ScreenJournal vs Limitless (formerly Rewind)

Updated on 14 September 2026

Rewind and Limitless are personal memory tools for one individual: record your own screen or conversations, then search them later. ScreenJournal is a team work visibility tool: it reads on-screen work across a whole team, writes a timeline of what each person did, then deletes the raw screen data by default. One is personal recall; the other is team work intelligence.

They can sound alike, because both grew out of reading what happens on a screen. But the customer is different. A personal recorder serves the individual who runs it. ScreenJournal serves whoever runs the team.

ScreenJournal is an AI work visibility tool that reads on-screen work as it happens, turns it into a detailed timeline of what each person actually did, and then, by default, deletes the raw screen data. Timelines accumulate into a searchable chronicle of everyone's work history, and from them ScreenJournal generates timesheets and reports automatically and drafts standup summaries on request, answering questions about any of it in plain English.

What is Limitless (formerly Rewind)?

Limitless is a personal artificial-intelligence product built around a wearable that records and transcribes conversations and meetings, with companion apps for the major platforms. It began as Rewind.ai, a macOS app that continuously recorded your screen and audio and stored a searchable history locally on your Mac, then pivoted in 2024 to Limitless, moving the focus to conversations and a cloud store the vendor describes as encrypted so that only the user can decrypt it. According to reporting by TechCrunch and 9to5Mac, Meta announced in December 2025 that it had acquired Limitless: the wearable is no longer sold, the original Rewind Mac app has been wound down with its screen and audio capture disabled, users in several regions including the EU and the UK lost the service, and the team joined Meta's hardware organisation. Across both generations it was a single-user personal tool, with no team roles, shared workspaces or aggregate analytics.

How do Limitless and ScreenJournal compare?

Both grew out of recording a screen, so the comparison comes down to who the record serves and what is kept.

Personal memory vs team work intelligence

Rewind and Limitless were built to help one person remember; ScreenJournal is built to help a manager see and improve a team's work. Rewind archived your own screen so you could scrub back to a moment; Limitless records your conversations so a personal assistant can recall them for you. In both, the customer and the subject are the same individual, and the value is personal retrieval. ScreenJournal is designed the other way round: the subject is the team, the customer is whoever runs it, and the value is pattern recognition across people, such as where handling time is going or which workflow is slowing a shift down.

What the trajectory of a personal recorder shows

The Rewind-to-Limitless story is a useful illustration of what these tools are for. Rewind started exactly where a screen recorder starts: continuous local capture of one person's Mac, stored on that Mac. It then moved away from screen recording toward a cloud, conversation-first personal assistant, and, per reporting in December 2025, was acquired by Meta and wound down as a standalone product. The throughline is that this is consumer personal-memory technology, oriented to the individual, not durable work-visibility infrastructure for a business. ScreenJournal is built for the second job: a managed record of how a team's work actually gets done, kept as a searchable chronicle rather than a personal archive.

What happens to the raw screen data?

Personal recorders keep your recordings so you can retrieve them; ScreenJournal keeps an understanding and, by default, deletes the rest. Rewind stored continuous screen and audio locally; Limitless stores conversation recordings in its cloud. ScreenJournal, by default, does neither: the screen is recorded as short-lived video, the work is read from it, and the video is deleted during processing, so what remains is the derived timeline text. Where a manager needs video evidence they can opt in to keep the recordings (Evidence Mode), and those recordings are stored for up to 3 months. Call and meeting audio is treated differently and kept as a business record, but by default there is no screen archive, local or cloud, to secure or subpoena. The principle is described in derive and discard.

What does ScreenJournal add for managing a team?

ScreenJournal ships the things a personal memory tool has no reason to build. Because it assumes you are overseeing a group, it provides roles and permissions, a productivity score whose rubric an organisation can tailor to its own definition of productive work, a weekly Ranking with AI-written member summaries, Overview dashboards and Excel reports, and answers to plain-English questions across everyone's work through chat and MCP. When an organisation turns meeting audio on, it records and transcribes calls in recognised meeting apps and shows the transcripts, with playback where the audio file is kept, on the Audio page to the same people who can see that member's activity.

When is Limitless or Rewind the right choice?

A personal recorder is the right choice when you want to remember your own screen or conversations.

• You are an individual who wants a personal record of your own day, not a team's.
• Your need is personal recall, not managing or reporting on other people.
• You want a consumer personal-assistant experience centred on your own memory.
• You have checked current availability, given that, per reporting, the products are being wound down following the December 2025 acquisition.

When is ScreenJournal the right choice?

ScreenJournal is the right choice when you need a durable, managed record of a team's work.

• You manage a remote or hybrid team and need visibility across people, not one person's recall.
• You want timesheets, a weekly Ranking and Excel reports, and plain-English answers generated from the work itself.
• You run a call centre or outsourcing operation where voice is part of the work.
• You need a lasting, managed record of the team's work, not a consumer memory app.
• You want a derived record with no footage to breach by default, rather than a personal store of recordings.

Frequently asked questions

Is ScreenJournal a Rewind or Limitless alternative for teams?

Yes. Rewind and Limitless are personal, single-user memory tools: Rewind recorded your own Mac screen locally, and Limitless records your conversations to its cloud. ScreenJournal is a team work visibility tool that reads on-screen work across a whole team, writes a timeline of what each person did, then deletes the raw screen data by default. It has the roles, reporting and analytics a personal memory tool does not.

What happened to Rewind and Limitless?

Rewind.ai rebranded to Limitless in 2024, shifting from local screen recording on the Mac to a cloud memory built around a wearable. According to reporting by TechCrunch and 9to5Mac, Meta announced in December 2025 that it had acquired Limitless, the wearable stopped being sold, the original Rewind app was wound down with capture disabled, and the service ended in several regions. ScreenJournal is an independent, team-scale product and is unaffected.

Does ScreenJournal store recordings the way Rewind and Limitless do?

Not by default. Rewind stored continuous screen and audio locally, and Limitless stores conversation recordings in its cloud. ScreenJournal records the screen as short-lived video, reads the work from it, and by default deletes that raw screen data during processing, keeping only the derived timeline. A manager can opt in to keep video evidence, stored for up to 3 months; otherwise there is no screen archive to store or breach.

Does ScreenJournal delete call and meeting audio the way it deletes screen data?

No, and it does not need to. Meeting audio is a separate capture that is off by default. When an organisation turns it on, the desktop app records only while a recognised meeting app is using the microphone, and the policy decides whether the audio file is kept or only the transcript. Transcripts appear on the Audio page for the same people who can see that member's activity, and redacted passages show as a neutral marker.

Personal recall, or team work intelligence

Rewind was a landmark personal memory tool, and Limitless carried that idea into a wearable and the cloud before Meta acquired it. For remembering your own screen or conversations, that lineage did something genuinely new. But personal recall and team work intelligence are different problems. ScreenJournal reads the work across your team, writes the timeline, deletes the raw screen data by default and gives a manager the timesheets, reports and answers the job requires. For the wider market view, see ScreenJournal vs the alternatives.