If you paid money for GIF software, that's probably because of the licensing on the file format. It did lapse sometime in the 2000's, though, so now it's a free and open file format.
To answer your question? Open Broadcast Software (OBS). Period. It's fantastic. It's lightweight, open source, and optimized for streaming. Except all you have to do is output the file format to .mp4 and it can capture video locally. Then I just run it through XMedia Recode to convert it to an optimized webm (which is getting video support across more and more websites these days), and you can have high quality, pixel-perfect video capture running over 2 minutes in length under 30 mb if you set up the settings right. It's great if you know what you're doing.