The Quiet Shift in Async Video
Loom built its reputation on a simple promise: record your screen, share a link, skip the meeting. For a few years, that was enough. Remote teams adopted it by the millions, Atlassian acquired it for nearly a billion dollars in 2023, and async video became shorthand for modern work communication. But a specific and growing segment of users – creators, solo operators, course builders, and consultants who produce video content as part of their actual product – has started walking toward the exit.
Tella is where many of them are landing.
The comparison between the two tools sounds unfair on paper. Loom has enterprise scale, Atlassian’s distribution muscle, and deep integrations across the productivity stack. Tella is smaller, more design-forward, and openly courting the creator economy rather than the corporate org chart. But that positioning gap is precisely why Tella is winning users that Loom can no longer hold. The overlap between “async video tool” and “content creation platform” is wider than most SaaS analysts expected, and Loom has not moved quickly enough to address it.
What Loom Got Wrong About Its Own Users
Loom’s product decisions since the Atlassian acquisition have tilted hard toward enterprise. That means admin controls, security compliance, Jira integrations, and team analytics – useful features for IT departments, but largely irrelevant to a freelance designer sending client walkthroughs or an educator building an online course. The product has grown more powerful in the directions that enterprise buyers care about and noticeably stagnant in the directions that individual creators care about. Video customization, branding controls, viewer engagement tools, and aesthetics have not kept pace with what the creator-adjacent market now expects.
This is a familiar pattern in SaaS. A tool gets acquired, the acquirer optimizes for the largest addressable contract size, and the long tail of passionate individual users – who evangelized the product in the first place – find themselves using something that no longer feels built for them. Loom’s free tier has also tightened since the acquisition, with limits on video length and storage that pushed casual but loyal users to either pay up or look elsewhere. For someone recording a five-minute team update, that friction is manageable. For someone producing a 40-minute product tutorial with custom branding needs, it becomes a reason to leave.
Tella stepped directly into that gap. Its interface prioritizes how a video looks and feels to the viewer, not just how fast the sender can record and ship. Background customization, scene layouts, built-in teleprompter functionality, and polished sharing pages give it a feel closer to a lightweight video production suite than a screen recorder. For users who care about their brand presentation – not just their message delivery – that distinction matters more than Loom’s deeper Atlassian integrations.
The Creator Economy Wants More Than a Link
The broader shift here is about what “async video” means to different user cohorts. For an engineering manager, async video is a faster alternative to a Slack message. For a creator or consultant, async video is a product in itself – something that represents their brand, gets shared publicly, and needs to look professional without requiring a full editing workflow. Loom was built around the first use case. Tella is built around the second.
Tella’s growth has been concentrated in communities that Loom’s marketing barely addresses: independent educators, agency owners, UX researchers sharing client findings, and SaaS founders who send personalized video outreach. These users share their tools openly in newsletters, Discord servers, and Twitter threads. When someone in those circles switches from Loom to Tella and posts about it, the recommendation carries weight. Word-of-mouth in tightly networked creator communities moves faster than enterprise sales cycles, and Tella has benefited from that dynamic consistently.
Loom’s response, to the extent there has been one, has been to add AI-powered features like auto-generated titles, summaries, and transcripts. These are genuinely useful additions, but they address the async communication use case – reducing friction for the recipient – rather than the creator use case, which is about production quality and brand presentation. Adding a summary to a video does not help a course creator who needs their recording environment to look intentional and their sharing page to reflect their visual identity.
Where This Leaves Loom
Loom is not collapsing. Inside large companies that already live inside the Atlassian ecosystem, it remains the default choice and will likely stay that way. The Jira and Confluence integrations alone make the switching cost high enough for enterprise teams. But the cultural energy that once surrounded Loom – the sense that it was the tool that sharp, forward-thinking people used – has faded. Tools that feel owned by a corporate parent rarely retain the community affection they earned as scrappy startups.
Tella is not without its own limitations. It lacks Loom’s depth on the enterprise side, and users who need centralized team libraries, granular permissions, or compliance-grade security features will find it underpowered. The product is also still maturing, and some of its more ambitious features around interactive video and viewer analytics are works in progress. Growth in the creator market is real, but creator-market revenue is notoriously hard to scale into the kind of ARR that sustains a long-term business without moving upmarket – the same move that cost Loom its creative base.
The more interesting question is whether Tella can hold its positioning as it grows, or whether success will push it toward the same enterprise compromises that left Loom’s original users looking for alternatives. For now, it has the advantage of being the tool that still feels like it was made for the person recording the video, not just the company paying the invoice – and in a crowded market of async tools, that feeling is harder to manufacture than any feature list.
