Minimi vs Screencap: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Minimi and Screencap — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Minimi
Shram
Minimi is an ambient memory Mac app that quietly captures tabs, documents, calls, and Slack threads to provide context for Claude.
Key features
- Ambient Memory Capture: Continuously records user activity on macOS — including open browser tabs, documents, calls, and Slack threads — to create a persistent context layer.
- Claude Context Integration: Supplies collected context to Claude to improve response relevance and maintain continuity across conversations.
- Background Mac App: Runs quietly on the Mac, minimizing user friction while maintaining an ongoing record of interactions across apps.
- Meeting Notetaker Support: Enables creation of live artifacts such as Mini-scribe, a Granola-style AI meeting notetaker that operates entirely on Minimi memory.
- Inbox for Incomplete Conversations: Acts as an AI inbox that surfaces and preserves incomplete or ongoing conversations for follow-up and continuity.
- Context-First Responses: Ensures every Claude response can start with rich, user-specific context gathered from recent activity.
- Continuous background capture of user activity (browser tabs, documents, calls, Slack threads)
- Centralized ambient memory to provide context to Claude conversations
- Inbox-style management for incomplete or ongoing conversations
- Enables context-rich downstream tools (e.g., meeting notetakers like "Mini-scribe")
- Quiet/background operation aimed at minimizing user friction
Best for
- Enhancing Claude chat quality by pre-loading recent tabs, documents, and messages so answers reflect the user's current context and work.
- Automated meeting notetaking: running a Mini-scribe artifact that uses Minimi memory to generate meeting notes and action items without manual setup.
- Managing an inbox of incomplete or pending conversations, enabling easier follow-up and continuity across asynchronous threads.
- Research and writing assistance: providing the assistant with the user's active documents and tabs so drafting and summarization use accurate source context.
- Cross-app context retrieval: surfacing recent Slack discussions, call notes, and opened documents to inform decisions and reduce repetitive explanations.
- Provide persistent context to Claude for better, context-aware assistant responses
- Automatically capture meeting context to power AI meeting notes and summaries
- Aggregate fragmented conversation threads (email, Slack, docs) into a unified inbox of incomplete tasks
- Recall past interactions and documents when composing responses or continuing conversations
- Power custom Claude-based agents that rely on personal desktop context
Screencap
Proteus Computer Use
Local-first macOS screen recorder that captures, labels, and indexes team workflows so knowledge stays searchable and private.
Key features
- Local-First Capture: Recordings live in ~/.screencap on your Mac and never leave unless you explicitly share them.
- On-Device Task Segmentation: An on-device model breaks long recordings into labeled tasks like payroll runs, expense approvals, or CRM data entry.
- Full-Text Search of Workflows: Every spoken word and on-screen moment is indexed so any past workflow can be surfaced months later by search.
- Privacy-Enforced Recording: Password managers and banking apps are cut before a frame is written; email and chat are masked in real time.
- MCP Context Snapshots: While recording, Screencap queries connected MCP servers to capture the exact Gusto/Attio/Linear/Notion record on screen inside the video.
- Deliberate Sharing With PII Scrubbing: Every shared copy is scrubbed of names, secrets, and PII, and only the recordings you pick ever leave the machine.
- Source-Available Codebase: The full capture engine, encryption, agent, and anonymizer are public on GitHub under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0.
Best for
- Team Onboarding: Assemble ordered collections of real workflow recordings so new teammates learn exactly how work is actually done.
- Institutional Knowledge Capture: Preserve the tacit steps behind payroll runs, reconciliations, and quarterly reports as searchable video.
- Ops Documentation: Replace stale wikis by pointing teammates at labeled task recordings that stay current with the real system.
- Compliance-Sensitive Recording: Capture back-office work in banking, finance, and HR without leaking passwords, account balances, or PII.
- Computer-Use Dataset Contribution: Optionally donate reviewed, scrubbed recordings to a public dataset for training open computer-use models.
