ASYNC VIDEO
Loom is owned by Atlassian and runs in its own cloud — it does not offer a self-hosted option today, so your recordings and viewer data sit within reach of the CLOUD Act. Polybase runs in our EU cloud, your own VPC, or fully air-gapped on your servers.
Polybase doesn't record videos — it keeps the whole conversation in one place. Start a live call from any channel, share your screen, and write the outcome into a thread or doc that lives next to the tasks it produced. What your team would have said to a camera becomes text anyone can search, skim and quote months later.
Loom, now part of Atlassian, is the leading async video messaging tool: record your screen and camera, share a link, and viewers watch on their own time — with viewer analytics and AI-generated titles and summaries on top. It does that job very well. But it is a US cloud service with no self-hosted option today, the videos accumulate into a library that can be hard to skim, and the follow-up work still happens somewhere else.
Review how Polybase and Loom approach the work your team needs to do.
Based on publicly available information about Loom as of August 2026. Products evolve — plans and features may have changed; please verify details with the vendor. Spotted something out of date? Let us know at [email protected].
A practical sequence for planning the change, moving the useful material and introducing the new workspace.
Your recordings live in Loom's cloud. Before changing anything, download the videos still worth keeping and note which ones your team actually rewatches — usually a small fraction. That list tells you what genuinely needs video and what was really a decision waiting to be written down.
Recorded standups become short thread updates. Product walkthroughs become live calls with screen share. Explainers and how-tos become docs that stay current. Decisions announced on camera become messages in the channel where the work happens.
Create a channel per team or project. Each one carries its own chat, threads, calls, docs and tasks — so an update, the discussion it triggers and the follow-up work all share one address instead of a video link plus three other tools.
When something needs showing, start a call in the channel and share your screen — no link to record, upload or send. Then capture the outcome in a doc with per-block co-editing and version history. When it changes, you edit the doc instead of re-recording a video.
If your team records video messages for external audiences or across wide time-zone gaps, keep Loom for exactly that. Polybase absorbs the internal explainers, standups and decisions — the part that should have been searchable text all along.
The additional workspace capabilities to consider when comparing Polybase with Loom.
A decision made in a thread or doc is full-text searchable forever. A decision made at minute seven of a screen recording is much harder to find, even with transcripts. Polybase keeps the conclusion — not a video you have to rewatch to find it.
WebRTC calls powered by a self-hosted LiveKit media server, encrypted in transit (DTLS-SRTP) — with screen share, live captions, noise suppression and background blur. When a walkthrough needs to happen, it happens now, with questions answered on the spot.
A walkthrough video goes stale the day the UI changes. A Polybase doc gets edited — with per-block locking, presence and version history — and stays the current answer, linked from the channel where people will look for it.
Any chat message — including messages in a call's chat panel — becomes a tracked task with one click. Follow-ups land on List, Board or Timeline views instead of in a comment under a video that rarely gets reopened.
Loom is a cloud service: your recordings and viewer data live on infrastructure operated by Atlassian, a company subject to US jurisdiction. Polybase deploys in our EU cloud, in your VPC, or fully air-gapped on your own servers via Docker Compose.
Loom adds another tool next to your chat, task and doc tools. Polybase folds chat, calls, tasks, docs and boards into one workspace — the update, the discussion and the follow-up never leave the channel.
Common questions about switching from Loom to Polybase.
Zoom is meetings as a destination. Polybase starts calls from the channel you're already in — with captions built in.
See the comparisonCalls start in the channel or DM you're already in — no meeting links, no calendar hop — and you can self-host down to air-gapped.
See the comparison