Loom

Loom is a tool for asynchronous video messaging — recording a short video of your screen, your camera, or both, and sharing it as a link the recipient watches whenever they like. Instead of scheduling a live meeting to walk someone through a design, a bug, or a status update, you record a two-minute Loom and send it, and they watch on their own time. The recipient does not need the app or an account to view it; they just open the link. That low friction is the whole idea: capture the explanation once, at your convenience, and let others consume it at theirs. Loom added features over time, such as automatic transcripts and AI-generated summaries and titles, but the core remains simple — turn a would-be meeting or a wall of text into a quick, watchable video that carries tone and context a written message often loses.

Loom was acquired by Atlassian, the software company behind Jira, Confluence, and Trello, in 2023, folding async video into Atlassian's suite of team-collaboration tools. Flagging that ownership matters, because a tool's home shapes its future direction and integrations. It is also worth being clear about what Loom is not: it is a workplace communication and collaboration tool, not marketing technology. Loom does not run campaigns, manage ad spend, or track customers through a funnel; it helps colleagues explain things to one another without a live call. Marketers may use it internally, as anyone might, but it does not belong in a martech stack. The reason to say so plainly is that SaaS tools are easy to miscategorize, and filing an async-video communication tool under marketing software would be a mistake.

Loom and Zoom rhyme and both involve video, so they get confused, but they solve opposite problems. Zoom is synchronous: it hosts live video calls and meetings where people are present at the same time, talking in real time. Loom is asynchronous: it records a video for someone to watch later, with no one needing to be online at the same moment. The difference is time. Zoom is for the conversation you need to have together, now — a discussion, a negotiation, a workshop. Loom is for the explanation you can deliver on your own and let others absorb whenever they are ready — a walkthrough, an update, a piece of feedback. One gathers people simultaneously; the other frees them from having to gather at all, which is a genuinely different kind of communication.

That distinction changes when each tool is the right choice. Reach for Zoom when you genuinely need back-and-forth in real time, where the value is in the live exchange and immediate reactions. Reach for Loom when the interaction is mostly one-directional — you have something to show or explain, and a meeting would just force everyone to be present for a monologue. Teams that overuse live meetings often discover that many of them could have been Looms, reclaiming calendar time and letting people work uninterrupted. The two are complements, not rivals: async video for what does not need a meeting, live video for what does. Confusing them leads either to needless meetings that a recording would have replaced, or to async messages where a real-time conversation was actually required.

Using Loom well means recognizing which communications are genuinely one-directional and turning those into short videos instead of meetings or long documents. A code review, a design walkthrough, a bug report, an onboarding explainer, or a status update often needs showing more than discussing, and a two- or three-minute recording delivers it with tone and visual context that text strips away — while letting the viewer watch on their own schedule and rewatch the tricky parts. Keep the videos short and focused, use the transcript and summary features so recipients can skim, and organize the links where your team already works. Done consistently, async video reduces meeting load and speeds up communication across time zones, because the sender records once and every recipient consumes on their own time rather than everyone converging on a shared calendar slot.

The failures are using async video for the wrong situations and overdoing it. Recording a Loom for something that really needs live discussion — a negotiation, a sensitive conversation, a decision requiring debate — just delays the back-and-forth that was needed. Rambling, unedited fifteen-minute videos defeat the purpose, since a viewer will not sit through them any more than they would read a bloated memo. Some teams swing so far toward async that genuine collaboration suffers. And on tool lists, people occasionally file Loom as marketing software, which it is not — it is a communication tool now owned by Atlassian. The discipline is to match the medium to the message: async video for one-directional explanation, live video for real dialogue, and short, focused recordings either way.

Loom takes the name of the weaving loom, a device that interlaces threads, suggesting a tool that weaves quick video messages into a team's communication.

Etymology: source.

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