Crade vs Rewind: live screen reading vs background recording
Both promise to help you with whatever is on your Mac, but they work in fundamentally different ways. Rewind records your screen 24/7 so you can search the past; Crade reads your screen live and answers questions about the present. Here is the honest comparison.
Rewind and Crade get mentioned together because they share an overall premise: AI that knows what is on your Mac. Once you dig in, they are answering different questions. Rewind asks "what did I see two weeks ago?". Crade asks "what is on screen right now and what should I do about it?". Whether one or the other fits depends on what you actually want.
How they work
Rewind records your screen continuously in the background and stores everything locally. You can scroll back through any past moment, search it like a database, and ask AI to summarise meetings or find a forgotten reference. The value is in the archive.
Crade does not record anything. It captures the current screen at the moment you ask a question, sends it with the prompt to your connected AI, and gives you an answer. The value is in the live conversation.
What each is great at
- Rewind: finding a tab you closed last week, summarising a meeting you forgot to take notes for, searching emails by remembered phrase, recalling something you saw days ago.
- Crade: writing a quote from a brief on screen now, debugging an error in front of you now, understanding a foreign-language doc you are reading now, getting help with a spreadsheet you are mid-way through.
Privacy and storage
Rewind stores everything you see locally on your Mac. Disk usage adds up quickly (Rewind suggests 200 GB+ for serious use). Sensitive content (passwords, financial sites, private messages) is recorded by default unless you explicitly exclude apps. For some people that is a deal-breaker; for others it is the point.
Crade does not store screenshots after the AI reply is generated. Each interaction is discrete. Disk usage is minimal. For people who do not want a permanent archive of their screen on disk, Crade is the lighter option.
Cost
- Rewind: $19/month (Pro) covers the AI features. Local storage is your disk.
- Crade: Free tier ($0) covers basic screen reading. Pro ($7.99/mo) raises usage caps and unlocks Agent mode. Or connect your own Claude or ChatGPT account and the AI is billed by them.
Platform
- Rewind: macOS only.
- Crade: macOS and Windows.
Who each fits
- Pick Rewind if: you want a searchable archive of your computer use; you regularly need to recall things from days or weeks ago; you take a lot of unstructured meetings.
- Pick Crade if: you want live help on what is on screen now; you do not want continuous recording running; you want Agent mode for end-to-end tasks; you are on Windows.
Can you use both?
Yes, and they do not really overlap. Some people run Rewind for the archive and Crade for live conversation. The use cases are complementary, not competing. The honest answer to "which one" depends on whether your bottleneck is recall (Rewind) or live action (Crade).
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