Outplayed vs Medal:
two free clippers, two different bets.

A platform app and a standalone app.

Outplayed is an Overwolf app. Its own site describes it as a capture app that automatically records your best moments, and the download page states plainly that installing it will install the Overwolf client. That matters more than it sounds. Overwolf is a platform layer with its own updater, overlay and background process, and Outplayed is one app running on top of it. If you already run other Overwolf apps, that layer costs you nothing extra. If you do not, you are installing two things rather than one.

The pitch is breadth. Outplayed's own site says it supports over 5,000 games and automatically captures your best moments and biggest plays, as well as recording on demand. Overwolf's support article for the app adds instant hotkey clips and screenshots, a screen recorder for capture beyond gameplay, the Outplayed Editor for trimming clips before sharing, and posting directly to social platforms. Neither page names the events that trigger a capture, nor the platforms it posts to, so this page does not name them either.

Medal is a standalone Windows app with no platform layer underneath it, and it is as much a social product as a capture tool. Clips upload to a profile other people can watch, and the app is built around that loop. It captures on a hotkey, it can auto-clip from in-game event detection, and it can record a full session from start to finish if you ask it to.

The sharpest difference between them is not a feature, it is documentation. Medal publishes a per-game table of exactly which events it detects in which titles, with a last-updated date on it. Outplayed advertises a games count, and we could not find an equivalent per-game trigger list anywhere on its public pages. Neither approach is wrong, but only one of them lets you check whether your game is covered before you install anything.

Side by side, with receipts.

Every row was read from the vendors' own pages on 14 August 2026. A cell reading "not stated" means the vendor page did not say, not that the answer is no. Both products change often, so re-check before you commit.

Both read the game. Only one shows its work.

Neither of these tools watches your footage and forms an opinion about it. Both are driven by in-game event detection, so a clip gets saved because the game reported an event, not because anything judged the moment. That is a real strength worth stating plainly: when a kill fires, it fires because a kill happened, with no inference involved.

Medal publishes the whole table. Its support article, last updated 5 May 2026, lists 16 titles with the exact triggers for each. Counter-Strike 2 fires on Kill, 2K, 3K, 4K, Ace, Headshot, Death and Assist. Valorant lists Kill, 2K, 3K, 4K, Ace, Death and Assist, plus Knife Kill. League of Legends runs long, from Pentakill and Ace down to Baron Steal, Dragon Steal, Voidgrub Steal and Turret Destroyed. Rocket League is granular about goal types, including Aerial, Bicycle, Backwards, Turtle and Pool Shot, plus Epic Save and Demolish. The remainder of the list is Dota 2, EA Sports FC Online, Fortnite, GTA V, Minecraft, PUBG, Rematch, REPO, Roblox, Runescape: Dragonwilds, War Thunder and YAPYAP.

Two caveats are worth knowing before you lean on that list. Rocket League and REPO are marked in the same table as needing a plugin installed. And in a separate support article on auto clipping, Medal's own troubleshooting says to disable any Streamer Mode in your game, because it obfuscates information Medal uses to detect the events, and to check that Replays are enabled, because most of the auto-clipping games use the game's replay system as a base. If you play with Streamer Mode on, that is the first thing to check.

We could not find an equivalent table for Outplayed. Its pages advertise 5,000+ supported games and describe automatic capture of your best moments and biggest plays, without naming the events that trigger it. We are not going to claim its coverage is narrower or broader than Medal's, because we could not verify that from outside the app. What we can say is that the two published numbers do not measure the same thing: 5,000+ is a supported-games figure, and 16 is a games-with-published-triggers figure. Reading one against the other is the easiest mistake to make on this comparison.

The practical move is identical for both. Install it, open the capture or auto-clipping settings, and look for the game you actually play. If it is not there, both tools still take a clip on a manual hotkey.

Where the files actually go.

Both capture to your own disk first, and both are happy to fill it. This is the part people underestimate, because a rolling capture habit turns into hundreds of gigabytes faster than anyone plans for.

• Medal, free tier. Per Medal's own Premium comparison, free accounts upload clips up to 10 minutes at standard quality and frame rate, watermarks and outros are not removable, ads are shown, and cloud sync is not available. Clips live on your drive unless you upload them.
• Medal, Premium tier. The same page lists a 30 minute upload limit, removable watermarks and outros, uploads at up to 1440p and up to 120 FPS, cloud sync with manual or automatic upload, screen-recording uploads, priority chat support, and cosmetic extras such as badges and a premium profile.
• Medal, full session recording. Switching it on makes Medal record the entire session from start to end, and it keeps going until you close the game or run out of hard drive space. Your clip hotkey turns into a bookmark instead, marking moments to cut later.
• Outplayed. Captures to your own disk, and its support article says clips can be trimmed in the Outplayed Editor and then posted directly to social platforms. Its public pages do not state a free-tier storage allowance, an upload ceiling or a watermark policy, so those cells say so rather than guess.

Both free to install. Neither publishes its rate.

This is the least satisfying section on the page, and the honest version of it is short.

Outplayed is free. Both outplayed.tv and the Overwolf app listing label it Free, mark it as containing ads, and note that a subscription is available. The wording on the site is that you can support the dev with Outplayed Premium, remove ads, and unlock premium features. No amount appears on either page, so no amount appears here.

Medal is free to install with an optional Premium tier on top. Medal's support documentation describes Premium as billed monthly or at a discounted yearly rate and lists everything it unlocks, but prints no figure. Medal's own site returned HTTP 403 to our automated request on 14 August 2026, so we could not read its pricing page. Third-party roundups do circulate a number for Medal Premium. We are deliberately not repeating it, because we did not see it at the source, and a stale price in a comparison table does more damage than an empty cell.

So the practical answer: install either one free, use it for a week, and read the current rate in the app or at the vendor's own checkout before you subscribe to anything. Both are subject to regional pricing and promotions in any case, so a figure quoted on a third-party page is unlikely to match what you are shown.

Pick this one if.

Both are free, so the cheapest way to settle this is to install both and keep whichever one you stop noticing. If you would rather decide up front, here is the split.

Neither helps with a file you already have.

There is one case where this whole comparison misses. Both tools have to be running while you play. If what you are looking at is a three-hour recording already sitting on your drive, from OBS, from ShadowPlay, or from Medal's own full session recording, neither one can go back and find the good parts. Nothing flagged that footage at the time, and there is no trigger left to fire.

That is the gap CutBench fills, and it is a different tool for the other half of the problem. It never runs during the game. You point it at a recording you already have and it works through the whole file on your own NVIDIA GPU, scoring candidate moments from speech, audio events, scene changes and trained per-game classifiers, then hands back a ranked list of vertical clips trimmed to their payoff with captions burned in. It is Windows 10 or 11 only, needs an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer, and a three-hour session takes roughly two to five hours on an RTX 3060 class card, so it is a queue you start and walk away from. It is $34.99 once on Steam, and the free demo runs the identical pipeline with a watermark on exports.

If you are happy with what your clipper catches live, you do not need it. If the problem is a drive full of sessions nobody has watched back, that is the half it was built for. Keep the live clipper either way, because the two do not overlap.

Outplayed vs Medal FAQ.