Best Rewind Alternatives 2026, Ranked After the Shutdown

The short version: Rewind is dead. The Mac app stopped recording on December 19, 2025, the company is now Limitless, and Limitless itself is winding down under Meta. The best Rewind alternative in 2026 for the people Rewind was built for (privacy-conscious Mac users who wanted a personal memory that stays on their machine) is Everpaper. ScreenPipe is the pick if you need Windows or Linux. Every option below is ranked with dated pricing and honest drawbacks.

TL;DR: our top picks

Everpaper is our product. We build it, so we ranked it first only where that's honest, and we list its real limits below alongside everyone else's.

What happened to Rewind

Every "best Rewind apps" list published before this year is now stale, so let's get the facts straight first. Here's the verified timeline (checked 2026-08-04 against rewind.ai's own post-mortem page, TechCrunch, and 9to5Mac):

Rewind AI was founded in 2020 by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek, raised over $33M from a16z, First Round Capital, and NEA, and launched its Mac app in November 2022. The pitch was genuinely new: continuous on-device capture of your screen and audio, compressed locally, searchable later. "Ask Rewind," a GPT-4 chat over your own history, went viral in March 2023. Then the company pivoted to a wearable, announced the Pendant in late 2023, and rebranded to Limitless in April 2024. The Mac app went into maintenance mode.

On December 5, 2025, Meta announced it was acquiring Limitless. Two weeks later, on December 19, 2025, recording in the Rewind Mac app was disabled and downloads were removed. The rewind.ai domain has since been resold and is now operated by an unaffiliated third party selling generic AI tools; the site itself carries a disclaimer that it has "no affiliation to the original Rewind AI, Limitless, or Meta."

So if you had years of life captured in Rewind, the app on your Mac no longer records. If you search for Rewind today, the domain you land on isn't the company. And the successor product, Limitless, is itself in a managed sunset. That's why this page exists.

Why people are looking for a Rewind alternative

Beyond the obvious (the app is gone), the shutdown surfaced the reasons people chose Rewind in the first place, and those needs haven't disappeared.

They wanted memory without a vendor. Rewind's core promise was that capture, compression, OCR, and search happened on the Mac itself. Its users self-selected for that. The shutdown is exactly the scenario they were trying to avoid: a company decision, made far away, ending a tool that held years of their days.

They wanted recall without a bot. Rewind recorded system audio, so it captured calls with no visible participant. Meeting-bot tools feel like a downgrade to this crowd.

They got burned by the trade-offs and stayed anyway. Rewind's weaknesses were real: teardowns measured battery drain around 20–40% on Apple Silicon laptops during continuous capture, the free tier was tightly limited, and transcription quality was inconsistent. People tolerated that because the on-device architecture mattered more. Those people are exactly who this list is for.

How we evaluated

We scored each Rewind alternative on five criteria, weighted for the audience Rewind actually had:

• Survivability: is the product alive, funded, and independent, or one acquisition away from another shutdown?
• Data residency: on-device by default, or cloud by default? Who trains on your data?
• Capture model: continuous day-long memory, or meetings-only?
• Recall quality: can you search and ask questions across everything, not just transcripts?
• Price honesty: actual entry cost with a check date.

Every published competitor price below carries a "checked 2026-08-04" stamp from our research files.

1. Everpaper: best for ex-Rewind users on Apple Silicon

Overview. Everpaper is a private, on-device daybook for macOS, and it's the closest living relative of the original Rewind idea: periodic screenshots of the front window (default every 2 minutes), on-device OCR, meeting recording with on-device transcription, and search over all of it, with no account and nothing uploaded by default. The privacy stance is the product: "No provider, no traffic." AI features wait until you configure one. Everpaper is in active private beta.

What we like.

