A free Arcade alternative that records your real app, not screenshots

What Arcade does well#

Arcade is polished. Each capture becomes a screenshot or a short clip with a hotspot on the thing to click next, and the result looks finished the moment you stop. It has:

• Branding themes, so a demo matches your site.
• Video clips between steps, for motion a screenshot cannot show.
• An AI voiceover.
• Analytics, and team features for a sales or marketing group working on the same demos.

It is priced per seat, with a free plan that limits how many demos you can publish, at the time of writing; the current numbers are on Arcade's pricing page.

Where Replayink differs#

• It records the real app, not pictures of it. Each screen is the real HTML with the real CSS. Menus open, dialogs appear and spinners spin, because the app's own reactions were recorded as changes to the page and are played back. No code from the app runs for the viewer.
• The viewer goes in any order. Every control you used while recording is live. A screenshot-and-hotspot demo has one path; this one has as many as you used.
• Free, with no demo cap. No per-seat price. An account holds 1 GB of recordings, and you publish as many demos as fit.
• Nothing to install for viewers. The link opens in any browser, with none of Replayink's interface around it.
• Local until you publish. Recording uploads nothing. No account is needed to record; an anonymous one is made the first time you publish.

A link opens in Explore, where the viewer clicks freely. Add ?autoplay=1 and it plays like a video first, with a cursor, until the first click hands it over. Present is the closest thing to an Arcade demo: a screenshot per step with a pulsing hotspot, the step's title and its note.

What Replayink does not do#

• No video clips. A step is a page, not a recording of motion.
• No AI voiceover in this build.
• No branding themes. The demo looks like your app, because it is your app.
• No team workspaces for demos. A demo belongs to the account that published it.
• No region blur. Passwords, card numbers and one-time codes are masked before storage, and an option masks everything you type, but what the page showed is in the copy.

If a demo needs a voiceover, clips or a branded frame, Arcade is the better fit.

Record a demo in Replayink#

1. Add Replayink to Chrome. It also runs in Microsoft Edge.
2. Open your web app and press Shift+R, or press the ● button on the toolbar. After a 3-2-1 countdown a small dock appears.
3. Use the app. Every click, typed value, choice, drag, scroll, dialog and page change becomes a step, up to 500. Hold A to draw an arrow or P for the pen; what you draw stays in the demo.
4. Press Stop. The player opens with the recording.
5. Press Share link. The address is on your clipboard.

Edit lists the steps: rename them, write a note for each, change the order. End a link with #s=4 to open it at step 4, or add ?embed=1 for an iframe in your docs. Stats show views, unique viewers and how far people got. Publishing again keeps the same link, and Unpublish takes it down. More in how to record an interactive demo and interactive demo or screen recording.

What it cannot do#

The copy runs none of your app's code, so what works is what you did while recording; a button nobody pressed does nothing, and the player says so. Canvas and WebGL apps, video players, and pages that keep redrawing from a websocket after you stop come through as what was on screen. Native browser UI, such as a file picker, is not recorded. It keeps what the page did, not the network. Very large pages fall back to a screenshot for that step. It is not a video editor.

Questions#

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