Guideless
Guideless captures a browser workflow through a Chrome extension, then uses AI to write every step, generate voice-over and captions, and publish it as a narrated video guide with shareable links, embeds and engagement analytics.
What is Guideless?
Guideless is a documentation platform from Santa Monica Intelligence, UAB, a Lithuanian company based in Vilnius, that turns a software workflow into a narrated video guide and a written step-by-step procedure at the same time. Its pitch rests on removing the two chores that make software documentation expensive: explaining what you are doing while you do it, and editing the result afterwards.
The product follows three stages the site labels Capture, Generate and Publish. Capture runs through a Chrome extension: you open the tab where the process begins, click record, and simply perform the task. One technical point matters more than it first appears, because this is not screen recording. The extension captures the workflow as discrete, editable steps rather than as a video file, which is precisely what makes the output correctable later. While recording, a blur mode lets you hide names, emails, account identifiers or customer data before they ever reach a published guide.
Generate is where the AI works. It writes the instruction for each step, produces a voice-over and captions from those same transcripts, and applies the workspace theme so every guide looks alike no matter who made it. The editor then allows rewriting the wording, asking the AI to make a transcript shorter or clearer, choosing a different voice, replacing and annotating screenshots, and translating the whole guide, with generated text and voice selection available in 43 languages.
Publish covers a shareable link, an embed code for a website, help centre or LMS, and exports to MP4, PDF or Markdown. Viewers need no account. Built-in insights then report views, play rate, completion and where people drop off, for a single guide or an entire workspace.
Around this sit the workspace mechanics: folders, collections, search, member roles and invitations, plus SAML single sign-on, custom domains and custom data residency at the enterprise tier. The integrations named on the site are Slack, Notion and Confluence. Intended uses are software guides, employee training, customer onboarding, SOPs, product walkthroughs, internal documentation and help centre content. The scope is deliberately narrow: browser workflows in Chrome, with no API and no mobile application.
What it does
- Capture a browser workflow automatically as editable steps, with nothing to narrate while you work
- Generate the written instruction, AI voice-over and captions for every captured step
- Publish as a shareable link or an embed for a website, help centre or LMS
- Translate a guide and regenerate its narration in 43 languages
- Blur names, emails, account IDs and customer data before anything reaches a finished guide
- Export to MP4 up to 4K, PDF or Markdown
- Track views, play rate, completion and drop-off points across guides and workspaces
When to use Guideless / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Guideless is the right fit.
When to use Guideless
- Support and help centre teams who need step-by-step articles they can embed straight into their knowledge base
- Learning and development teams building employee training and internal SOPs without a video production budget
- Customer success and onboarding specialists walking new SaaS accounts through a product for the first time
- Technical writers and documentation managers who must keep guides current as interfaces keep changing
- Product marketing and sales enablement teams producing product walkthroughs for launches and demos
When not to use Guideless
- Anyone documenting desktop, mobile or installed software, since capture works only inside a Chrome or Chromium tab
- Teams standardised on Safari or Firefox, as the capture extension ships only through the Chrome Web Store
- Developers wanting programmatic access: Guideless publishes no API and no developer documentation
- Organisations needing printable, text-first reference handbooks, a format the vendor itself concedes to Scribe
- Users under 16, who fall outside the audience the privacy policy says the service is intended for
How to use Guideless
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create a free account at guideless.ai and set up a workspace
- Install the Guideless extension from the Chrome Web Store, in the same browser profile you use to sign in
- Open the page where the workflow starts and close any popovers, notifications or private details you do not want captured
- From the dashboard or from a folder, click Create, then pick the browser tab holding the workflow
- Click Start recording and walk through the process the way a first-time viewer should see it
