Price
Screen Studio is $29 a month or $108 a year, and fees are non-refundable under their terms. Dolly is free to try, €5 once for Lifetime and €19 once for Pro, with a 30-day refund. Over three years that's $324 against €5.
The camera work
Both find your clicks and zoom there automatically, both offer a Loupe-style magnifier, and both let you add or edit zooms by hand. In Dolly you pick a spring (focused, balanced or smooth), set zoom from 1.2× to 3.5×, add motion blur, or choose an instant cut. Screen Studio's motion is excellent and has had years of tuning; try both on the same recording and trust your eyes.
Cursor and look
Both record the cursor separately and redraw it, so it can be smoothed, resized, restyled or hidden after the fact. Dolly has 25 cursor sets, click effects, and click sounds (or your own). Both put your recording on wallpapers, gradients or images with padding, corners and a shadow. Dolly adds browser and MacBook frames; Screen Studio frames iPhone and iPad recordings.
Editing
Dolly's timeline lets you split, trim, reorder and put several takes after each other, change speed per clip without chipmunk voices, and find silences and long typing in one click. Both have captions and transcript editing on your Mac. Screen Studio adds camera cutout, color grading and AI voiceover.
Sharing
Screen Studio has had share links at 1080p60 with comments and view counts for a while. Dolly exports MP4 (up to 4K60) or GIF to a file or straight to your clipboard, and since 0.4.9 it has Dolly links too: Get link gives a short 1080p link right away, with timestamped comments, reactions, a transcript, chapters, a password or expiry, and insights without cookies. They're free during the beta.
Privacy
Both are offline-first. In Dolly an account is optional, and recording, transcription and export run on your Mac. Nothing leaves it unless you choose Get link, and then only that video.
