Your Mac ships with two perfectly good screen recorders, and there are at least three more worth knowing about. Which one you should use depends entirely on the job: a quick bug report has different needs than a tutorial, and a tutorial has different needs than the demo on your landing page. Here's every option, fastest first.
Option 1: Cmd+Shift+5 — the built-in screenshot toolbar
Press Cmd+Shift+5 and macOS opens a capture toolbar with two recording modes: the entire screen or a selected region. Pick one, hit Record, and stop it from the menu bar icon when you're done. The file lands on your desktop as a .mov. That container is fine as a capture, not as a universal upload — convert to MP4/H.264 before you send it to a client, a website, or social. We cover when MOV, MP4, and WebM each make sense in best video format in 2026.
Use it for: bug reports, quick "here's what I mean" clips for Slack, anything internal.
Its limits: no system audio (your mic only), no webcam, no editing beyond Trim in QuickTime, and the raw capture of a cluttered desktop looks exactly like what it is. There's also no window-follow or zoom — small text stays small.
Option 2: QuickTime Player — the same engine with a file menu
QuickTime's File → New Screen Recording drives the same capture engine as Cmd+Shift+5, with one addition worth knowing: New Movie Recording can capture your webcam, and you can run both at once to get a crude facecam setup. Like the toolbar, it records your microphone but not the audio your Mac is playing — if you need to capture app or browser sound, that's a whole topic of its own (we wrote up the four real ways to record system audio on a Mac).
Option 3: The terminal — screencapture -v
macOS ships a CLI recorder almost nobody knows about: screencapture -v recording.mov starts a video capture, and Ctrl+C stops it. It's handy for scripted or remote captures over SSH, and completely bare-bones otherwise — no region selection UI, no audio options worth using. If your demo lives entirely inside the terminal, a text-based recorder is usually the better tool; see our comparison of asciinema, VHS, and real video for terminal demos.
Option 4: OBS Studio — free, powerful, and built for streaming
OBS is the free heavyweight: multiple scenes, window and display capture, webcam overlays, and (with a bit of setup) system audio. If you're streaming, or recording long-form content with scene switches, it's the right call and the price is unbeatable.
The honest downside: OBS is a broadcast studio, not a demo tool. You configure scenes, sources, and audio routing before you record, and what comes out is a flat, unedited capture — no zooms, no cursor treatment, no background. For a 40-second product demo, the setup often takes longer than the recording.
Option 5: Dedicated demo recorders — when the video is the product
Everything above produces a faithful, flat capture. That's fine until the recording itself has a job to do — a launch video, a landing-page demo, an App Store preview. Then the things that make raw captures look amateur start to matter: tiny text, a jittery cursor, no visual focus. (We catalogued all nine of those failure modes in why screen recordings look bad.)
This is the category tools like Screen Studio and ZoomCap exist for: they record your screen and your input telemetry, then generate camera work from it — smooth zooms onto the places you click, a re-rendered cursor, padding and a background — and export a polished MP4. ZoomCap does this from one terminal command, processes everything locally, captures system audio without extra drivers, and costs $29 once; we compared the field honestly (including where the competition wins) in Screen Studio alternatives in 2026.
Which one should you actually use?
- Bug report or quick internal clip: Cmd+Shift+5. It's already installed and it's fast.
- Tutorial with narration: QuickTime if mic-only audio is enough; OBS if you need your webcam and app sound together.
- Streaming or long-form recording: OBS, no contest.
- Terminal-only demo: asciinema or VHS for docs, real video for launches.
- Demo that has to sell something: a dedicated demo recorder. The gap between a flat capture and generated camera work is the difference viewers actually notice.
One last tip that applies to every option here: before you hit record, bump your font sizes, turn on Do Not Disturb, and record the window — not the whole 4K display. Those three habits improve a recording more than any tool switch.