rewind ai open source alternative: 6 projects, checked

the honest answer for anyone after a rewind ai open source alternative, as of october 2026: real options exist, but none is a finished, open source rewind. pensieve (apache 2.0) and openrecall (agpl 3.0) are the most capable projects with osi approved open source licences.

windrecorder (gpl 2.0) is windows only. dayflow (mit) is a mac work journal, and rem (mit) stopped shipping in 2024. screenpipe, the busiest, is source available under its own commercial licence. in our judgement, each asks you to own more of the upkeep than rewind did.

was rewind ai open source?

no, rewind ai was never open source, which is part of why its users had nothing to fall back on.

rewind was a closed source app for mac and iphone. when meta bought the company, by then called limitless, an update disabled all screen and audio capture starting december 19, 2025. with no published code, nobody could keep it running, and every open source rewind project on github is a separate rebuild, not a fork.

the longer story is in what happened to rewind ai, and if you still have old data, see how to export rewind ai data.

the six projects, side by side

we checked each repo's licence file, readme and release history on october 21, 2026.

which one runs on your machine?

your operating system cuts the list before anything else does.

• mac: screenpipe, pensieve, openrecall and dayflow. rem only if you accept an alpha that has not shipped in over two years.
• windows: windrecorder, screenpipe, pensieve and openrecall. microsoft's own recall needs a copilot+ pc with a 40 tops npu, 16 gb of ram and 256 gb of storage.
• linux: screenpipe, through an appimage, and openrecall. pensieve lists linux as in development.

what does each project actually capture?

they all take pictures of your screen, but what they keep and how they search it varies a lot.

screenpipe captures on events such as app switches and clicks, reads the accessibility tree for text, and falls back to ocr. it also records system audio and your mic, transcribed by local whisper or deepgram's cloud. official builds have a free plan, with full history at $25 a month or $250 a year on its pricing page. we compare it with the original in screenpipe vs rewind.

pensieve, formerly called memos, screenshots every screen and indexes them with ocr, a vision language model and embeddings. it plugs into ollama or any openai compatible api. the optional minicpm v model takes about 5.5 gb, and the readme recommends an nvidia card with 8 gb of vram or an m series mac.

openrecall takes regular screenshots, skips near duplicates, and runs local ocr for semantic search. its readme says no internet connection or cloud is required, and recommends keeping the data on an encrypted volume.

windrecorder screenshots every 3 seconds by default and turns them into video every 15 minutes, or records straight to video through ffmpeg. version 0.1.0 added a read only skill so an ai agent can search your records.

dayflow writes a timeline of your day using the model you pick: ollama, lm studio, a gemini key, or chatgpt and claude through their command line tools. it is a work journal more than a searchable frame archive.

rem screenshots every 2 seconds and recognizes the text. it still calls itself very alpha.

what does self hosting really cost you?

self hosting moves four jobs from a vendor to you: models, updates, storage and security.

1. models. ocr engines, embedding models and vision models download and run on your hardware. if you want rewind style answers in plain english, you also run a local llm, which our local llm guide for mac covers. all of it costs cpu: screenpipe's readme estimates 5% to 20% while capturing, against the 1% to 5% rewind claimed on apple silicon.
2. updates. python tools break in quiet ways. pensieve's readme notes that macos ties screen recording permission to the python binary path, so upgrading python means granting it again. openrecall has no tagged releases at all.
3. storage. windrecorder documents 10 to 20 gb of video a month plus about 160 mb of database, and its compression presets can shrink video to 0.1x to 0.7x of that. screenpipe's pricing page lists about 30 gb a month. rewind's homepage in may 2024 said users typically used 14 gb a month, thanks to a claimed 3,750x compression rate.
4. security. encryption is your job. microsoft says recall encrypts its snapshots and search index, while openrecall's readme tells you to create an encrypted volume yourself.

what self hosting saves is the subscription. rewind's 2024 pricing page charged $19 a month billed yearly for pro, and screenpipe's official basic plan is $25 a month or $250 a year. a source build of any of these six, for personal use, costs nothing.

the licences are the easy part. agpl, gpl, apache and mit all allow personal use. screenpipe's licence is the one with commercial limits, so read it before using a source build at work.

which rewind ai open source alternative should you pick?

in our judgement, the right self hosted rewind alternative depends on how much maintenance you will actually do.

• screenpipe if you want the most capable, most actively shipped tool and accept a source available licence. it had 13 app releases in the 30 days to october 21, 2026.
• pensieve if a true open source licence matters and you are comfortable with python and local models.
• windrecorder if you are on windows and want video playback with ocr search.
• dayflow if what you want is a daily journal of your work rather than an archive of every frame.
• skip openrecall unless you plan to maintain it, and skip rem, which has not shipped since 2024.

for the wider field, including tools that are not open source, see rewind ai alternatives and our remynd vs screenpipe comparison.

if you want the archive local without running it yourself

remynd is not open source: it is a closed source mac app, and we would rather say so plainly than blur it.

what it offers instead is the local archive without the upkeep. it records the windows on your screen except the ones you exclude, and reads text from the window you are working in with apple vision, on your mac. call audio is transcribed on your mac with an mlx model, and control + space opens search. you choose the apps and sites it never records.

it is free to download for apple silicon macs on macos 14 or later. the archive of what you saw should live on your own mac, so a vendor shutting down can't take it with them.

download remynd for mac and keep the archive on your own disk without running the stack yourself.