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Honest comparisons

Why not just do it another way?

You have real alternatives, and you are already weighing them. Here is what each one is genuinely good at, and the exact point at which it stops helping.

The three you are weighing

Writing it yourself, recording the clicks, or asking a chat

  • Why not write the SOPs ourselves?

    You can, and a well-written SOP is worth having.

    It costs days of somebody's time per process, so it waits behind everything else. Steptree writes the first draft from one run-through, with the judgement calls you flag, not just the clicks. When a screen changes, record it again and you have a new draft in minutes.

  • Why not a screen recording, or a folder of screenshots?

    Both are quick, and a record of the job is better than nothing.

    A recording shows what was clicked. An SOP also needs the why: the goal, the judgement calls and the traps. Steptree asks for the goal before you start and lets you flag each judgement call as you go, in any app on your computer, not one browser tab.

  • Why not paste our procedures into a chat?

    A general AI is quick, and it can tidy up a procedure you already have.

    It has never seen how your team does the job, so somebody pastes the context in every morning and it guesses at the rest. Connect Claude to Steptree once and it searches your SOPs instead. In the Steptree App, Steptree AI answers from them too.

And the fourth

“We'll just automate it instead”

For the reader who came looking for automation rather than documentation.
What an RPA platform is good at
High-volume, identical work across systems it has a connection to. For that, it genuinely automates, and it is good at it.
Where it stops
It needs a developer, a flowchart built by hand and a connection to every system you touch. And it leaves nothing a new starter can read, so the know-how behind the flowchart stays with whoever built it.
What is different here
Steptree starts with an SOP a person can read and approve, written from one run-through, with the judgement calls in it. If you do want the job done for you later, an agent can be built from that same SOP.

Being straight about it

When Steptree is the wrong answer

Three situations where we would tell you so on the call. Not every workflow needs Steptree.
If you have ten thousand identical transactions a day
You want a purpose-built integration or an RPA platform, and you probably already have one. Steptree is for the work that is varied, judgement-heavy and badly documented — not for high-volume, identical, already-automated throughput.
If your processes are already written down and current
Then the writing, the first half of what we do, is worth less to you. You can still paste an SOP in so your AI can read it, but the recorder is the reason to buy Steptree.
If nobody can be spared to do the job once
This does not work. Somebody has to do the job with the recorder on. It is the only step that costs you time, and there is no version of this where a tool learns your process without watching it.

Questions

Asked while deciding

Do we have to replace anything we already use?
No. Steptree records the software you already use, on Windows or Mac, and your AI reads the SOPs in the tools you already use. Nobody has to move their work somewhere new.
We already tried documenting our processes. Why would this be different?
Because nobody has to find the week to write it: one run-through, and Steptree writes the draft. When a screen changes, recording it again takes minutes, not a rewrite. And your AI reads the result, so it gets used.
Can we start small?
That is the recommended way in. One job, recorded by the person who does it, on the free plan with no card.
What if we outgrow it?
Nothing is deleted when a paid plan ends. The workspace moves to Free and keeps every SOP, which you can still open, edit and share, and your AI can still read over MCP. Every skill you compiled still downloads as a SKILL.md file. Each person can also download a copy of their own data from Settings, including the SOPs they created. There is no PDF or Word export.

Next

Where to go from here

  • Three jobs, before and after

    What changed for the people who used to do them by hand.

  • What it costs

    Free to start, no card, and every model included until the credits run out.

  • Ask us directly

    Plenty of these conversations end with us pointing you at the free plan instead.

Prove it beats the alternative, on your own job

Record the process you were about to write up by hand, and read the SOP Steptree writes from it, free. Pay when you want the rest of them written down too.

Someone at a wall of sticky notes talking a seated team through a process.