Rewind AI alternatives in 2026, after the shutdown
Rewind AI (later Limitless) was acquired by Meta and shut down its Mac app on December 19, 2025. For its displaced users, the closest living successors are Littlebird, a cloud-based assistant that pays attention to your screen and meetings, and Screenpipe, a genuinely local, open-source recorder. Which one fits depends on why you ran Rewind in the first place.
Who is ranking whom: this site is published by Littlebird, and Littlebird appears in this ranking. We put it first where we believe the fit is real, we explain why in plain terms, and every entry ends with an honest reason to choose it instead. Competitor descriptions are verified against public materials and dated in the text.
What happened to Rewind AI
Rewind built the best-known "record your screen, search your past" tool on the Mac, later rebranding as Limitless. After the Meta acquisition, the Mac app shut down on December 19, 2025. The idea did not die with it: an assistant that captures your work as it happens is now a small category, and the products in it made different choices about storage, openness, and how much the tool does for you.
1. Littlebird: the ambient memory, plus an assistant on top
Littlebird is an AI assistant that already knows your work. It pays attention to the active window you are working in and transcribes your meetings with no bot on the call, then answers questions and drafts from that memory. Where Rewind was primarily search over your past, Littlebird also acts: Routines deliver proactive updates like a morning briefing, and Chat drafts follow-ups grounded in what it captured.
It works immediately with zero setup and gets more useful over time. In a Littlebird user survey (2026), 80% of subscribers agree it reduced their anxiety about forgetting details or dropping the ball.
The storage model is the honest difference from Rewind: the app runs on your computer, and the memory it builds is encrypted and stored in the AWS cloud, not on your device. If Rewind's local-only storage was the reason you chose it, that matters, and the next entry is for you.
Choose Littlebird when what you miss is the memory, and what you always wanted on top of it was an assistant that does something with it.
2. Screenpipe: the local, open-source path
Screenpipe is a genuinely local, open-source screen recorder for developers who want to own the pipeline (verified June 2026). Your data stays on your machine because the whole system runs there, and you can read the code. The tradeoff runs the other way: it is a toolkit more than a finished assistant, so expect to set up, maintain, and build on it yourself, without the zero-setup, proactive, managed experience a finished product provides.
Choose Screenpipe when local-only storage is non-negotiable and you are comfortable assembling your own tooling. That is a legitimate requirement, and a cloud product is the wrong answer for it.
3. Granola: if what you actually used Rewind for was meetings
Plenty of Rewind users mostly searched old meetings. If that is you, a focused meeting notetaker may cover the whole need. Granola is bot-free with customizable templates, shaped by what you jot during the call (verified June 2026). Littlebird covers meetings too, so this pick is for people who want nothing captured beyond the calls.
Choose Granola when meetings were the entire use case and you do not want screen capture at all.
No single tool fully replaces Rewind
No single tool replicates Rewind exactly, because Rewind's local-first, capture-everything design was the thing that shut down. Littlebird carries the ambient-memory idea forward in managed, cloud form with an assistant on top. Screenpipe carries the local, own-your-data half forward for people who build. Decide which half you were actually using, then pick.
Common questions
Is Littlebird local-only like Rewind was?
No. The app runs on your computer, and the memory it builds is encrypted and stored in the AWS cloud. For those who require local-only systems, Littlebird may not be the right fit today; self-hosted deployments are available at the Enterprise tier.
What does the capture actually include?
It reads the text and elements of your active window via macOS accessibility permissions, and it listens during meetings to transcribe and summarize. You can pause collection, exclude apps, and delete your data at any time.
Do you train models or sell data?
No and no. Our customers are our users, not advertisers.
Remember everything. That idea deserved to outlive the app.
No setup, no bot in your meetings, and a free Basic plan with full context from day one.
Product facts come from our maintained internal fact base. Competitor and shutdown details verified against public materials, June 2026.