• The Day Journal is the direct successor to Rewind's always-on capture: screenshots on an interval you set (30 seconds to 10 minutes), on-device OCR, Pause when idle on by default, a Reduce work on battery toggle, and retention you control (screenshots kept 30 days by default; 7/30/90/Forever options). Data lives in ~/Library/Application Support/HindsightNext/journal. Details in the day journal docs.
• Meetings work the Rewind way: no bot, system audio captured on your machine. Start with ⇧⌘M or Index (⌘K) → Begin minutes; it recognizes Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, Around, and Whereby links. Transcription runs on the Apple Neural Engine with Parakeet (parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3) by default, with Whisper and MOSS (transcription and speaker diarization in one model, opt-in) as alternatives. More in the meetings docs.
• Recall is built around evidence: Ask the Book (⇧⌘A) streams an answer written only from matching days and frames, with a Sources list where each source is the exact frame (time, app, window title), and clicking it opens the original screen. The Concordance (⌥Space) summons that search from anywhere. Without any AI provider, recall still returns cards for phone numbers, emails, links, and files with time-and-place stamps.
• Redaction runs offline at capture time and again before any outbound AI call; API keys, JWTs, card numbers, SSNs, and OTPs become [REDACTED:api_key]-style placeholders. See the privacy model.
• Portability is built in: Import Transcript (v1.11.0) ingests .vtt files from Zoom, Teams, and Otter as real meetings, and the whole journal exports to a linked Obsidian vault or GraphML.

Drawbacks. macOS 14.2+ only, Apple Silicon only: no Intel Macs, no Windows, no mobile, no web app. It's in private beta, so you can't just download it today. AI features (Ask, summaries, the day narrative) wait for a provider you configure. Local options like Ollama, LM Studio, oMLX, and Apple Foundation Models keep even that on-device, and cloud providers sit behind an explicit toggle that's off by default. The Second Brain has a readiness gate (5 days, 300 frames, 60 distinct things, 3 recurring threads) before it says "Ready." MOSS is happiest on 16 GB machines.

Pricing. In private beta with limited spots, with a founding-license option for early supporters, not a monthly subscription. No public price; join the waitlist.

Best for: the exact person Rewind was built for: a Mac user who wants a private, searchable memory of their days and meetings, and who just learned what happens when that memory depends on someone else's company.

2. ScreenPipe: best cross-platform local memory

Overview. ScreenPipe is a local-first 24/7 screen and microphone recorder for macOS, Windows, and Linux, written in Rust. It's the option most often described as the open-source-style Rewind alternative, and it's the only tool on this list that works beyond the Mac. Capture is continuous (default 1 FPS screenshots plus accessibility-tree text), transcription is local Whisper (whisper-tiny through whisper-large-v3-turbo), and everything is exposed through a local SQLite database and HTTP API at localhost:3030.

What we like.

• Genuinely local-first: data lives in ~/.screenpipe/db.sqlite, and capture, OCR, local transcription, and search all work fully offline. Default-on PII removal redacts emails, phone numbers, and card numbers; the homepage claims password managers are excluded and cloud upload is off before storage.
• Free entry: npx -y screenpipe@latest record gets you local recording, search, and the API at no cost. The paid desktop app adds signed builds, auto-updates, and support.
• Developer surface: an MCP server for Claude, Codex, Cursor, and ChatGPT, plus "pipes": scheduled agents that can, for example, summarize a meeting when it ends and drop a note into Obsidian.
• Cross-platform including Linux CLI; Y Combinator backed (S26), with auditable source.

Drawbacks. It's infrastructure, not a finished memory app; you assemble your own recall workflow from pipes and prompts, where Rewind and Everpaper ship one. The official documentation reviewed does not state whether speaker identification is supported. The license moved from MIT to the Screenpipe Commercial License on 2026-06-09, now source-available; any commercial use of the source requires a paid license, which some users read as a rug pull. The business model has confused people enough to spawn an Ask HN thread, and community marketing was aggressive enough that r/LocalLLaMA had a ban-request thread. Official troubleshooting docs acknowledge CPU and battery concerns, advising lower capture FPS on older machines.

Pricing (checked 2026-08-04, supplied ScreenPipe pricing page). Free is $0 with 10 AI credits/month. Basic is $25/month or $250/year with 150 credits and unlimited user-installed scheduled tasks and history. Business is $50/seat/month or $500/seat/year with 400 credits, frontier models, cloud sync, automations, and team workspace.

Best for: developers and technical founders who want a local, scriptable memory layer on any desktop OS and are happy to build the last mile themselves.

3. Limitless: the official successor, winding down

Overview. Limitless is Rewind's direct continuation (same company, same founders, same LinkedIn page), and honesty requires covering it here, because some Rewind users were migrated to it. But it's not a destination; it's a departure lounge. Since the Meta acquisition announced December 5, 2025: the Pendant is no longer sold, recording in the Limitless desktop and web apps has been disabled (access to past recordings is kept through 2026), and users in the EU, UK, Brazil, China, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey were cut off entirely, their data deleted after December 19, 2025.

