Loom Review 2025: Async Video Messaging That Replaces Meetings

The Meeting That Broke Us

It was a Tuesday. The kind of gray, low-energy Tuesday where your coffee gets cold before you remember to drink it. Our team of twelve -- scattered across Bangalore, Berlin, and Brooklyn -- had just wrapped up a forty-five-minute video call to discuss a product update that could have been an email. Actually, it could have been three sentences. The designer had shown a revised mockup. The PM had nodded. Everyone else had sat on mute with their cameras off, answering Slack messages in another tab while pretending to pay attention. When the meeting ended, the Slack messages started immediately: "What was the final decision on the header?" "Did she say the icon was changing or staying?" "Wait, were we supposed to do something?"

My manager, who had just wasted forty-five minutes of her afternoon and was now facing three more hours of calls before she could do any actual work, leaned back in her chair -- I could hear the creak through her mic in our one-on-one -- and said something that stuck with me: "We just had twelve people in a room for nearly an hour, and I'm not sure any of us left knowing more than we did going in."

That week, she sent us all a link to Loom.

Before Loom: A Culture of Calendar Debt

I want to paint a picture of what our workdays looked like before Loom arrived, because I think many readers will recognize themselves in it. Our PM would schedule a "quick sync" to walk someone through a feature spec -- thirty minutes blocked. A designer wanted to show three variations of a component -- another thirty-minute call, most of which was spent waiting for people to join and then re-explaining context to latecomers. An engineer needed to walk through a pull request that touched six files -- you guessed it, a meeting. By Wednesday, most of us had four or five hours of open time scattered in thirty-minute scraps throughout the day. Not enough to think deeply about anything. Just enough to answer messages, feel behind, and start dreading Thursday's calendar.

The irony is that none of these were bad intentions. People genuinely wanted to communicate clearly. They wanted the nuance of voice, the ability to point at things on a screen, the reassurance that the other person understood. Text in Slack felt too flat for complex topics. Long documents felt too formal and too slow. Video calls felt like the only option.

They were not.

The First Loom: Something Shifted

The first Loom I ever watched was from our designer, Priya. Instead of booking her usual "mockup review" meeting, she had recorded a four-minute video walking through the updated checkout flow. Her face was in a small bubble in the corner. Her screen showed the Figma file. She pointed at things with her cursor, talked through her reasoning, paused to highlight a particular interaction, and at the end she said, "Let me know what you think -- drop a comment on the timestamp if anything feels off."

I watched it at 1.5x speed while eating lunch. It took under three minutes. I left a timestamped comment at the 2:14 mark about the button placement. Priya saw it an hour later and replied with a thirty-second follow-up Loom showing the adjustment. Done. No calendar invite. No waiting for six people to find a shared free slot. No one sitting on mute pretending to care about a design decision that was not relevant to their work.

Something had shifted. Not just in how we communicated, but in how the day felt. There was more open space. More time to actually build things.

What Loom Actually Is (And What It Is Not)

For those unfamiliar, Loom is an asynchronous video messaging platform. You click a button -- in the Chrome extension, the desktop app, or the mobile app -- and it records your screen, your webcam, or both at the same time. When you stop recording, Loom instantly generates a shareable link. No uploading to YouTube. No attaching a 200MB file to an email. You get a URL, and anyone with that URL can watch the video in their browser.

That is the foundation. What is built on top of it is where Loom started to genuinely change our team's habits.

Every video gets an automatic transcript, powered by AI that supports over fifty languages. The transcript is not just a wall of text -- it is timestamped and searchable, which means you can skim it the way you would skim a document and jump to the part you actually need. On top of the transcript, Loom's AI generates a summary: a short paragraph that captures the gist. For our PM, who was watching fifteen to twenty Looms per week from different team members, the summaries alone saved her an hour of video watching time. She could read the paragraph, decide whether she needed the detail, and move on.

