ReMyndscreenpipe vs rewind: is screenpipe the rewind replacement?
screenpipe vs rewind, as of october 2026: in our view, screenpipe is a real, actively built replacement for what rewind did, and it does more for developers, but it is not a clone. it records screen and audio locally, runs on mac, windows and linux, and publishes its source under its own commercial licence rather than mit. full history costs $250 a year, about $21 a month, or $25 billed monthly.
in our view, pick it if you want to read, script or extend your archive. rewind itself stopped recording on december 19, 2025.
what was rewind, and what is left of it?
rewind was a closed source mac app that recorded your screen and audio and kept the archive on your own mac.
its homepage in may 2024 promised a 3,750x compression rate and said users typically used 14 gb a month. speech recognition ran locally. ask rewind sold "the power of gpt-4", with only relevant text sent to its llm partners. on apple silicon, rewind said recording used 1% to 5% of total cpu.
pricing was simple. the same month's pricing page listed a free tier that showed only the top three search results, and pro at $19 a month billed yearly or $29 month to month.
then the company became limitless and was bought by meta. the december 5, 2025 announcement came with an update that would disable all screen and audio capture starting december 19. nothing is left to run. the full story is in what happened to rewind ai.
what is screenpipe in october 2026?
screenpipe is a source available screen and audio recorder made by negentropy labs, a san francisco company founded in 2024 and part of y combinator's summer 2026 batch.
the licence is the first thing to get right. the screenpipe commercial license lets you use, modify and run the code free for personal, noncommercial, educational and research work, plus a 7 day evaluation at any company. commercial use of the source needs a paid enterprise licence. older versions released under mit stay mit, but current code is not open source in the usual sense.
the project is busy. as of october 21, 2026, the github repo shows 22,021 stars and 2,250 forks, and app v2.7.116 shipped that day. the pitch has also widened. the readme now leads with "screenpipe finds work worth automating in your company", so teams are a growing focus, though personal plans remain.
screenpipe vs rewind, side by side
the two tools solve the same problem with different engines and very different openness.
| rewind (until december 2025) | screenpipe (october 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| source | closed | public, under the screenpipe commercial license |
| platforms | mac, plus an iphone app | macos 13 or later, windows 10 or later, linux |
| capture | a frame every two seconds, compressed into video, plus audio | screenshots on events plus accessibility text, ocr fallback |
| audio | recorded and transcribed on your mac | system audio and mic; local whisper or deepgram cloud |
| storage | local, typically 14 gb a month | local sqlite and media, about 30 gb a month |
| cpu | 1% to 5% of total cpu on apple silicon | about 5% to 20%, per its readme |
| ai | ask rewind on gpt-4 via llm partners | your pick of local or cloud models, plus mcp |
| price | free tier; pro $19 a month yearly or $29 monthly | free $0; basic $25 a month or $250 a year; business $50 a seat a month or $500 a year |
| status | capture disabled december 19, 2025 | 13 app releases in the 30 days to october 21, 2026 |
is screenpipe like rewind?
in the job that mattered most, yes: both keep a searchable, scrollable history of your computer on your own disk.
the engine differs. rewind captured a frame every two seconds and compressed hard. screenpipe's readme describes capture on events, such as app switches, clicks, typing pauses and scrolls, pairing each screenshot with the text the accessibility tree already exposes. ocr is the fallback, using apple vision on a mac. it records every connected monitor, and you can exclude apps, windows and urls, much as rewind let you skip apps and private browsing.
the ask layer is where they split. rewind answered with gpt-4 through its own llm partners. screenpipe lets you choose: plan models labelled auto, efficient and frontier on free, basic and business, a local model through ollama or any openai compatible server, or claude and chatgpt reading your history over mcp.
one gap: rewind had an iphone app. screenpipe's pricing page lists mobile access only as a private beta on business's top capacity tier.
how much setup and upkeep does screenpipe need?
the official app installs like any mac app, so in our view the setup gap with rewind is smaller than its reputation suggests.
screenpipe's install guide is three steps: open the download, drag it to applications, then approve screen and system audio recording, microphone and accessibility when macos asks. apple explains those screen recording permissions if you want to see what you are granting. you may also be asked to sign in.
the upkeep is where a screenpipe rewind alternative asks more of you:
- models. keeping ai on your machine means running ollama or another model server yourself. our local llm guide for mac covers the tradeoffs.
- telemetry. the readme says posthog product analytics is on by default and sentry gets crash reports. you can switch analytics off in settings, under privacy.
- disk. plan for about 30 gb a month and set retention early. rewind's figure was 14 gb.
- updates. 13 app releases landed in 30 days. the readme warns that the main branch moves fast and breaks things, so source builders should pin a release.
- licence. building from source for work counts as commercial use, which needs the enterprise licence.
what does screenpipe do that rewind never did?
screenpipe is built to be read by other software, which rewind never was.
it runs a rest api on localhost port 3030, with raw sql access to the sqlite database. it ships an mcp server, so claude desktop, cursor and other clients can query your history. pipes are scheduled ai agents written as markdown files, with per pipe rules on which apps and data types an agent may touch. and it runs on windows and linux.
the source matters for a reason rewind users feel in their gut. if screenpipe the company changed course tomorrow, the code you can read, and build for personal use, would still be out there. rewind left nothing behind to build.
who should pick screenpipe over rewind's old setup?
in our judgement, screenpipe is the right rewind replacement for three kinds of people:
- developers who want an api, mcp access and scripted agents on top of their history.
- anyone on windows or linux, since rewind's 2024 faq listed only macs and iphone.
- people who want to audit the code that watches their screen.
it is a weaker fit if you want rewind's quiet, low disk, set and forget mac app, if you would build from source for commercial work, or if default analytics bother you, though that last one is a setting. one more opinion: screenpipe is venture backed and leaning toward company workflow discovery, the same kind of pressure that moved rewind. the source licence is your hedge.
if you typed "is screenpipe like rewind" because you lost rewind, start with the rewind ai alternatives overview and the open source rewind ai alternatives roundup.
where does remynd fit?
remynd is another live option on the mac, and it is not open source.
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.
like screenpipe, it sends sign in, crash reports and usage analytics over the network, plus the words of a search that reads like a question. the archive lives on your mac unless you turn on optional cloud sync, which encrypts it first.
it is free to download for apple silicon macs on macos 14 or later. we compare the two directly in remynd vs screenpipe. either way, 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 your history on your own disk.