What we like.

• Existing customers are being treated about as well as a sunset allows: no more subscription payments, the Unlimited plan is free for them, and support is committed throughout 2026 (official FAQ, checked 2026-08-04).
• A data export tool exists (help.limitless.ai), so if you have Limitless recordings, you can get them out. Do it now, not in December.
• The product itself had real strengths in its day: a generous free tier (1,200 voice-minutes of transcription per month with all AI features included), strong English multi-speaker transcription in quiet settings, and granular retention controls.

Drawbacks. Everything is cloud: audio lives in Limitless's infrastructure (TLS in transit, HSM-backed storage at rest), and post-acquisition you must accept an updated privacy policy and terms tied to Meta. Recording in the desktop and web apps is already off, so it can't replace Rewind's capture even if you wanted it to. The official support commitment extends throughout 2026, with no published commitment beyond that. And the architecture contradicts the reason most Rewind users chose Rewind: on-device processing was the point.

Pricing (checked 2026-08-04, limitless.ai FAQ). Pendant no longer sold. Existing customers: Unlimited plan free, support throughout 2026. The official site does not publish a purchasable new-customer plan.

Best for: existing Pendant owners riding out the support window, and former Rewind/Limitless users who need to export their data before the lights go off. Nobody else should start here.

4. Granola: best for the meetings-only slice

Overview. Many Rewind users mostly used it for meetings. If that's you, Granola covers that slice well: a bot-free AI meeting notepad that captures microphone plus system audio on your Mac or Windows machine, then streams audio to Deepgram or AssemblyAI for transcription and text to OpenAI and Anthropic for notes. No bot joins the call, and it works with anything playing through system audio.

What we like.

• Note quality is widely praised (Nat Friedman, an investor via NFDG, called it "the best meeting notes of anything I've tried so far"), and the human-in-the-loop model, where you jot rough notes and AI fleshes them out from the transcript, gives you more control than fully automatic summaries.
• Bot-free and manual by default: Granola doesn't transcribe unless you've clicked into a note. Widest platform coverage of any bot-free tool here: macOS, Windows, iOS, Android.
• Audio is never stored: "it only stores the transcript and any notes," hosted in a US AWS VPC, encrypted at rest and in transit. SOC 2 Type 2 certified with public security post-mortems. Granola raised a $125M Series C in March 2026.

Drawbacks. It's meetings-only. There's no day-long memory, no screen capture, no "what was that thing on my screen Tuesday." It's bot-free, not on-device: audio still goes to Deepgram/AssemblyAI and text to OpenAI/Anthropic, and Granola trains its own models on anonymized data by default on consumer tiers (opt-out in Settings). Speaker identification is weak: transcripts default to "Me" and "Them," with named speaker tags only for Google Meet and Zoom. No recording playback, ever, so you can't verify a transcript against audio. Sign-in requires a Google or Microsoft account.

Pricing (checked 2026-08-04, granola.ai/pricing). Basic is free with limited meeting history; the official pricing page does not state the exact cap. Business is $14 per user/month. Enterprise is $35 per user/month with SSO, org-wide auto-deletion, and training off for the team.

Best for: ex-Rewind users whose actual usage was 90% meetings and who are comfortable with cloud processing in exchange for polish.

Honorable mentions

• Obsidian: not a recorder, but it's where exported memory should live: local Markdown, free including commercial use since 2025-02-20. Everpaper's journal export targets it directly, and it's a sane long-term home for anything you export from Limitless before the shutdown. See the export docs.

Rewind vs the field: feature comparison

Migrating from Rewind: what to do this week

If the Rewind app is still installed on your Mac, here's the order of operations:

1. Export through Limitless while access remains. If your Rewind data was migrated into a Limitless account, use the official export tool at help.limitless.ai while support remains committed throughout 2026.
2. Decide your new capture model. Day-long memory (Everpaper, ScreenPipe) or meetings-only (Granola)? The answer is in how you actually used Rewind; check your own habits, not the marketing.
3. Move supported transcripts. Everpaper can import .vtt meeting transcripts from Zoom, Teams, and Otter as real meetings.
4. Pick a home you control for future exports. Whatever tool you land on, set up a regular export to plain Markdown (an Obsidian vault works) so the next acquisition announcement is an inconvenience, not a bereavement.

