Medal vs
ReelShift.

Where Medal wins

It is free. That is not a small thing and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Medal is free on PC and mobile with optional paid extras, and it has nearly 3 billion clips uploaded and over 12 million connected users behind it.

It also records at higher quality than your stream does. Up to 4K at 144fps, with multi track audio so you can balance game, mic and Discord separately afterwards. If what you want is the cleanest possible capture of a gameplay moment, a local recorder beats anything working from a compressed broadcast.

And it goes further than people assume: it auto formats clips to vertical, has a built in editor for trimming, captions and cropping, and shares straight to TikTok, Shorts and Reels.

Where ReelShift wins

It catches what you would not have caught.

Medal needs a trigger. Either you press a key, which means you noticed the moment and remembered to react, or a game event fires, which means it has to be a game moment. Everything else is lost.

ReelShift has no trigger to miss. It is reading the stream the whole time: your voice, the emotion in it, what you said, and how fast chat is moving. The moment you did not notice, the one that happened while you were concentrating, still gets clipped.

That gap is widest on talking streams. On Just Chatting, IRL or a live podcast, there is no kill feed and the good bits are things somebody said. A recorder sees none of it.

Which one should you pick

Pick Medal if: you mostly play rather than stream, you want the highest quality capture of gameplay moments, your clips are game moments rather than conversation, or you simply do not want to pay anything. For a lot of people this is the right answer.

Pick ReelShift if: you go live regularly, your best moments come out of talking and chat rather than the game, you do not have time to edit afterwards, or you want clips ready to post while the stream is still running.

Use both if: you stream games. Medal for the pure gameplay you want in full quality, ReelShift for everything the broadcast produced.

The bit people miss

With Medal, the clip exists the second you press the key, but it is a raw 16:9 gameplay capture that you then open, trim, crop and caption. The editor is good, but it is still you doing it, clip by clip, after the stream.

With ReelShift the clip arrives already finished: cropped vertical, captions burned in, title written from what was actually said, minutes after the moment. If the thing stopping you posting is time rather than capture, that is the difference that matters.