- Use the capture widget to pause with Cmd/Ctrl+I, or switch on blur mode with Cmd/Ctrl+B and click whatever must be hidden
- Click the checkmark to finish the capture; the editor opens on the captured steps
- In the editor, delete, reorder or rename steps, edit the transcript or have the AI tighten it, then choose a voice and generate the voice-over
- Adjust the styling: theme, backgrounds, borders, cursor, zoom, highlights and section slides
- Publish as a link or embed code, or export to MP4, PDF or Markdown, then follow engagement in Insights
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Nothing to narrate and nothing to edit: you perform the task once and the AI writes and speaks the guide
- The free plan is permanent rather than a countdown trial, and still includes AI narration and voice-over
- Guides can be updated in place, regenerating only what changed instead of re-recording from scratch
- Forty-three languages turn a single capture into onboarding material for a foreign team or customer
- Built-in blurring for sensitive information, available during capture and again in the editor
- One capture yields a link, an embed, an MP4, a PDF and a Markdown file
- A clear contractual position on AI training: customer content is never used without explicit written consent
Cons
- Chrome or another Chromium browser is mandatory, and only browser workflows can be captured
- No public API, so nothing can be automated or integrated programmatically
- No mobile application and no desktop client of any kind
- The free plan stops at three published guides, one user and one workspace, and keeps a watermark
- Pro is capped at ten users; beyond that only Enterprise applies, and its price is not published
- No Data Processing Agreement is offered and no security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO is claimed
- No postal address, legal notice or contact page appears anywhere on the site
Pricing & Plans
Guideless offers a permanent free plan priced at $0, described on the pricing page as free for everyone and explicitly not a time-limited trial. The lowest paid entry point is the Pro plan at USD 29.00 per user per month when billed annually, which is the figure shown on the public pricing page; the vendor's own documentation lists the same plan at USD 39.00 per user per month on monthly billing. The Enterprise tier is quoted individually and is available on annual billing only. Pro is charged per workspace member, so each accepted invitation adds a paid seat.
- up to 3 published guides
- unlimited guide views
- AI narration and AI voice-over
- sharing by link and embed
- limited to 1 user and 1 workspace
- with a watermark
- no insights and no MP4 export
- unlimited guides
- guide and workspace insights
- no watermark
- unlimited MP4 exports up to 4K
- unlimited AI narration and voice-over
- up to 10 users in 1 workspace
- everything in Pro plus single sign-on
- custom data residency
- multiple workspaces
- custom domains
- and dedicated support and training
- with unlimited users
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Guideless handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is concrete rather than declaratory. The privacy policy, effective 18 June 2026, names its legal bases under the heading Legal Bases (GDPR / UK GDPR): contract, legitimate interests, consent and legal obligation. Data subject rights are enumerated, covering access, correction, deletion, export, restriction, objection, withdrawal of consent and complaint to a regulator, with privacy@guideless.ai as the route and a 30-day response commitment. Transfers outside the user's region rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent, breach notification is promised within 72 hours where legally required, and subprocessors are published with their purpose and safeguard. The gaps are worth naming: no Article 27 EU representative is designated, no data protection officer is identified, no Data Processing Agreement is offered, and no certification such as SOC 2 or ISO is claimed.
Who owns the data?
The terms are unusually direct. Guides, recordings and uploads created on Guideless belong to the customer, and the vendor states plainly that it claims no ownership of them. Guideless holds only a limited licence to process and display that content for the sole purpose of operating the service, and commits never to use it to train AI models or for unrelated product development without explicit written consent. Aggregated, anonymised usage statistics are permitted, but must contain no identifiable customer content. The third parties with access are named rather than implied: Cloudflare for hosting and storage, Stripe for payments, Intercom for support, an analytics vendor, legal and audit advisers under NDA, and authorities on a valid subpoena or court order.
