Rewind AI vs Screenpipe: which one should you actually use in 2026?

Rewind AI does not exist anymore as a product you can buy or install. Screenpipe does, and it does roughly the same job: recording your screen and audio, then making all of it searchable. If you are choosing between the two in 2026, the honest starting point is that this is not really a choice between two live options. One of these is a current product. The other is software history. This post covers what each one actually did, why Rewind stopped, and what Screenpipe looks like today, license, pricing, and capture included.

What happened to Rewind AI?

Rewind AI launched as a Mac app that recorded your entire screen and system audio in the background, then used OCR and transcription to make everything you had seen or heard searchable. It was one of the first tools to popularize the "search everything on your screen" category, and its maker, Limitless, later built a wearable pendant around the same idea.

On December 5, 2025, Meta announced it had acquired Limitless, bringing the founding team into Meta's Reality Labs wearables division. Meta's interest was in the wearable hardware and its underlying AI, not the desktop screen recording product. Screen and audio capture in the Rewind Mac app was disabled on December 19, 2025, two weeks after the acquisition was announced, and the standalone desktop product was wound down by the end of that month.

Is Screenpipe still available, and what does it actually do?

Yes. Screenpipe is an actively developed project that records your screen and audio and makes it searchable, the same basic job Rewind did. It reads screen text primarily through the operating system's accessibility APIs, falling back to OCR when accessibility data isn't available, and records both system audio and microphone input with local transcription. It runs on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10 and 11, and Linux, where the command line tool is fully supported and the desktop app has partial support.

Screenpipe's default posture is local first: capture, storage, OCR, transcription, and search all happen on the device, and nothing is sent out unless you deliberately turn on a cloud feature. That matches what Rewind originally promised, before Rewind's maker pivoted toward a cloud connected hardware pendant.

Licensing has changed recently. Screenpipe started under the MIT license, fully open source. On June 9, 2026, the project moved to the Screenpipe Commercial License, a source available license: personal, non-commercial, educational, and research use remain free, along with a short evaluation window for organizations, but running Screenpipe commercially or in production now requires a paid license. Screenpipe's own GitHub repository and pricing page are the source of truth for current terms, since license and pricing details can change independently of this post.

How do Rewind AI and Screenpipe actually compare?

Which one should you actually use in 2026?

There is only one live option between the two. If you want the "record my whole screen and search it later" category of tool that Rewind used to represent, Screenpipe is the current answer, not a nostalgic runner up. It covers the same ground Rewind did, screen, audio, OCR, full search, and adds cross platform support that Rewind never had.

The real decision isn't Rewind versus Screenpipe, since Rewind isn't on the table anymore. It's whether you actually want that category of tool at all: continuous screen and audio capture, with everything that implies for storage, indexing, and the sheer breadth of what gets recorded. Some people want exactly that. Others only ever used Rewind for one narrower reason.

If you only used Rewind to find what you were watching or listening to

Some Rewind users never cared about full screen recall. They used it to answer one specific question: what was I just playing, or where did I leave off in that video or podcast. That's a much smaller job than what Rewind or Screenpipe actually do, and it doesn't need screen recording, OCR, or a search index of every document and meeting you had open.

Echo is built for exactly that narrower job. It's a $9.99 one time purchase for up to three Macs, with no subscription and no account. Echo watches media playback across native apps (Spotify, Apple Music, Podcasts, SoundCloud) and the browser (YouTube, Twitch, SoundCloud, Spotify Web, and general web audio and video), and keeps a private, on device history of what you played and exactly where you stopped. Pressing ⌘⇧E resumes whatever you were last playing at the exact position, and YouTube resumes at the exact timestamp.

For a direct, feature by feature look at Echo against Rewind specifically, see Echo vs Rewind AI. For the fuller picture of Rewind's Mac alternatives split by use case, see Rewind AI alternatives for Mac.