The Best Rewind AI / Limitless Alternatives (2026)

If you relied on Rewind to answer "what was that thing I saw?", you're now looking for a replacement. After Meta acquired Limitless (Rewind's parent company) in December 2025, the Rewind app was sunset and its screen and audio capture were switched off on December 19, 2025. This guide covers the best alternatives in 2026 — and, just as importantly, how to pick the one that matches how you actually used it.

First, decide what you actually need back

Rewind bundled two very different jobs into one heavy app, and most people only really used one of them:

• Total recall of everything on your screen — meetings, calls, every app and document. This needs a full screen/audio recorder.
• Finding things you came across online — the article you skimmed, the show you looked up, the product you compared, the song you played. This is most of what people search for, and it doesn't require recording your entire screen.

Knowing which one you need makes the choice obvious — and often lighter and more private.

Full screen recorders (the closest like-for-like)

Screenpipe — best open-source alternative

Screenpipe is the most popular direct replacement. It continuously records your screen and audio, indexes everything with AI search, and keeps all data local and offline. It's open-source, runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and is free to self-host with a paid hosted option. If you want Rewind's full-capture model with stronger privacy guarantees, this is the closest match.

Microsoft Recall — built into Windows 11

If you're on a Copilot+ PC, Recall is already on your machine. It periodically snapshots your screen, runs OCR, and lets you search your visual history locally. Note the trade-offs: it's Windows-only, takes periodic snapshots rather than recording continuously, and doesn't capture audio. After its early privacy backlash, Microsoft made it opt-in and added encryption.

Memex — selective capture

Memex takes a more privacy-conscious approach: instead of recording your whole screen, it captures only the pages and content you choose. A good fit if continuous recording feels like too much but you still want a searchable web memory.

Lightweight browser recall (if you mostly want what you saw online)

Here's the honest part: if you're shopping for a Rewind replacement mainly to find things you ran into while browsing, a full screen recorder is far more than you need. Recording every pixel and every call to retrieve "that recipe I saw last week" is a lot of capture — and a lot of sensitive data — for a small job.

StashPad covers that use case directly. It's a free Chrome extension that quietly remembers the things you browse — shows, articles, recipes, songs, products — and lets you find them later by asking in plain English:

• "what was that cooking show with the British host?"
• "the article about sleep I read a couple weeks ago"
• "did I already buy a replacement filter?"

How StashPad compares

• Scope: remembers what you browse, not your entire screen and microphone — less to capture, less to expose.
• Privacy: local-first by default; your stash lives on your device, and you can exclude any site or content type.
• Setup: install and go — no recording permissions for your whole machine, no wearable, no workflow change.
• Platform: works in Chrome on any OS, rather than being tied to a specific Mac app or Windows PC.

It's not a full Rewind replacement for recording meetings or every app you touch — for that, Screenpipe is the better pick. But for the everyday "where did I see that?" problem, it's lighter, more private, and built exactly for it.

Related guides

• How to find a TV show you watched but forgot the name of
• How to find a song you heard but can't remember
• Browser extensions that remember for you

Frequently asked questions