A better alternative to screen-recording tutorials

What screen-recording tools do well

Scribe and Iorad watch you perform a task and automatically build a numbered guide with screenshots. Loom records your screen and voice into a shareable video. These are great for documentation. If you need to hand a colleague a reference they can pull up later, a captured guide is exactly the right tool, and we'd never tell you otherwise.

The common thread is that they produce an artifact: a document or a video. Someone makes it once, and everyone else reads or watches it afterward.

The gap between reading and doing

Here's where it gets tricky. When you follow a captured guide, you're doing two things at once: looking at the guide, then looking at your own screen, then back again. Your eyes and attention bounce between two places. With a video it's worse, because you have to pause, switch windows, try the step, then switch back to find where you were.

The guide is on someone else's screen, or in a separate window. Your actual task is in front of you. That gap is small, but it's exactly where people get stuck, click the wrong thing, or give up.

• ➤A captured guide lives in a separate window or page
• ➤A video shows someone else's screen, not yours
• ➤You translate their steps onto your own layout
• ➤Nothing checks that you did the step correctly

The alternative: guided live on your own screen

PathTutorial closes that gap. Rather than producing a guide you follow yourself, it runs the tutorial on top of your own screen. An arrow points directly at the real button in your window, a voice reads the step aloud, and it waits until you've actually done it before continuing. There's no second window to glance at and no video to pause. The instruction is right where your task is.

A recording shows you what to do. A live-guided tutorial waits while you do it.

Because it waits for each step, you can't fall behind, and you can't lose your place. You're not translating someone else's screen onto your own, because it is your own. That's the core difference between a screen-recording tool and a live guide.

Which one do you actually need?

If your goal is to document a process for a team to reference, a capture tool like Scribe or Iorad is a fine choice. If your goal is to actually get someone through a task, on their machine, without them getting stuck, a guided on-screen tutorial does something those tools don't. They solve different problems, and it's worth being clear about which one you have.

PathTutorial is free and runs on Windows 10 and 11. Tutorials are .ptf files you open in the free Player, and you can browse a library, describe your task to get one built, or connect your own AI assistant. If you've been searching for a Scribe or Iorad alternative that guides instead of documents, this is a different kind of tool worth trying.