Disclosure: I run Tallyfy, which runs and tracks processes, so I’m not neutral about where documentation ends and the work begins. Everything about Scribe and the other tools below comes from their own pages.

Scribe’s main product works like this. You click through a task once, and it writes the guide. If a written guide is all you need, you may not need to pay anyone for it, because several free tools and the AI assistants you already use cover most of the same ground.

What Scribe does

Scribe describes itself as a way to automatically capture “how work gets done.” Your team opens each guide from a link or an embed, and on every plan Scribe can also play it as an on-screen walkthrough or surface it on the website you’re working in.

Scribe also sells Optimize, by demo request, which watches how work happens across approved apps and maps the processes it sees. Neither product starts a run each time a process is used, assigns its steps or shows who’s on which step, so nothing flags a late step on a particular run.

Free ways to write a process down

If the goal is a written, step-by-step process with screenshots, there’s a free option for every part of it. You put a few pieces together yourself, which takes a little more setup than one paid app.

Capture tools that cost nothing

• Mimik is the closest free match. It’s an open source browser extension, MIT licensed on GitHub, that records your clicks and turns them into a step-by-step guide with annotated screenshots. The guides and screenshots stay on your device, and it needs no account.
• Snipping Tool on Windows 11 can record a video clip of any part of the screen. Add a few lines of text and you have a walkthrough.
• Clipchamp includes a screen, camera and voice recorder on its free plan for personal Microsoft accounts, with watermark-free exports up to 1080p.
• ShareX is a free and open source capture tool for Windows. It takes screenshots and screen recordings, and its editor lets you mark up and redact a screenshot.
• OBS Studio is free and open source recording software for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Flameshot is a cross-platform screenshot tool with arrows, highlights, blur and numbered markers built in.
• Greenshot is a free and open source screenshot tool for Windows that lets you annotate, highlight or hide parts of a screenshot.

Other capture tools, including Tango, Guidde and Loom, are covered in our review of process recording plugins.

Free places to keep the documents

• Google Docs is free to use, and anyone with a Google Account can create documents in it.
• BookStack is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hosted platform for organizing and storing information.
• Docmost has a free, open source Community edition you run on your own servers, with real-time collaboration, spaces and full-text search.
• Wiki.js is open source wiki software under the AGPL-v3 license.

You don’t have to record anything, either. Our free process documentation tool takes a plain-English description of a process and gives back a Word document with the steps, role assignments and deadline guidance. It needs no sign-up.

Teaching an AI assistant the process

You can also show an AI assistant a process, or hand it the steps, and let it keep them. These features change quickly and some sit on paid plans, so read each vendor’s page before you rely on one.

• Grok Bot, where the feature is switched on, can learn a browser task by watching you demonstrate it once. It records up to ten minutes of what’s on screen, with no microphone audio, and drafts a skill that a routine can then run on a schedule. Grok Bot comes with paid Cursor plans or a linked SuperGrok subscription.
• Claude supports Skills on every plan, Free included, as long as code execution is on. On Pro, Max and Team plans, Cowork in Claude for Mac can record a skill from your screen for about ten minutes. You can talk through the steps as you go, and Claude proposes a skill for you to review.
• Gemini offers skills to Google AI subscribers, which you build from your own chats and run by typing a slash and the skill’s name. Separately, Gemini takes up to five minutes of video before you’d need a Pro or Ultra upgrade, so you can upload a screen recording and ask for the steps in writing.

Put these together and a team can write down most of its processes without buying a capture tool. The AI drafts still need a person to check them before anyone follows them.

Why a written process still gets skipped

A written process is something people can read. Nothing makes them read it, and nothing tells you whether they followed it.

Someone who has done a task ten times stops opening the guide, while a new hire follows the version that changed last month. Steps get missed, and sometimes the customer notices first. A document can’t automate anything either. It can say “send the welcome pack once the contract is signed,” but nobody gets told when that moment comes, and nobody finds out if the pack never went.

That’s the job Tallyfy does. Each time the process happens you launch a run of it, and each step goes to the person you assigned it to, with a deadline attached. Steps that only apply in some cases show up only then. The run keeps a record of who finished what and when, so the people with access to it can see where it stands. An AI agent can work a live run too, through Tallyfy’s MCP server.

So the split I’d suggest is simple. Write the process down with whichever free tool suits your team, then put it somewhere it runs, so each run follows the same steps. The adoption side of this, and why SOP libraries often go unread, is covered in why SOP software doesn’t get adopted.

Frequently asked questions