Loom Running in the Background on Mac: Why It Happens and How to Stop It

You finish recording. You close Loom. You go back to your work.

Then this notification slides in from the corner of your screen:

"Loom" is running in the background. You can manage background apps in the Dock and in System Settings.

Wait — you closed it. You saw the window disappear. But Loom is still running, still using your CPU, still connected to the internet, still holding its screen recording and accessibility permissions.

If that feels wrong, it's because it is. You closed the app. It should be closed.

Why Loom doesn't actually close when you close it

Loom installs a launch agent — a macOS mechanism that tells the system to keep a process alive even after you close the app window, and to restart it automatically every time you log in.

This isn't a bug. It's how Loom was designed to work. It wants to:

• Stay resident so recording can start instantly from a hotkey
• Keep uploading — cloud sync continues in the background after you stop recording
• Listen for workspace notifications — comments, views, reactions on your videos
• Update itself silently — checking for and installing new versions without asking

The result: from the moment you first install Loom, it runs every time your Mac is on. Whether you recorded something today, last week, or last month, Loom is there — consuming resources, maintaining network connections, holding onto permissions.

What a background Loom process costs you

Your battery

Background processes wake your CPU at regular intervals. On a MacBook, this is measurable. Open Activity Monitor, sort by Energy Impact, and look for Loom. Users consistently find it consuming energy while doing nothing visible.

Your memory

Loom's background agent and its helper processes stay resident in RAM. On a MacBook Air with 8 GB, each always-on app you carry takes a bite out of what's available for the work you're actually doing. You start swapping sooner. Things feel slower. And you may not connect it to a screen recorder you haven't used in a week.

Your bandwidth

Loom phones home — sync checks, analytics pings, update polling. If you're on a flight with paid Wi-Fi, on a mobile hotspot, or behind a VPN you pay for by the gigabyte, Loom is using your connection without asking.

Your security surface

This is the one that should bother you most. Loom has screen recording permission and accessibility permission. When Loom is running in the background — which is always — those permissions are live. If Loom's process were ever compromised (a vulnerability, a supply chain attack, a bad update), the attacker inherits access to see your screen and read your keyboard inputs.

An app that only runs when you're using it exposes that surface for minutes. An app that never closes exposes it for every waking hour.

How to stop Loom from running in the background

Here's the fix, step by step. These are real commands, not workarounds.

Step 1: Remove Loom from Login Items

1. Open System Settings
2. Go to General → Login Items & Extensions
3. Under "Allow in the Background," find Loom and toggle it off

This tells macOS to stop auto-launching Loom when you log in.

Step 2: Kill the launch agent

If Loom still restarts itself, there's a launch agent file keeping it alive:

ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ | grep -i loom

Remove it:

launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.loom.desktop.plist
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.loom.desktop.plist

Step 3: Force quit what's running now

Open Activity Monitor, search "Loom," and quit every process you find.

Step 4: Ask yourself one question

If you have to reverse-engineer an app's background processes just to make it stop running, whose interests is that app serving — yours, or the company that made it?

What it looks like when a screen recorder respects your Mac

ScreenKite does one thing Loom apparently can't: it closes when you close it.

No background processes. You open ScreenKite, you record, you close ScreenKite. No launch agent. No helper processes. No network activity. Your Mac goes back to being yours.

No cloud dependency. Your recordings live on your Mac. Nothing uploads to a third-party server. Nobody's workspace admin can pull up a dashboard of your recording activity. You share when you want, how you want.

No always-on permissions. ScreenKite uses Apple's ScreenCaptureKit — the same framework Apple built for this exact purpose. You grant screen recording permission once in System Settings, the same way you would for any Mac app. The difference: ScreenKite isn't exercising that permission in the background 24 hours a day.

A recorder and an editor in one. Here's what most people don't realize: if you're paying for a screen recorder and a video editor, you're paying twice for what should be one workflow. ScreenKite has auto-zoom, cursor beautification, transcription-based editing, timeline cuts, overlays, and captions — built in. You get a Screen Studio-quality recorder and a CapCut/Final Cut Pro/DaVinci Resolve-quality editor in one app.

One-time purchase. Not a monthly subscription. Not per-seat pricing that scales to thousands as your team grows. One price, you own it, it's yours.

Exports up to 3× faster. Native Apple Silicon. Hardware-accelerated Metal encoding. Record a long walkthrough, export in minutes. Your fans stay quiet.

Leaving Loom as a team?

If your organization relies on Loom's share links and collaboration features, ScreenKite Enterprise gives you the same workflow on your own infrastructure — on-prem or managed. Your recordings never leave your network. No per-seat cloud pricing. Talk to our team →

Why Loom was built this way

It's worth understanding why. When Loom was a startup, the always-on architecture served a clear purpose: maximize engagement, minimize friction, get recordings uploaded and shared as fast as possible.

But Loom is now owned by Atlassian. It's a product inside a public company's portfolio. The incentives that keep it always-on have shifted:

• Data collection — an always-running process can capture usage patterns, session metadata, and workspace analytics around the clock
• Stickiness — an app woven into your system's startup sequence is harder to leave than one you simply delete
• Feature delivery — workspace notifications, auto-updates, and background sync all depend on Loom being alive when you didn't ask it to be

None of these serve you. You wanted to record your screen. You weren't looking for another process to manage.

Apple agrees with you

Apple has been steadily making this harder for apps like Loom:

• macOS Ventura surfaced background agents in System Settings for the first time — making hidden processes visible
• macOS Sequoia added monthly re-authorization for screen recording — apps must re-earn your trust
• macOS Tahoe further tightens restrictions on what background processes can do without explicit consent

Each year, macOS moves further toward a simple principle: apps should run when you use them and stop when you're done.

ScreenKite was built for this principle. It runs when you need it. It stops when you don't. Everything else follows from that.

Download ScreenKite → · Windows waitlist →