ScreenPipe alternatives: 4 honest paths for 2026

ScreenPipe earned its following the hard way: a 24/7 local screen-and-mic recorder, written in Rust, with a local API and a genuine offline mode. If you wanted a Rewind-style memory layer you could actually audit, it was one of the only serious options.

Then 2026 happened, and a chunk of its user base started shopping. Here's why, and where they're going.

A quick disclosure before anything else: Everpaper is our product. It sits first in this list, and we made it, so read that entry with the appropriate grain of salt. Everything else here is sourced from dated competitor research, with prices stamped where we could verify them.

Why people are leaving ScreenPipe

Four threads keep coming up, and they're all verifiable.

The license change. On 2026-06-09, ScreenPipe's source moved from MIT to the "Screenpipe Commercial License." Personal, non-commercial, educational, and research use stays free, plus a 7-day commercial evaluation. Any commercial use of the source, though, now requires a paid license. Older MIT releases remain MIT, so "open source ScreenPipe" still exists in the past tense. But the current codebase is source-available, and a lot of users who adopted it specifically because it was MIT feel the rug moved. The community had already flagged the project's aggressive self-promotion (an r/LocalLLaMA thread in September 2024 asked moderators to ban ScreenPipe posts for spamming), so trust wasn't overflowing to begin with.

Two pricing layers. ScreenPipe's source license and desktop product plans are separate. Personal, non-commercial source use remains free; commercial source use requires a paid license. The product page lists Free at $0, Basic at $25/month or $250/year, and Business at $50/seat/month or $500/seat/year. Free includes a 7-day Business trial and 10 AI credits/month on Auto only, with no frontier models. Basic raises the allowance to 150 credits/month, adds Auto, GPT-5.6 Luna, and GPT-5.4 mini, and removes user-installed scheduled-task and history limits, but still excludes frontier models. Business provides 400 credits/month, frontier Claude and GPT models, cloud sync, automations on efficient models, unlimited provider usage through your own key, and a managed team workspace.

Resource usage. This one comes from ScreenPipe's own docs: the official troubleshooting page tells users to lower the capture FPS from the 1 FPS default, exclude heavy apps, and switch to whisper-tiny on older machines. When your troubleshooting guide is a guide to making the app use less CPU and battery, that's an admission. Continuous capture is expensive, and ScreenPipe's approach (screenshots plus OCR plus Whisper) shows it.

You assemble it yourself. ScreenPipe is infrastructure, not a product. The AI features live in "pipes": scheduled agents you define as a pipe.md prompt plus a schedule. Want meeting summaries filed into Obsidian? That's a pipe you write or install. It's powerful if you're the kind of person who enjoys wiring a local API at localhost:3030 into an MCP server. If you wanted something finished, you were always in the wrong place, and more users seem to be realizing that.

Quick comparison

The alternatives

1. Everpaper — best for people who wanted a finished product, not a toolkit

Everpaper is built for the person who liked ScreenPipe's local-first philosophy and lost patience with the assembly required.

Everpaper is a private, on-device daybook for macOS: a Day Journal, meeting Minutes, and a Second Brain, all kept on your machine. Capture, OCR, transcription, storage, search, and the knowledge graph all run locally with no account. The core privacy rule is quotable: "no provider, no traffic." AI features like Ask the Book and the day narrative wait until you configure a provider. Local providers (Ollama, LM Studio, oMLX, Apple Foundation Models) can keep AI processing on the Mac. The privacy documentation explains the local and optional cloud paths.

Where ScreenPipe asks you to write pipes, Everpaper ships the daybook workflow. Meetings start with ⇧⌘M and transcribe on-device on the Neural Engine (Parakeet parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 by default, or MOSS for transcription-plus-diarization in one model); the meeting guide shows the full flow. Recall is ⌘K for the Index or ⌥Space for the Concordance from anywhere, documented in Recall. A CLI (everpaper-cli, in the app bundle) gives people who liked ScreenPipe's scriptability meetings, transcribe for any audio file, second-brain, llm, and global --json output. The whole journal can export to a plain-Markdown Obsidian vault, with no lock-in.

