Free interactive demo software: record a clickable demo in Chrome

What "interactive" means here#

A video from a screen recording tool like Loom plays. The viewer watches a cursor and cannot touch anything. An interactive demo is the app itself, replayed: every control you used while recording is live, and the viewer presses it.

• Any order. Nothing is locked to the sequence you recorded. A viewer who only cares about the export screen goes straight to it.
• The app's own reactions. A menu opening, a snackbar, a spinner: recorded as changes to the page and played back.
• Honest edges. A button nobody pressed while recording does nothing, and the page says so instead of pretending.

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 viewer's first click hands the page over. Present is a screenshot per step with a pulsing hotspot and the step's note. More on the difference in interactive demo or screen recording.

What is free, and where the limits are#

• The extension is free: recording, editing, publishing, embedding and stats.
• No account to record. An anonymous account is made for you the first time you publish.
• 1 GB of hosted recordings per account, and no cap on the number of demos within it.
• Up to 500 steps in one recording.
• Anyone with the link can open a published demo. There is no password and no expiry; there is Unpublish.

Record a demo, step by step#

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. Hold A to draw an arrow; 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, where you rename them, write a note for each and change the order. End a link with #s=7 to open it at step 7, or add ?embed=1 to run it inside your docs. Stats show views, unique viewers and how far people got. Publishing again keeps the same link. The full detail is in how to record an interactive demo.

Where it runs#

Recording needs Chrome or Edge, version 120 and up. Viewing needs nothing: the link opens in any browser on any device.

How it compares with paid demo tools#

In general terms, paid demo tools are priced per seat, their free plans cap how many demos you can publish, and most capture a screenshot of each screen with a hotspot on it, so the viewer follows the one path you captured. They also do things Replayink does not: video clips, an AI voiceover, branding themes and team workspaces.

Replayink saves the real HTML of each screen and replays the app's own reactions, so menus and dialogs work and the viewer can go in any order. It is free, with no per-seat price and no demo cap within 1 GB, and nothing leaves your computer until you press Share link. A side-by-side with one paid tool is in a free alternative that records the real app.

Privacy before you publish#

Nothing is uploaded while you record. Passwords, card numbers and one-time codes are masked before they are stored, and an option masks everything you type. There is no region blur, and a recording keeps each page as you saw it, so a demo of a site you are signed in to can show a customer's name in a table. Record on a test account when you can.

What it cannot do#

The copy runs none of your app's code, so what works is what you did while recording. 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 or the address bar, is not recorded. It keeps what the page did, not the network: a failed request shows as whatever the page showed. Very large pages fall back to a screenshot for that step. It is not a video editor.

Questions#

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