The best screen recorder Chrome extensions

Google Chrome extensions are surprisingly flexible, to the point that they’re often essential add-ons for privacy and productivity. You can even use them for screen recording, a task people usually think of as requiring dedicated apps or native OS tools. Below, we’ve gathered a list of some of the best screen recording extensions currently available on the Chrome Web Store.

The best screen recorder Chrome extensions

In all likelihood, you’ll probably only need one extension, so we’re not going to offer a colossal list here. Think of this as a set of alternatives — if you don’t like the interface in one extension, or you need a very specific feature, download another. Extensions can also potentially disappear off the Chrome Web Store, though if that happens we’ll try to update with a suitable replacement.

Droplr lets you save recordings as either GIFs or HD videos, the former potentially being very useful if you’re trying to create a guide for someone. Optionally you can include audio and video of yourself, and choose whether to record your full desktop or just the currently open tab. 

Whenever you finish a recording, it’s saved to your Droplr cloud account, and a sharing link is automatically copied to your clipboard. You can of course choose to save the file locally, although Droplr prefers the WEBM format instead of something more widely useful like MP4.

Like Droplr, NinjaCapture auto-generates sharing links for screen recordings, and supports recording personal audio and video alongside your screen. There are plenty of options available if you need more control — for example you can adjust resolution, set framerate to 5, 10, 30, or 60fps, and save to either MP4 or WEBM. In fact you can pick separate camera and microphone sources, and use a countdown if you need a few seconds to prepare.

As necessary, you can change sharing links to be public, private, or available only to specific people. But if you don’t want to use NinjaCapture’s default sharing options at all, the extension makes is easy to upload to your own cloud storage lockers at services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Nimbus is perhaps even more flexible than NinjaCapture. You can record not just your overall screen but any individual app on your computer, going beyond Chrome, and add shape annotations such as arrows and rectangles. Like its rival, you can adjust resolutions and framerates, even pushing sharpness up to 4K.

The drawback is that some more advanced features require paying for Premium access. Those include things like trimming, cropping, watermarking, and publishing directly to YouTube. You’ll also need Premium to convert WEBM clips to MP4 or GIF, as well as upload to Dropbox instead of Google Drive, Google Classroom, or Nimbus Note.

Loom is a pretty solid alternative to Nimbus, and might be preferable depending on what you’re after. While you can only record about 5 minutes without a paid subscription, Loom does let you add things like frames, backgrounds, and special effects, including blur. You can mix and match screen or webcam video with microphone or internal audio, and trim all of it to your heart’s content.

You can also share videos publicly, privately, or within a set group, and exploit some pretty useful integrations such as Gmail, Github, and Slack. There’s definitely a business focus in fact, so Loom could be overkill.

We’re including Vimeo Record mostly because Vimeo is a well-trusted name when it comes to video hosting. One of the unusual advantages of this extension, however, is that in addition to getting auto-generated sharing links, you can embed videos into websites and social media, and even browse analytics such as views and impressions. Vimeo was a competitor to YouTube at one point, and it shows.

While there’s no time limit on recordings, and you can record any app, Vimeo does hold some things back to encourage a paid upgrade. Among those are 4K resolution, removing Vimeo’s branding, and more niche items such as chapters, calls-to-action, automatic closed captioning, and the ability to lock videos behind a password. None of those will probably be important to casual users, thankfully.