Loom also auto-generates chapter headings for longer videos, breaking them into navigable sections. Viewers can adjust playback speed, leave comments tied to specific moments in the video, and react with emojis -- which sounds trivial until you realize that a thumbs-up emoji at a specific timestamp is often all the confirmation someone needs. No reply required. No follow-up meeting.

How It Wove Into Our Days

Within two weeks, Loom had seeped into almost every workflow we had. Not because management mandated it, but because it turned out to be the path of least resistance for a surprising number of communication patterns.

Code reviews became richer. Instead of leaving ten disconnected comments on a pull request, our senior engineer would record a six-minute walkthrough. "Here's what I'm seeing in the auth module -- watch the cursor -- this function is doing too much." The developer on the other end told me later: "Reading comments, I only get the 'what.' Watching the Loom, I got the 'why.' I could hear in his voice which parts worried him and which were just style suggestions."

Product updates stopped being meetings. Our PM recorded a weekly five-minute Loom every Monday morning summarizing what shipped, what was in progress, and what decisions needed input. She shared it in Slack, and it embedded with a thumbnail preview so people could watch it inline. The engagement analytics -- yes, Loom tracks who watched and how far they got -- showed that about 85% of the team watched the full video, compared to the maybe 60% attendance we used to get at the live standup.

Onboarding changed entirely. When a new developer joined in November, instead of scheduling five hours of knowledge-transfer meetings across her first week, we pointed her to a Loom library. Architecture walkthroughs, deployment guides, code style explanations, product history -- all recorded by the people who knew the systems best, watchable at her own pace, pausable, rewindable. "It was like having a patient mentor who never got tired of repeating things," she told me later.

Client communication surprised us most. A colleague in our sales team started sending personalized Loom videos to prospects instead of cold emails. He would pull up the prospect's website, walk through a specific observation about their product, and suggest how our solution might help -- all in ninety seconds. His click-through rate jumped to over twenty percent. "People are so used to being pitched in text," he said. "A face talking directly to them, showing their actual site -- it feels like you cared enough to spend time on them specifically." Loom's custom branding and call-to-action buttons let him overlay a "Book a Demo" button at the end of each video, and it converted at a rate that made his email sequences look embarrassing by comparison.

The Annotation Layer

A detail that does not get enough attention: Loom's drawing tools during recording. You can draw freehand on your screen, highlight regions with a spotlight that dims everything else, and create visible click effects so viewers can follow your cursor. These sound small. They are not. When our tech lead circled a problematic line of code during a review, drew an arrow showing the data flow, and talked through the bug -- that replaced what would have been a fifteen-minute back-and-forth in Slack, full of "which file are you looking at?" and "can you share your screen?" The annotations made the communication directional. You knew exactly where to look, exactly what mattered.

The Atlassian Chapter

Loom was acquired by Atlassian in October 2023 for $975 million. If you use Jira, Confluence, or Trello, that number tells you something about where async video sits in Atlassian's vision. Since the acquisition, the integrations have deepened. There is now a native Loom recording button inside Jira tickets and Confluence pages. You can attach a walkthrough directly to a ticket without leaving the Atlassian ecosystem. For our team, which already lived in Jira, this was a small but meaningful friction reduction -- the difference between "I should probably record a Loom for this" and actually doing it, right there in the interface.

The broader integration story extends beyond Atlassian. Loom videos embed natively in Slack, Notion, GitHub pull requests, Linear issues, Salesforce records, HubSpot contacts, and Google Docs. The Slack integration is the one we use most. Paste a Loom link in a channel, and it unfurls with a thumbnail preview. Teammates can watch it inline. The video lives where the conversation already is, rather than pulling people away to a separate platform.

Recording Quality and the Two-Second Start

One thing I have not mentioned because it is easy to take for granted: Loom recordings look and sound good. The video captures at up to 4K on supported hardware. The audio handling is clean even in noisy environments -- I have recorded Looms from a coffee shop and the result was perfectly watchable. The webcam bubble can be repositioned, resized, or hidden entirely depending on whether the context calls for a face or just a screen.