Honest limits: macOS 14.2+ only, Apple Silicon only (the Neural Engine speech model rules out Intel), no Windows or Linux. If cross-platform support was your reason for ScreenPipe, skip Everpaper. It's a private beta with no mobile or web version. AI features wait for a provider you configure. The Second Brain has a readiness gate of 5 days, 300 frames, 60 distinct things, and 3 recurring threads before it says "Ready."

Everpaper is in private beta with limited spots, with a founding-license option for early supporters, not a monthly subscription. We don't quote a public price during beta.

Best for: Mac users who want the local-first capture-and-recall idea as a finished, maintained product. Head-to-head: ScreenPipe vs Everpaper.

2. Limitless — best for hands-free, in-person capture (with a hard expiry date)

Limitless is the continuation of Rewind AI (same company, same founders), and its Pendant is a wearable mic that records in-person conversations all day, a form factor nothing else on this list touches. Before shutdown, the software captured meetings through system audio without a bot.

The problem is the timeline. Meta's acquisition was announced 2025-12-05. The Pendant is no longer sold. Desktop and web recording are disabled. EU/UK plus Brazil, China, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey were cut off in December 2025, with data deleted after Dec 19. Existing customers get the Unlimited plan free and support "throughout 2026," which tells you what happens after 2026.

Everything also lives in the Limitless cloud, and post-acquisition you accept a Meta-tied privacy policy. If you left ScreenPipe over trust and licensing, moving to a cloud-only product being absorbed by Meta is a strange direction.

Best for: existing Pendant owners riding out the wind-down, or anyone who genuinely needs wearable in-person capture and accepts the deadline. Not a long-term home. Historically, the official free tier included 1,200 transcription minutes per month; no current paid tier is available.

3. Rewind — the original, now an obituary

Rewind matters to this list historically: it's the product ScreenPipe positioned itself against, and its on-device architecture (continuous screen + audio capture, aggressive compression, local OCR and speech-to-text on Apple Silicon) proved the category. "Ask Rewind," GPT-4 over your own history, went viral in March 2023.

It's dead. The company rebranded to Limitless in 2024, got acquired by Meta, and the Rewind Mac app stopped recording on 2025-12-19. The rewind.ai domain is now an unaffiliated AI-tools aggregator with an explicit disclaimer that it has nothing to do with the original product. Teardowns measured battery drain of 20–40% on Apple Silicon laptops, a cautionary tale the whole category learned from.

If you're reading old "Rewind vs ScreenPipe" threads trying to pick a side, both sides of that comparison are gone in their original form. We maintain a current Rewind alternatives rundown for that intent.

Best for: nobody, going forward. It's a reference point, not an option.

4. Granola — best if meetings are the only slice you need

Granola is a different shape of tool: a bot-free AI meeting notepad, not a 24/7 recorder. The desktop app captures mic plus system audio locally and streams to transcription providers; no bot joins the call, so it works with Zoom, Meet, Teams, or anything else playing through system audio. Its signature move is human-in-the-loop notes: you jot rough notes during the call, and the AI fleshes them out from the transcript. Nat Friedman called its notes "the best meeting notes of anything I've tried." Granola raised a Series C at a $1.5B valuation in March 2026, evidence that it is an active, well-funded product.

The trade: it's a cloud product. Transcription runs through Deepgram or AssemblyAI, summarization through OpenAI/Anthropic, notes sit in US-hosted AWS, and audio is never stored; transcript and notes only. On consumer tiers, Granola trains on anonymized data by default (opt-out in Settings; off by default on Enterprise). Speaker identification is weak: desktop transcripts default to "Me"/"Them" labels, with named speakers only on Google Meet and Zoom via extensions.

Pricing, checked 2026-08-04 from the official pricing page: Basic is free with limited meeting history; Business is $14/user/month; Enterprise is $35/user/month.

Best for: people whose ScreenPipe use was really just "remember my meetings," who don't mind cloud processing, and who want polish over privacy. If the meetings slice is your whole need, also see our Granola vs Everpaper comparison.

ScreenPipe vs the field

How to choose

Ask yourself two questions.

