Arcade vs Loom

Arcade is an interactive demo and product video platform from Arcade Software, founded in early 2021 by former Atlassian colleagues Caroline Clark and Rich Manalang. Its seed round was led by Upfront Ventures with Sequoia and Bond. The original job is simple: record clicks in your product with a browser extension and turn them into a clickable, embeddable walkthrough that prospects can try on a website, blog or social post before signing up.

Today Arcade sells two product lines. Interactive demos add branching, hotspots, AI voiceovers, AI translations, lead forms, CTAs, MP4 and GIF export and engagement insights. AI video builds editable launch videos, changelogs, tutorials and talking-head clips from your product and brand, and can be requested from Claude or ChatGPT through the Arcade MCP. Demo plans run Free, Growth (per seat) and Enterprise; AI video has a separate Free and credit-based Pro plan.

Arcade suits product marketers, sales engineers and growth teams at product-led SaaS companies who want demos live in hours. It is not an in-app onboarding tool like Userflow or Stonly, and async screen recording for internal updates is cheaper in Loom. Custom domains, SSO and the native Salesforce integration sit on Enterprise only.

Buying tip: demo subscriptions do not include AI video credits, and monthly credits do not roll over. Arcade says more than 37,000 teams use it, with logos such as Atlassian, Zapier, Retool and Carta, so check which product line you actually need before buying both.

Loom is an asynchronous video messaging tool founded in San Francisco in 2015 and acquired by Atlassian in 2023. It made the quick screen recording a normal way to communicate at work: instead of scheduling a meeting or writing a long message, people record a short video and share a link.

Loom records your screen, camera or both from a desktop app, Chrome extension or mobile app, and the video is uploaded while you record, so a shareable link is ready the moment you stop. Viewers can watch at higher speed, leave time-stamped comments and emoji reactions, and see transcripts and captions. Creators get basic trimming and editing, call-to-action buttons, viewer insights and privacy controls. AI features generate titles, summaries and chapters, remove filler words and silences, and turn videos into documents or messages. Integrations embed Loom in Slack, Gmail, Notion, Jira, Confluence, GitHub and Salesforce. The free Starter plan limits each person to 25 videos of up to 5 minutes, while Business plans remove limits and add branding controls, and Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM and advanced security.

Loom fits distributed teams, product and engineering groups, sales reps sending personalized videos and support teams explaining fixes. For polished product demos and marketing videos with zoom effects, Tella, Screen Studio and Descript produce better-looking output, and Vidyard is popular for sales video. Loom's advantage is speed, simplicity and how widely recipients already recognize it.