Asciinema vs Savvy CLI: Terminal recording tools

Savvy CLI and Asciinema are both powerful tools that can record terminal activity, but they serve different purposes and are built with different core functionalities.

Savvy

Purpose and Functionality

Savvy CLI is primarily designed to automate capturing actionable knowledge from terminal activity. Developers who need to document and share operational procedures or incident responses can easily create runbooks or non-developers can simply run those runbooks to get the job done.

• Session Recording: Savvy captures command-line sessions and automatically converts them into detailed documentation like a runbook that anyone can run locally on their machine. These runbooks can include commands, links, and notes, providing a comprehensive guide for repetitive tasks or troubleshooting procedures​.

• AI Integration: Savvy uses LLMs to interpret and document terminal sessions, turning complex commands into easy-to-understand steps. Another AI component called Savvy Explain, can also generate explanations for shell commands, helping users understand what each command does.

• Sharing and Collaboration: Users can share runbooks via simple links or export them to Markdown or MDX, facilitating easy integration with other documentation tools and platforms. ​

Asciinema

Purpose and Functionality

Asciinema is a tool for recording terminal sessions and sharing them as replayable videos. This makes it useful for educational content or demonstrations where seeing the real-time command execution is beneficial.

• Session Recording: Asciinema captures every keystroke and output in the terminal, allowing others to view the session exactly as it occurred. Viewers can copy-paste the content they want directly from the recording.

• AI Integration: Looking forward to it!

• Sharing and Collaboration: Recorded sessions are stored in a lightweight, text-based format, which can be played back in any web browser. This makes it easier to share across different platforms without compatibility issues.

Final Thoughts

Savvy CLI is best suited for creating actionable, detailed documentation that can be used repeatedly by teams to standardize procedures or troubleshoot issues. Asciinema, however, is best suited for demonstrations where the process and flow of terminal activity are crucial for understanding.

Savvy’s runbook output format is text-based that can be edited and formatted further. Asciinema’s output is a shareable, replayable session that mimics the original terminal activity, but unfortunately cannot be edited.

Both tools provide valuable capabilities depending on user's needs!