When Stagewright isn't the right tool.

Every tool is good at some jobs and wrong for others. These are the jobs Stagewright isn’t built for. Some are choices we’ve made; one or two may change, and we say which.

Presenter videos and AI avatars

If you want a person on screen, or a generated presenter explaining a policy or a concept, use a tool built for it, such as Synthesia or HeyGen.

We’ve decided not to build avatars. Stagewright shows the product itself, recorded from a running build, with narration over it. That’s a different kind of video, and we’d rather do it well.

Interactive demos made from a copy of your app

Tools like Arcade, Navattic and Storylane are built for go-to-market teams to make interactive, clickable product demos for sales and marketing, from captures of your product’s screens.

Stagewright doesn’t make copies. It records the live product, so what it shows is what ships, and it can tell you when that stops being true. If your goal is a polished, hand-built sales demo, one of those tools is the better fit.

Editing video or slides you already have

Stagewright doesn’t take uploaded video, screen recordings or slide decks to edit. What it publishes is recorded from walkthroughs it ran, with any slides defined in the same file, so there’s a run behind every recorded frame. If you want to cut and caption recordings you’ve made yourself, use a video editor.

Capturing a guide by clicking through the app, today

If a support or training lead wants to open the product, click through a flow, and have a guide made from the clicks, a capture tool such as Scribe or Guidde fits better today. They capture in the browser as you go.

Stagewright doesn’t have a click-to-capture extension yet. A walkthrough starts as a file, written by a person or a coding agent, or drafted by Stagewright from a feature’s code. People without repository access can edit the narration in script mode and send a change with Propose change, for an engineer to approve. A browser companion is on our list, but it’s the lowest priority, and we won’t promise a date.

Native mobile and desktop apps

Stagewright records web apps in Chromium. It doesn’t record native iOS, Android or Windows apps. We’ve looked at what it would take, and it isn’t planned.

No environment a browser can drive

A walkthrough needs a running build of your product: a staging or preview environment, or the app running locally or in CI, with an account and data it can use. Stagewright can reach staging behind a VPN through a runner you host, and localhost through the CLI.

If your product only exists in production, with real customers’ data and no demo account, or can’t be driven by a browser at all, Stagewright has nothing safe to record. Set up a staging or preview environment with seeded data first; it’s worth having anyway.

Somewhere in between

If you’re not sure, the method explains what Stagewright is built around, and the comparisons set it next to specific tools, with what each does better. Or write to support@stagewright.ai and describe what you’re trying to make. If something else would suit you better, we’ll say so.