I Read 189 Loom Reviews So You Don't Have To
I spent an afternoon reading every single Loom review on Trustpilot.
All 189 of them.
Loom's overall rating sits at 1.5 out of 5 stars. That's not a rounding error — 70% of reviewers gave it one star. For a product that was once described as "the tool that killed unnecessary meetings," this is a stunning collapse.
Here's what I found.
The Numbers First
Before the stories, the raw data:
| Rating | Share of Reviews |
|---|---|
| 5 stars | ~8% |
| 4 stars | ~4% |
| 3 stars | ~3% |
| 2 stars | ~7% |
| 1 star | ~70% |
That 70% number is the one that matters. One-star reviews aren't people who found the product "okay but not great." One-star reviews are people angry enough to go out of their way to warn others.
So what are they angry about? Four things, almost exclusively.
Complaint #1: The Billing Shock
This is the most common theme. It shows up again and again, often in all-caps.
When Atlassian acquired Loom in early 2024 for around $975 million, most users didn't think much of it at first. Then Atlassian quietly eliminated the "Creator Lite" viewer tier — a free seat type that let teams share videos with viewers at no extra cost.
The result: teams that were paying a few hundred dollars a year suddenly received bills for tens of thousands.
One pattern I saw repeated in multiple reviews: a team of, say, 50 people that was paying around $240/year found themselves facing a renewal invoice for $24,000. That's a 100x increase with no new features, no warning, and no path back.
The reviews from this period are some of the most visceral I've read for any software product. People aren't just annoyed — they're describing it as a betrayal. "Bait and switch" appears so often it practically became the product tagline.
What makes it worse is that many of these teams were mid-year on annual contracts. They either paid the inflated bill or lost access to all their recorded videos immediately.
Complaint #2: The Reliability Failures
Billing is the loudest complaint. But the second most common theme is that the product simply stopped working reliably.
Between October and December 2025 alone, Loom experienced multiple major outages — one lasting six hours, another stretching to seven, and several more affecting specific features. For a tool marketed to replace real-time meetings with async video, that's a fundamental problem.
The specific complaints cluster around a few patterns:
- Videos stuck uploading. Users record, hit stop, and the upload just... hangs. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes indefinitely.
- Audio out of sync. The recording completes, the video plays back, but the audio is off by several seconds.
- Can't log in. Multiple reviews describe being locked out of their accounts with no explanation and no support response.
- Recordings lost. A small but recurring thread of reviews describes completed recordings simply disappearing — either during upload or after the account tier was changed.
For individual users, these are frustrating. For teams using Loom to replace synchronous meetings, a six-hour outage isn't an inconvenience — it's a work stoppage.
Complaint #3: The Support Black Hole
If the billing shock and the reliability failures are the two main wounds, the support experience is the salt.
The pattern across reviews is consistent: something goes wrong, the user contacts Loom support, and either nothing happens or they receive an automated reply that doesn't address the issue.
Multiple reviewers describe submitting tickets and waiting weeks for a response. Several describe waiting months. A few describe never receiving a human response at all.
One phrase that appears with uncomfortable regularity is some variation of: "Customer support doesn't exist."
This matters more than it might seem. Software tools break. Bugs happen. The question is whether there's a team on the other side that treats your problem like it matters. Based on the reviews, users feel the answer changed after the acquisition.
Some of the harshest reviews aren't about the product malfunctioning. They're from long-term Loom users who describe feeling like the company they trusted simply stopped caring about them.
Complaint #4: Feature Regression
This one is quieter but persistent.
A subset of reviews — mostly from users who joined Loom in 2021 or 2022 — describe features getting worse rather than better since the acquisition. Not removed outright, but degraded: slower to load, glitchier to use, or simply less polished than they remembered.
The transition to the Atlassian ecosystem appears to have come with the typical enterprise-software overhead: more required logins, more redirects, more "please upgrade your plan" prompts in places where the feature used to just work.
For users who originally chose Loom because it was fast and simple, this friction is a betrayal of the core value proposition.
What Do the Happy Reviewers Say?
The ~12% of reviewers who gave 4 or 5 stars break down into two groups:
- Enterprise users on Atlassian contracts who are getting Loom bundled with Jira, Confluence, or other Atlassian products. For them, it's effectively free and good enough.
- Individual creators who haven't hit a billing event yet and are still on grandfathered terms.
Even many of the positive reviews come with asterisks. "Great product, terrible company." "Love the tool, hate the ownership." The product itself clearly works well when it works. The issue is everything surrounding it.
What Are Users Switching To?
This is the question that shows up at the end of nearly every one-star review: "What should I use instead?"
The alternatives that come up most often in the reviews themselves:
- Portell — Browser-based, no install, $9/month flat with no per-seat fees. The most direct Loom replacement for teams that just need to record and share.
- Cap.so — Open-source alternative, still in early development.
- Tella — Higher quality output, but more expensive at $19/month for a solo plan.
- ScreenPal — Budget-friendly, less polished.
- Vidyard — More sales-focused, overkill for general async comms.
The common thread in what people want: something reliable, something with predictable pricing, and something that doesn't require an enterprise procurement conversation to share a three-minute screen recording.
The Bigger Picture
Loom's story isn't really about Loom. It's about what happens to indie SaaS products after acquisition by a company optimizing for a different customer.
Loom was built for individuals and small teams who needed async video to feel human. Atlassian builds software for enterprise IT departments. Those are different products with different pricing philosophies and different definitions of "working."
The 70% one-star rate on Trustpilot isn't a data anomaly. It's the market signal that there's a genuine gap — a need for a tool that does what Loom used to do, at a price that doesn't require a CFO to approve.
That gap is real, and a handful of products are trying to fill it.
Where to Go From Here
If you're in the market for a Loom replacement, the cleanest starting point I've found is Portell — it runs fully in your browser (no install, no extension), offers a free plan with 25 videos, and charges a flat $9/month for Pro with no seat-based billing. You can read our full Portell review here.
And if you want to track new tools as they enter this space, we list and review indie and SaaS products at foundout.io — including screen recording tools, async communication tools, and Loom alternatives as they launch.
The market Atlassian handed to competitors is a big one. Someone is going to win it.