Reuse rights
Customers may reuse their own material freely, without asking permission. Any guide can be exported as MP4, PDF or Markdown, published behind a shareable link, or embedded in a website, help centre, documentation portal or LMS, and viewers need no Guideless account to watch one. The restrictions in the terms bear on the service rather than on the content: no reverse engineering, no duplication of the platform, no unlawful or high-risk use, and no sharing of access beyond the licence granted. One caveat sits apart from the rest, in the section on trials, where the terms note that trial data may be used to improve the service. After termination, access stops immediately and content is deleted 90 days later unless it has been exported first.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Hosting and storage are handled by Cloudflare, which the privacy policy names as a subprocessor with data centres in the EU and the US, covered by Standard Contractual Clauses. No specific country or facility is identified beyond that pairing, and customer-selectable data residency exists only as a custom option on the Enterprise tier. Other named recipients are Stripe for payments under PCI-DSS and SCCs, Intercom for support under SCCs, an analytics vendor applying IP anonymisation, advisers under NDA, and authorities on a valid legal order. Stated security measures are TLS 1.2 or above in transit, AES-256 at rest, role-based least-privilege access, annual penetration testing, continuous monitoring, and breach notification within 72 hours where legally required. The contract itself is governed by Lithuanian law, with disputes heard in the competent courts of Lithuania. One caution: the domain resolves to a Cloudflare anycast address, which marks the CDN edge and says nothing about where data actually rests.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Guideless.
- Capturing business software means recording whatever is on screen: customer records, credentials and personal data leak unless someone remembers to blur them, and blurring is a manual act
- The extension requests permission to read and change data on the tabs you capture, a broad grant even though the vendor states it stays idle until recording begins
- A published guide needs no account to view, so a share link forwarded carelessly exposes an internal process to whoever receives it
- AI-written narration states a misread step with the same confidence as a correct one, so guides still need a human reading before they go out
- A guide left unrevised after an interface change teaches a path that no longer exists, and video is harder to correct quickly than text
- Outsourcing procedure-writing can erode a team's own explicit grasp of how its processes actually work
- Customer names and logos may be used in Guideless marketing by default, and opting out requires written notification
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. Three things are needed: an account, a workspace and the Chrome extension. There is no server to install, nothing to configure and no API key to manage. The one recurring snag is a profile mismatch, since the extension must sit in the same browser profile used to sign in to Guideless, and a tab opened before installation has to be reloaded. Embedding a guide is a copy-and-paste of the supplied code. The only genuinely technical step is SAML single sign-on, which is reserved for the Enterprise tier.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Guideless
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Guideless.
Frequently asked questions
Does Guideless record my screen as a video?
What do I need before I can create my first guide?
Do I have to record my own voice?
How many languages does Guideless support?
Is there a free plan, and what does it include?
How much does the paid plan cost?
Is my content used to train AI models?
How long is my data kept?
Do viewers need an account to watch a guide?
Is there an API?
Should you pick Guideless?
Guideless answers a narrow but real problem: software documentation goes stale because making it is tedious. By capturing a workflow as editable steps and letting AI write and speak the result, it removes both the narration and the editing that usually stop teams from keeping guides current. The ability to update only what changed, rather than re-record, is the feature most likely to matter six months in.
The product is more mature than the company's age suggests. Three tiers, SAML single sign-on, workspace analytics, roles, 43 languages and a seventeen-page documentation set are not the marks of a weekend project, and a EUR 1 million pre-seed backed by angels from the Vinted orbit, alongside paying customers in fifteen markets, supports that impression. The comparison pages against Scribe, Tango, Loom, Guidde and Supademo are unusually candid, conceding outright that a screenshot-and-text tool suits printable handbooks better.
Two reservations deserve weight. The first is scope: capture happens only in Chrome or another Chromium browser, there is no API, and there is no mobile or desktop client. Anything outside a browser tab is out of reach.
The second is corporate transparency. The company behind the tool, Santa Monica Intelligence, UAB, is named once, in the contact section of the privacy policy. There is no legal notice, no contact page and no postal address anywhere on the site, no Data Processing Agreement is offered, and no Article 27 EU representative is designated. Against that, the contractual commitments are unusually clear: customers own their guides, content is never used for AI training without written consent, subprocessors are published, and retention periods are spelled out.
For a support, enablement or L&D team working in browser-based software, it is a strong fit. For a regulated buyer, the governance paperwork is not yet there.
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