Free Screen Recorder for Windows 10 & Windows 11 (2023 Guide)

If a free screen recorder for Windows 10 &  Windows 11 is powerful enough to make screencasts, why pay for a premium one?

A screen recorder is a specialized screencast creator that’s capable of grabbing and saving any desktop activity into one kind of media format, usually a video format like MP4. If you are just stepping into the screen capture world and don’t want to invest in a paid tool, a piece of free video recording software for Windows 10 can really help.

We’ve rounded up the best free screen recorders for Windows list sometime before, but due to compatibility or other reasons, some of them are not so friendly with Windows 10. Also considering the computing levels and screen capture requirements of viewers may vary from each other, here this free screen recording software list will cover the best ones of different types.

NOTE!: All those free recording programs are freeware, with no watermark by default, not contain any commercial app or similar trial version. So you can produce screen video in a truly free way.

REMINDER!: As a rule, free tools are not ideal for noobs because of the lack of features or unfriendly interface. Therefore, if you have no experience in using multimedia software like video converter, video editor or so, you are suggested to carve out the way of screencasting with a naive screen recorder for Windows 10 like RecMaster

.

Seven Recording Modes: Game Mode, Full Screen, Custom Area, Webcam, Audio Only Key/Advanced features: Scheduled recording, Auto-start recording at system startup, Real-time annotation, Add mouse cursor/watermark effect

RecMaster screen recorder gives a one-click screen recording method to keep whatever happens on the monitor in your own way!

1. Game Bar – A Free Screen Recorder Coming from Windows 10 & Windows 11

I’ve put Game Bar in many screen recorder lists earlier like the best screen recorder for Windows and the top screen recorder for Windows 10 thanks to its system-bundled nature and free of charge. And in this post especially centering on free tools, without doubt, Game Bar is the first one to recommend. If you are not so familiar with it, check out the reasons below.

Game Bar is a gaming overlay attached to the Windows 10 system since version 1903 in May 2019.

Modeled from Xbox console’s Game DVR, this system-built-in feature can help PC gamers gain an improved gaming experience by taking game capturing (screencast and screenshot included), broadcasting the session, and sharing what you’ve recorded directly to Twitter without leaving the game.

When acting as a free screen recorder for Windows 10 & Windows 11, Game Bar not only accepts PC games but also works well with any other primary displaying app like Office suite, browser streaming, chatting app, and so forth.

With many capture settings available, you can define the recording quality, frame rate, audio source & bit rate, duration (up to 4 hours at one time), and preferred shortcuts at will. Now you can press the default “Win + G” to pop up its overlay or “Win + Alt + R” to start recording immediately.

Game Bar offers Windows 10 users a quick and easy solution for screencasting. The only shortcoming of this freebie is that it’s so rigid that people are not allowed to record the whole desktop or more than one app at the same time.

2. ShareX – An Open Source and One-stop Screen Capturing Tool Available for Windows 10

As a piece of all-in-one screen capture software with various sharing options, ShareX is able to make screenshots & screencasts on Windows 10 and upload them onto cloud services in only clicks.

You can regard it as a simple combination of the Snipping Tool and Game Bar, the former of which is an inbuilt image-capturing app of Windows 10 & Windows 11 and the latter a video recording utility.

But it gives more flexibility on both picture and video grabbing to some degree.

Speak of ShareX’s screen recording functionality, it has preloaded two major options under its Capture menu – Screen recording (FFmpeg) and Screen recording (GIF), with which you are empowered to work out any FFmpeg-supported video file and animated GIF of the screen, be it the entire display or a customized area.

ShareX also gives more screen recording settings under Task settings -> Capture -> Screen Recorder like video & video source, encoder, quality, video frame rate, whether to show the mouse cursor, whether to record with lossless encoding to output the original high-quality recording, etc.

File sharing is a key feature of ShareX because it allows users to upload images, videos, or other files to more than 50 destinations directly like Imgur, Flicker, Twitter, Dropbox, and more.