How to choose

Answer these in order:

1. What did you actually use Rewind for? All-day screen memory → Everpaper or ScreenPipe. Meetings only → Granola or Everpaper. If you're unsure, start by deciding whether you need screen history or meeting transcripts.
2. May your data leave the machine? No → Everpaper (Apple Silicon Macs) or ScreenPipe (any desktop OS). Yes, within reason → Granola is the most polished cloud option.
3. What's your hardware? Intel Mac or Windows or Linux → ScreenPipe. Apple Silicon Mac → every option is open. Mixed fleet → ScreenPipe or Granola.
4. How much assembly will you tolerate? Zero → Everpaper or Granola. Happy to script → ScreenPipe exposes the local database, API, MCP server, and pipes for your own workflow.

FAQ

Is Rewind still available? No. The Rewind Mac app's recording was disabled on December 19, 2025, and downloads were removed. The rewind.ai domain is now an unaffiliated AI-tools aggregator that explicitly disclaims any connection to the original company. If a site claims to offer a Rewind download in 2026, it isn't the product you're thinking of.

What happened to Rewind? The company rebranded to Limitless in April 2024 to focus on a wearable Pendant, put the Mac app in maintenance mode, and was acquired by Meta (announced December 5, 2025). Recording in the Rewind app was shut off two weeks later. Limitless itself is now winding down: Pendant unsold, desktop and web recording disabled, existing customers supported through 2026.

Is Limitless the same as Rewind? Same company, same founders (Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek), different product and architecture. Rewind was on-device capture on the Mac; Limitless is a cloud service built around a wearable, and it no longer records on desktop or web at all. If what you valued was Rewind's on-device model, Limitless was never a true successor to it even before the Meta acquisition.

Can I get my data out of Rewind or Limitless? Limitless provides a data export tool via its help center, and existing accounts keep access to past recordings through 2026. Export through the official tool while access remains. Going forward, favor tools with real export: Everpaper exports the whole journal as a linked Obsidian vault or GraphML, and ScreenPipe stores everything in a local SQLite database you can query directly.

What's the closest thing to Rewind in 2026? Architecturally, Everpaper and ScreenPipe: continuous local capture, on-device transcription, search over everything, no bot, no account. Everpaper ships the finished, Rewind-like experience (day journal, meetings, ask-your-history) on Apple Silicon Macs; ScreenPipe is the cross-platform, build-it-yourself version. Granola covers the meetings slice in the cloud.

Is there a free Rewind alternative? ScreenPipe's CLI is free and fully local: npx -y screenpipe@latest record. Granola's Basic plan is free with limited meeting history, but it's cloud-processed and meetings-only. Everpaper isn't free; it's in private beta with a founding-license model for early supporters, not a monthly subscription. But nothing on its capture path ever leaves your Mac.

Are Rewind alternatives safe for confidential meetings? On-device tools (Everpaper, ScreenPipe) keep audio and transcripts on your machine by default, which removes the vendor from the question. Cloud tools (Granola, Limitless while it lasts) send audio or transcripts to third parties, so the answer depends on your policy and the other parties' consent. Whatever you use, tell people you're recording; the law in two-party-consent jurisdictions applies to the recorder, not the vendor.

Methodology

We researched each tool on 2026-08-04 against official pricing pages, FAQs, security pages, help centers, and user-review sites, plus TechCrunch and 9to5Mac coverage of the Meta acquisition and rewind.ai's own post-mortem page. Every published price above carries its check date. Everpaper is our product and was ranked first on the survivability, data-residency, and capture-model criteria weighted for Rewind's actual user base; its limitations (macOS 14.2+ only, Apple Silicon only, private beta, no mobile or web app, AI features waiting on a provider) are stated in its entry.

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Everpaper: your days, kept, on your Mac. Rewind's idea in an active private beta: on-device capture, meetings without a bot, and recall that never needs a provider. Limited spots, founding-license model for early supporters, not a monthly subscription. Join the waitlist at everpaper.app. Read more about the Day Journal and the on-device privacy model.