Both formats show your product. They differ in control, cost and how long they stay accurate.
Screen recording
- Pros: honest, fast, shows the real product.
- Cons: tiny text, shaky cursor, loading delays, and it goes stale after the next release.
UI animation
- Pros: zooms, highlights and clean transitions. You can show a feature before it ships.
- Cons: more design and motion work, and it needs good design files.
How to choose
- Tutorial or docs video? Record it.
- Homepage or launch video? Animate it.
- UI changing soon? Animate from separate layers so one screen can be swapped.
A blended video often works best: a polished animated overview, then a short real clip to prove it is the actual product.
More detail: UI animation vs screen recording.
Top comments (1)
For dev tools there's a third option worth adding to the list: a scripted capture. A CLI demo recorded from a script (VHS or asciinema, for example) has the honesty of a screen recording, but when the next release changes a flag or the output format, you re-run the script instead of re-recording by hand. That takes most of the sting out of the "goes stale" con. The same idea works for the blended version you suggest. If the animated overview is built from screens of the shipped build rather than the design file, and the short real clip comes from a script, both halves can be refreshed together when the UI moves.