges whole teams with a 5-seat team minimum, Guidde charges creators only, and Loom's creator rules are changing under Atlassian. The cheapest headline price is often not the cheapest bill.
Each free plan fails at a different point: Tango at 5 shared workflows, Loom at 25 videos or 5 minutes, Guidde at 25 videos and a watermark, Scribe at the first PDF export or desktop app. Estimate your monthly volume and pick the free plan whose wall you would reach last — or accept the paid tier whose wall you already know you will hit.
"AI included" means different tiers here. Loom's summaries and chapters need Business + AI. Guidde's AI narration needs Business. Tango's AI step text needs Pro, and translation needs Enterprise. Scribe's auto-redaction is Enterprise. Price the tier that contains the specific AI feature in the demo that sold you — not the entry tier.
A practical split many teams end up with: video for information that expires (announcements, one-off explanations), written guides for information that compounds (SOPs, onboarding references, customer help). Buying one tool to do both jobs is how teams end up with an unsearchable video library or, the opposite, documents nobody reads for news a 90-second video would have covered.
A recorder like Loom captures video of your screen; the viewer watches the process in sequence. A guide creator like Scribe or Tango watches your clicks and writes a document — numbered steps with screenshots — that a reader can skim, search and partially re-read. Guidde produces both from one capture. Neither format is better in general; they fail differently. Video is weak when someone needs one step out of twenty, and text is weak when the point is tone, context or "watch how this flows".
Not the headline per-user price — the seat rule and the AI tier. Loom's Business plan is $15/user/mo billed annually, and the AI features are a separate $20 tier (Business + AI). Before switching, calculate your creator/viewer split against each alternative: Tango can cost more than Loom for a viewer-heavy workspace because every member is a paid seat, while Guidde charges only for creators. Also check what you actually use: if transcripts are all you need, they are included in every Loom plan, including free; if you rely on auto summaries and chapters, price every tool at its AI tier.
It depends on which limit your usage hits. For sheer volume of web-based guides, Scribe's free plan has no published creation cap — its limits are exports, branding and desktop capture. Tango's free plan is the shortest-lived for a working library at 5 shared workflows. Loom and Guidde both cap you at 25 items (per person for Loom, in total for Guidde), and Loom adds a 5-minute cap per screen recording. None of the four free plans includes AI narration or automatic redaction of sensitive data.
No — they produce the content that lives in one. Scribe and Tango export to PDF, HTML and Markdown and embed by link; Guidde exports video, PPT and PDF; Loom videos embed into tools like Notion and Confluence. Your wiki or help center remains the library and the search layer; these tools replace the manual work of screenshotting and writing each procedure from scratch.
On Guidde, yes — but AI text-to-voice is a Business-plan feature ($39/creator/mo billed annually), not part of Pro. On the other three, plan on your own voice: Loom records you (its AI cleans up filler words and silences on Business + AI, rather than replacing your voice), and Scribe and Tango are document tools whose guides are read, not narrated. If guides must exist in several languages, note that translation features sit on Enterprise tiers for Scribe, Tango and Guidde alike.
Because this comparison is compiled from publicly available vendor information — pricing pages, plan tables and published limits — not from hands-on testing. Where a judgment appears, it is arithmetic or logic on those published facts (for example, the team-cost example above shows its inputs so you can rerun it with your own numbers). Anything that depends on feel — capture smoothness, editing quality, how good the AI narration sounds — is deliberately left for you to judge in a free plan or trial.