TinyTask has been the default answer for fifteen years, and for simple mouse loops it still works. Here is an honest look at where it stops being enough.
It is genuinely tiny — a single 33 KB executable with four buttons. There is nothing to learn, nothing to configure, and it has not changed since 2010, which in this corner of software is a compliment.
If your task is a short mouse loop that you want repeated a few times, TinyTask is fine and you do not need anything else.
Keyboard input is the usual one. TinyTask records mouse movement and clicks; typed text is not part of what it captures, so any task that involves filling fields falls apart.
The second wall is control over playback. You get a repeat count and that is it — no adjustable speed, no pause between runs, no way to stop cleanly in the middle of a long loop.
And the third is that the recording lives in a proprietary format that only TinyTask reads, so you cannot look at what was recorded or fix one wrong click without recording the whole thing again.
It records keystrokes together with mouse movement in the same pass, with the timing between them preserved. That covers data entry, form filling and anything where you type as well as click.
Playback has a hotkey you set yourself, so you can start and stop without reaching for the window — which matters in fullscreen games where you cannot alt-tab.
It is bigger than TinyTask, about 13.7 MB, because it carries a proper interface instead of four buttons. Still portable, still no installer, still nothing written to the registry.
Short mouse-only loop, few repeats, no typing — TinyTask, and do not overthink it.
Anything with keyboard input, long loops, hotkey control or timing that matters — you will outgrow TinyTask within a day.
Both are free, so the honest answer is to try the simple one first and move on when it stops fitting.
No. The formats are different and TinyTask files are not documented.
It is not malicious, but it is unmaintained, and some antivirus engines flag any macro tool by default.
Neither does under normal use.
Both work at the input level, but hotkey control makes a real difference there.