Can You Use Loom to Record Meetings?

Loom is one of the most popular tools for screen recording. You can record your screen, microphone, camera, and, depending on your setup, system audio, then immediately share the resulting video with a link. That makes it useful for product demos, tutorials, sales walkthroughs, bug reports, and asynchronous updates.

But screen recording and meeting recording are not the same thing. We'll explain how Loom works and what its limitations are when it comes to meeting recording at scale.

How Loom screen recording works

Loom is designed around a straightforward workflow:

1. Choose whether you want to capture your screen, camera, or both.
2. Select the screen, window, or recording area.
3. Choose a microphone.
4. Start recording.
5. Stop the recording when you're finished.
6. Loom uploads the video and generates a link you can share.

Loom supports screen and audio capture across macOS, Windows, and Chrome, with desktop recording available for individual windows, full screens, or custom areas.

This works particularly well when the person recording knows exactly when they want the recording to begin and end, and when they want the recording to capture all the content on their screen.

For example, Loom is a natural fit for:

• Product demonstrations
• Tutorials
• Design feedback
• Bug reports
• Asynchronous presentations

Meetings create a different set of requirements.

1. Loom cannot record meetings programmatically

If you are building any kind of product on top of meeting data, you cannot use a screen recorder like Loom as a recording layer.

Loom is designed for individual users to manually record and share content from their screen. A user starts the recording, chooses what to capture, stops the recording, and then shares the finished video.

Meeting products usually need something very different. A sales intelligence platform, interview notetaker, or coaching product may need to automatically detect when a meeting starts, begin recording, process the meeting data, and send the resulting audio, video, transcript, and metadata into the product's backend.

Loom does not have an API and is not designed to provide that kind of programmable meeting capture. It does not offer a developer workflow for automatically joining or detecting meetings, triggering recordings, and then retrieving completed meeting recordings for downstream processing.

That means you cannot treat Loom as an API-based recording layer where your application can:

• automatically start recording when a meeting begins
• reliably associate a recording with a specific meeting
• retrieve meeting audio or video programmatically
• stream meeting data to your application in real time
• automatically send completed recordings into transcription or AI pipelines
• capture structured meeting events and metadata alongside the recording

For a product that needs to record hundreds or thousands of meetings without manual intervention, these limitations make a general-purpose screen recorder unsuitable as the underlying infrastructure.

A purpose-built meeting recording API or desktop recording SDK instead exposes meeting capture programmatically, allowing your application to automatically record meetings and pass the resulting conversation data into transcription, summarization, analytics, or other downstream workflows.

2. Loom doesn't understand that there's a meeting

To Loom, a meeting is primarily another application or window being captured.

For meeting-powered applications, however, the context around the recording can be just as useful as the pixels on screen.

You may need information such as:

• Which meeting platform is running
• When the meeting starts and ends
• The meeting title
• The meeting URL
• Participant activity
• When somebody starts speaking
• Live transcripts
• Audio or video frames

Recall.ai's Desktop Recording SDK is specifically built around meetings and can expose real-time events including transcripts, participant joins and updates, speech events, raw audio, and video frames. It can also retrieve meeting URLs and titles for supported configurations.

A generic screen recording gives you a video. A meeting recording system can give your application structured meeting data.

3. Loom doesn't capture data in real time

With a traditional screen recording workflow, the primary artifact is the completed video.

Many meeting applications need the data before the meeting has finished.

For example, you might be building:

• A real-time sales assistant
• Live transcription
• A coaching application
• An accessibility product
• A meeting copilot
• An agent that responds based on the conversation

These products may need audio, transcripts, or participant activity while the call is happening.

A Desktop Recording SDK supports real-time events, including transcript data, participant activity, raw audio, and video frames. That makes the recording layer usable as infrastructure for products built on top of live conversations rather than only as a way to create videos after the fact.

When should you use Loom?

Use Loom when the recording itself is the content you want to create. It is useful when someone wants to intentionally record their screen, explain something, edit the resulting video, and send it to another person.

When should you use a desktop recording SDK?

Use a Desktop Recording SDK when the meeting is the source of data for your application.

If you need your product to automatically capture meetings, process the conversation, generate transcripts, react to events in real time, or run AI workflows on top of the resulting meeting data, a conventional screen recorder isn't enough.

That's the fundamental difference:

Loom helps people record their screens. A Desktop Recording SDK helps developers build products that record and understand meetings.