If you are looking for a Rewind AI alternative, you already know the difficult part: Rewind is not coming back. Recording in the Mac app was disabled for good on 19 December 2025, and the downloads were removed. The company had renamed itself Limitless in 2024, moved its focus to a wearable pendant, and was acquired by Meta in 2025.
That leaves a specific kind of person stranded — someone who deliberately chose a tool that kept a searchable memory of their work on their own machine, and who now needs somewhere to go.
This page compares the four options that actually exist, including ours, and says plainly where a competitor is the better pick.
What Rewind did, and why it is gone
Rewind ran quietly on your Mac and recorded your screen. It ran OCR over what it captured, so every word you had ever seen became searchable — including text inside images, video calls and apps that sync nothing. Later it added "Ask Rewind", which answered questions from that archive instead of from the open web.
The shutdown was not a surprise so much as the end of a drift. The 2024 rename to Limitless came with a shift toward a wearable pendant and a cloud service; the Mac app went into maintenance. The Meta acquisition finished the journey. Whatever you think of Meta, a continuous log of everything you have looked at is a different proposition inside an advertising company than it was inside a small Mac software team.
Work out what you are actually replacing
"Rewind alternative" means three different things to three different people, and picking wrong is how you end up migrating twice.
Screen capture and replay. Scrubbing back through a visual timeline to see a document, a demo, or a whiteboard you closed weeks ago. This is the hardest capability to replace and the one fewest tools have.
Search over what you saw. OCR across every captured frame, so you can find a number from a screen share or a name from a message in an app with no export.
Ask. An AI grounded in your own history. This needs the archive and a reasoning layer on top of it, which is a meaningfully higher bar than search.
Decide which of the three you relied on before you read the table.
The comparison
| ReMynd | Limitless | Screenpipe | Microsoft Recall | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Continuous capture | Screen + calls | Audio via pendant | Screen + mic, event-driven | Screen snapshots |
| On-device vs cloud | Searchable index kept on your computer | Cloud (now Meta) | Local; product analytics on by default | On-device, encrypted |
| Bring your own LLM | For extensions only (any OpenAI Responses API endpoint) | No | Yes, via Ollama | No |
| Call transcripts | Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack Huddles | Yes, audio-first | Mic capture, DIY | No |
| Platform | macOS | Wearable + cloud | macOS, Windows, Linux | Windows 11, Copilot+ or AI+ PCs only |
| Price | Free; pay only for optional cloud storage | Discontinued for new customers | Free plan; paid tiers from $25/mo ($250/yr) | Bundled with Copilot+ PCs |
Who should pick what
Pick ReMynd if you are on a Mac and you want the whole Rewind experience back — capture, OCR search, and your own AI agent answering from your own week — without the archive living on someone else's servers. Capture and OCR run on your device. Cloud sync is optional: recordings are encrypted on your computer with a password you set before upload, to ReMynd's storage on a paid plan or to your own S3 bucket. Read how on-device memory works if the architecture matters to you, and it should.
Pick Screenpipe if you want readable source in a local, cross-platform tool and you are comfortable with setup (its product analytics are on by default, and can be switched off). Its code is public under the Screenpipe Commercial License (free for personal and non-commercial use, paid for commercial use; it is no longer MIT licensed), it is written in Rust, runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, works with Ollama, and has a free plan alongside paid tiers from $25 a month ($250 a year) (pricing, checked 18 October 2026). Its event-driven capture — screenshotting on app switches, clicks and scroll pauses rather than on a timer — is a smart design that keeps CPU around 5–10%. If you want to read every line of code that touches your screen history, this is the honest answer and we would rather tell you than pretend otherwise. See the full ReMynd vs Screenpipe comparison.
Pick Microsoft Recall if you are on Windows with qualifying hardware. After a rough 2024 launch, Microsoft rebuilt the privacy model: opt-in, snapshots and the vector index always encrypted, just-in-time decryption behind Windows Hello. It is a reasonable timeline search. It is also Windows-only, which ends the conversation for most Rewind refugees. More in ReMynd vs Microsoft Recall.
Do not start with Limitless. It is the direct descendant of Rewind, which is exactly the problem — the pendant is no longer sold to new customers, and Limitless says it supports existing pendants through 2026 outside the seven markets (including the EU and the UK) where the service closed. If you own one, use it while support lasts and plan your exit. The ReMynd vs Limitless comparison covers migration.
An honest note on privacy claims
Be sceptical of absolutes, including from us. Any real application makes some network calls — sign-in, licence checks, crash reporting — and an app promising that literally nothing ever reaches a network is either wrong or has not thought about where the boundary sits.
The claim worth making is narrower and checkable: ReMynd keeps the searchable index on your computer, and cloud sync is opt-in. If you turn it on, recordings are encrypted on your computer with a password you set before upload, to ReMynd's storage or to your own S3 bucket, and they are never pooled, never trained on, never sold. Everything else is detail you are entitled to ask about.