What were you actually using ScreenPipe for? If the answer is "meetings," you were paying the 24/7-capture cost for a meetings problem, and Granola or Everpaper's Minutes will serve you better with less overhead. If the answer is "a searchable memory of everything on my screen," you're in the local-first memory category, and your realistic options are Everpaper (finished, Mac-only) or staying with ScreenPipe's free CLI.

Do you want to build, or do you want it built? ScreenPipe is an excellent foundation if your actual goal is a custom pipeline: local SQLite, HTTP API at localhost:3030, MCP server for Claude/Codex/Cursor, pipes you define yourself. If that sentence excited you, stop reading listicles. If it exhausted you, pick a product.

One more filter: platform. ScreenPipe runs on Windows and Linux (desktop app partial on Linux, Wayland varies). Everpaper is Mac-only. Among the verified options here, ScreenPipe itself is the only local-first path for Windows or Linux; Granola supports Windows but uses cloud processing.

FAQ

Is ScreenPipe still open source?

No. As of 2026-06-09 the source moved from MIT to the Screenpipe Commercial License: source-available, free for personal/non-commercial/educational/research use plus a 7-day commercial evaluation, with any commercial use of the source requiring a paid license. Older MIT-licensed releases remain MIT, so you can fork history, but the current project is not open source under any standard definition.

Can I still use ScreenPipe for free?

Yes. The Free plan is $0 with no credit card required and includes a 7-day Business trial, local capture, AI search, meeting notes, 50+ integrations, and 10 AI credits/month on Auto only; frontier models are excluded. Basic costs $25/month or $250/year. Business costs $50/seat/month or $500/seat/year. Commercial use of the current source remains a separate paid-license question.

What's the most private ScreenPipe alternative?

Everpaper, if you're on an Apple Silicon Mac: capture, OCR, on-device transcription, storage, knowledge graph, and search all run locally with no account, cloud AI is off by default behind an explicit toggle, and there's a redaction pass at capture time and again before any outbound AI call. ScreenPipe's local mode is comparably private if you stay off its cloud features. Granola and Limitless are cloud products; different threat model entirely.

Does anything match ScreenPipe's cross-platform support?

Within the products verified for this article, nothing matches ScreenPipe's local-first platform range. ScreenPipe covers macOS, Windows, and Linux (CLI full, desktop partial). Everpaper is macOS-only. Granola covers Windows and Mac plus mobile, but it uses cloud processing. If Windows or Linux is a hard requirement and local-first is too, staying on ScreenPipe's free tier is honestly your best answer.

Is Limitless worth switching to?

No. It's winding down under Meta. Pendant sales stopped in December 2025, desktop/web recording is disabled, and existing-customer support is committed only "throughout 2026." Treat it as hospice care for current users, not a destination.

What happened to Rewind?

Rebranded to Limitless in 2024, acquired by Meta (announced 2025-12-05), Mac app recording disabled 2025-12-19. The rewind.ai domain is now an unaffiliated AI-tools site. See our Rewind alternatives page for the full migration picture.

Recommendation

Stay with ScreenPipe if you're a hacker in the complimentary sense: you want to build on raw 24/7 capture, you're comfortable writing pipes and querying a local API, or you need Windows/Linux. The license change doesn't hurt personal use, the free CLI is genuinely capable, and nothing else local-first runs on your platform. Accept the CPU tax, pin your expectations on the paid-app pricing being unclear, and you're fine.

Leave for Everpaper if you're on an Apple Silicon Mac and you wanted the ScreenPipe idea as a finished product: on-device meeting Minutes, a Day Journal with 30-day default retention, Second Brain with beliefs computed locally, a real CLI for scripting, and Markdown export to Obsidian when you want out. The bias is declared above; the limits (Mac-only, beta, readiness gate) are real.

Leave for Granola if meetings were always the whole job and cloud processing is acceptable to you.

---

Everpaper is in private beta with limited spots, with a founding-license option for early supporters, not a monthly subscription. Join the waitlist at everpaper.app, or read the CLI documentation to see what local-first recall with a scriptable interface looks like.