In addition, it has an auto-upload feature to save your capture onto a cloud server with a URL being copied to a clipboard for further copy-and-paste sharing. Many people also like its mini tools like OCR recognizer, video converter, video thumbnail saving, QR code maker, etc.

3. Ezvid for Windows – A 100% Free Screen Recorder and Video Editor for Windows 10 & 11

Ezvid, a Los Angeles-based company with about 11 years of history, has brought about several user-generated services to general customers for free, including Ezvid Wiki, Ezvid Wikimaker, and our target here – Ezvid for Windows.

Ezvid for Windows is officially claimed as the easiest screen recorder and video creator with cutting-edge effects and features.

No matter you want to make a screen recording for documentation, informing, or just for fun, no matter whether the content you’d like to capture is the web page, PC game, desktop app, face cam, or any voice, Ezvid gives you the freedom to select and record it into a file.

The chance is its built-in video editor lends you a hand in producing and polishing video in one go.

Drawing on the screen, adding free included music/text/watermark/voice mix into video, changing the video playback speed to achieve slow/fast motion, and re-arranging the clips, all of those can be easily done with Ezvid.

What’s more, its Speech Synthesis function can help you make narration speech out of text slides with only a click.

After that, you can feel free to share this pro-looking recording on online sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo, or send it to friends via app/email. An extra note you should know is that every Ezvid recording clip is limited to 45 minutes.

4. Loom – A Free Online Screen Recorder for Windows 10 & 11

Loom’s basic or say unlicensed users could enjoy its online recording service at no cost, still without a recording duration limit or watermark fixed into the video.

The only requirement for enjoying this freebie is a sign-up. As long as you have signed your account in, you can download and install its Chrome extension or Mac desktop app for recording.

Chrome extension is the one we will focus on here thanks to its more convenient operation.

Online screen recorder offers an easy and quick solution to video capture and communication. That’s because, with it, customers can not only make screencasts on the web with no heavy desktop app installed and launched but also keep it in cloud space and share the media with only a URL.

Loom for Chrome mainly delivers three options for users to choose from: record screen only, record cam only, or record screen and cam at the same time. For screen capture, Full Desktop and Current Tab are also given for whole desktop, single desktop app, or browser tab capture with ease. No more settings for video or audio parameters manually, you should only decide what recording method to use before the real screencasting. When the recording is finished, you are enabled to download the MP4-formated video to a local hard disk. Then you can delete it for more space because Loom limits free users to save up to 25 videos in the library.

5. OBS Studio – Advanced Freeware for Screen Recording on Windows10 & 11

Since the former four free video recorders for Windows 10, especially ShareX and Loom, are more suitable for beginners, they are more aiming to assist people do FAST screen recording, with less control possibility.

So for those who want to initiate more flexible and complicated recording tasks, free open-sourced OBS Studio, aka Open Broadcaster Software, is recommended here.

OBS has two core functionalities, one is live broadcasting and the other one is screen recording. When acting as free screen recording software for Windows 10 & Windows 11, it’s capable of accessing and capturing any kind of source into video files in the preferred format, size, and quality. By supporting unlimited scenes, you can add, range, and realize pro-level montage movies with transition effects at will.

Considering various computing levels, OBS also gives different output modes for different users.

Newbies should choose Simple mode to set and seniors can pick Advanced to more parameters except for bit rate and encoder. For multi-audio-track creation, select MKV as the recording format.

• If you want to obtain more detailed setting suggestions, please check the best OBS settings for recording 1080p/720p video.
• If your capture window is all in black, regardless of the capture modes, you can try solutions to fix the OBS black screen error.

An Overview of These Five Free Screen Recorders for Windows 11 & Windows 11

Bottom Line

As the top list of free screen recorders for Windows 10 goes to an end, you must have a general understanding of what they are and how they work. It’s hard to judge which one is absolutely the number 1 product, so you should only select the one that suits your demands most.