Every click, form, tab, keystroke, scroll,
documented.
Nothing leaves your machine.

Mimik watches your tabs and writes the guide: annotated screenshots with numbered steps, ready to export. It never phones home.

Add to Chrome Get for Edge Get for Firefox Download Mimik Download for Windows
5.0 +16 ratings 8,000 users

Free and open source. No account, no trial, no seat count. All platforms

✓ No sign-up ✓ No telemetry ✓ Works offline ✓ Open source
1,652 stars 201 forks +10 contributors
7 languages
Features

Built for the way the work already happens.

Every feature runs on your machine. Pick one and watch it against a real page.

Click through it once

Every meaningful action becomes a step with its own screenshot, cropped to the element you touched and highlighted in place.

Named after what you clicked

Bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic key and each step gets a written sentence, taken from the page’s own text rather than from the screenshot.

Say why while you click

Talk through the workflow as you record. What you said is transcribed and filed under the step it belongs to.

Pixels erased, not covered

One click masks every value Mimik recognises, before the screenshot is ever written to disk. Anything it cannot know, you paint over yourself.

Fix it without recording again

Crop, annotate and redact any screenshot, rewrite a step inline, reorder or bulk-delete, and roll back through version history.

Replay it on the live page

Open a guide you recorded earlier and Mimik walks the real page with you, highlighting the next element and advancing as you interact.

Seven formats, written locally

PDF, DOCX, HTML, Markdown, GIF, MP4 and a .mimik file someone else can import and keep editing. All rendered on your machine.

This is what you get

Numbered steps, annotated screenshots and the sentences that describe them, ready to read, replay or hand to someone else.

Privacy

Where your data goes.

The complete list, including the parts that leave.

Stays on your machine

  • Screenshots and the pixels inside them
  • Every step, title and description
  • What you typed, and what you blurred out
  • Voice narration and its transcript

Leaves your machine

  • A favicon lookup, so a guide shows the site's icon next to each step
  • If you add an AI key, the step text and screenshots you ask it to describe, sent to the provider you chose
  • If you use voice narration, the text you asked it to read

Remove your AI key and the second line stops happening.

Never happens

  • No account, so nothing is tied to your name
  • No analytics or telemetry inside the extension
  • No syncing, no backups, no servers of ours
  • Nothing is uploaded when you export

Read the privacy policy

Compare

The only one that's actually local.

Capability Mimik Scribe Tango Guidde Folge
Screenshots storedOn your diskTheir cloudTheir cloudTheir cloudOn your disk
Works offline✓✗✗✗✓
Account requiredNoYesYesYesNo
Free forever✓LimitedLimitedLimitedLimited
Open source✓✗✗✗✗
AI descriptionsBYO keyIncludedIncludedIncludedBYO key
Browser extension✓✓✓✓✗
Desktop appWindows✗✗✗Win · macOS
Video export✓✗✗✓✗

In the browser, or on the desktop.

The extension records browser tabs. The desktop app records anything on screen. Same guides, same editor, same exports.

Browser extension

Records any tab, in the browser you already use.

Add to Chrome Get for Edge Get for Firefox

Chrome · Edge · Firefox · Brave, Arc and other Chromium browsers

Desktop app New

Records desktop apps and anything else outside the browser.

Windows

Windows 10 and later

Questions

The things people ask first.

Is it really free?

Yes, and there is no paid tier waiting behind it. Mimik is MIT licensed, the source is on GitHub, and nothing is metered. If you add your own AI key you pay your provider directly, and we never see it.

Does it work offline?

Everything except the two things that need a network: fetching a site's icon for a guide, and the AI features if you switched them on. Record, edit and export all work with the network off.

Where are my guides stored?

In your browser's own storage, or on disk for the desktop app. They are never uploaded. That also means clearing your browser data removes them, so export anything you want to keep.

What can I export?

PDF, DOCX, HTML, Markdown, GIF and MP4 video, plus a Mimik file that someone else can import into their own copy. Video can be narrated with a voice if you add a key for it.

Which browsers and systems does it run on?

The extension runs on Chrome, Edge and Firefox. The desktop app runs on Windows 10 and later.

Do I need an account?

No. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no password to lose and no profile of you to leak.

Can I use it at work?

The MIT licence permits commercial use. Because nothing leaves the machine, it also avoids the review that cloud capture tools usually trigger. Read the licence if your team needs the exact wording.