But the real magic is the startup speed. From clicking the record button to actually recording is about two seconds. There is a brief countdown, and then you are live. That matters more than any feature list, because the whole value of Loom depends on people actually using it -- and the barrier to recording has to be lower than the barrier to scheduling a meeting. If recording felt like a production, people would default back to meetings. The two-second start keeps it casual, spontaneous, human.

What It Costs (And Whether It Is Worth It)

Loom's free Starter plan gives you up to 25 videos with a five-minute recording limit. That five-minute cap is actually kind of interesting -- it forces you to be concise, which is a discipline many of us desperately need. But if you are using Loom seriously, you will outgrow it fast. Twenty-five videos sounds like a lot until you realize you have been recording three a day for a week and your library is full.

The Business plan runs $12.50 per user per month. Unlimited videos, no recording time limit, AI-generated summaries, engagement analytics, custom branding, password protection, and call-to-action overlays. For our team of twelve, that comes to $150 a month. I want to put that number in context: a single one-hour meeting with twelve people, assuming an average loaded cost of $60 per hour per person, costs the company $720 in salary alone. If Loom eliminates even one unnecessary meeting per week -- and in our experience it eliminated far more than that -- the math is not even close. The tool pays for itself before the first week is over.

The Enterprise tier adds SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning, advanced admin controls, a dedicated success manager, and a 99.9% SLA. Pricing is custom. For organizations with strict compliance needs, those features are table stakes rather than nice-to-haves.

Annual billing saves you roughly twenty percent, which brings the per-user cost closer to $10 a month. For what it does, Loom is one of the easier software expenses to justify on a team budget.

The Honest Limitations

Loom Versus the Others

Vidyard is the comparison that comes up most. Vidyard leans hard into sales -- CRM integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot, A/B testing on video thumbnails, buyer intent signals. If your entire use case is sales prospecting, Vidyard has a deeper toolkit for that specific job. But Loom is broader. It is built for the whole company -- engineering, product, design, support, leadership -- and its AI features, integration breadth, and general usability are ahead of Vidyard for anything beyond pure sales workflows.

Zoom Clips is interesting because it is free if you already pay for Zoom. That matters for budget-conscious teams. But it feels like what it is: an add-on feature inside a meetings product. The recording experience is rougher, the AI features are thinner, the analytics are weaker, and the integration story is almost nonexistent outside the Zoom ecosystem. You get what you pay for, which in this case is not much.

Vimeo Record is the choice for teams that want recording plus polished video hosting plus advanced editing in one ecosystem. If your workflow involves producing semi-professional videos -- not just quick messages -- Vimeo's integrated pipeline is compelling. But for the use case of "I want to explain something to my coworker without booking a meeting," Loom is faster, simpler, and more focused.

A Reflection on Async Culture

There is something I keep coming back to, months after Loom became a daily habit for our team. It is not really about the tool. It is about the assumption that sits underneath most workplace communication: the assumption that understanding requires presence. That if something matters, everyone needs to be in the same room -- or the same Zoom -- at the same time.

Loom gently challenges that assumption. Not heavily. It does not say meetings are evil. It just makes the alternative so easy that you start to notice how many meetings were never really necessary. You start to ask, "Could this be a Loom?" the way people used to ask, "Could this be an email?" And increasingly, the answer is yes.

But here is the thing that is harder to talk about: async communication requires trust. It requires trusting that your team will actually watch the video. It requires trusting that the person recording is being clear enough without real-time feedback. It requires trusting that a thumbs-up emoji on a timestamp means the message landed, even though you did not see the person nod. For teams that have that trust, Loom is transformative. For teams that do not, no tool can substitute for the culture work that needs to happen first.

Our team happened to be ready. We were drowning in meetings, distributed across time zones, and desperate for anything that would give us back some uninterrupted thinking time. Loom gave us that. Four months later, we have settled into a rhythm where live meetings are reserved for things that genuinely need real-time interaction -- brainstorms, difficult conversations, celebrations -- and everything else flows through async video.

The silence is productive now. Not lonely.

The Verdict