CleanShot X

What does CleanShot X do?

CleanShot X replaces the Mac's built-in screenshot and screen recording tools with a faster, more capable set, from quick captures to polished demo videos.

You can capture an area, a window, the full screen or a scrolling window, freeze the screen, or set a timer. After each capture a Quick Access Overlay lets you copy, save, annotate, upload or drag the file into another app. The annotation editor has arrows, blur and pixelate, spotlight, numbered steps, a smart highlighter and text styles, and the Background tool adds padding, shadows and backgrounds for social posts. Text recognition copies text from any image on your Mac, and Capture History restores anything you captured before. Screen recordings can include your webcam, microphone and system audio, click highlights and keystrokes, and export as MP4 or GIF. CleanShot 5.0 added Studio Mode, an editor with smart zooms, cursor smoothing, backgrounds, motion blur and vertical or square exports.

How much does CleanShot X cost in the UK?

CleanShot is priced in US dollars, with tax added at checkout: Basic is a one-off $35, and Pro is $12 per user a month or $10 a month billed annually.

• CleanShot Basic: the full Mac app, one year of updates, 1 GB of CleanShot Cloud storage
• CleanShot Pro: the full Mac app, always up to date, unlimited Cloud storage, custom domain and branding, password protection, file access control, team management, SSO and SCIM

Basic keeps working after its year of updates ends; renewing updates costs $19 a year, which is optional. Every feature of the Mac app is in both plans, so the choice depends on cloud sharing and team needs. CleanShot is also included in a Setapp subscription.

Is CleanShot X worth it over the free Mac tools?

For anyone who takes screenshots or recordings every day, reviewers say yes, mainly for the time it saves on annotating and styling.

CleanShot scores 4.9 out of 5 on Product Hunt from 55 reviews. Reviewers praise the annotation tools, scrolling capture, OCR and how native and fast it feels. Complaints are minor: one Product Hunt reviewer wants easier access to images already used, and another asked for simpler highlight tools when editing video. CleanShot says it is used by more than 250,000 people.

CleanShot X vs Cap and Tella: which is better?

CleanShot is the better all-round screenshot tool, while Cap and Tella focus on video.

Cap is open source and free for personal use, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and charges $29 a year for a commercial desktop licence or $8.16 a month for Cap Pro billed annually. Tella costs $13 per user a month billed annually and is built around edited demo videos, camera layouts, transcript editing and viewer analytics. CleanShot has no Windows version, but it is the only one of the three with full screenshot annotation, scrolling capture and OCR, and Basic is a one-off payment rather than a subscription. Kite is another option for produced launch videos with 3D mockups.

Is CleanShot Cloud safe for work files?

CleanShot says its cloud service is certified to ISO 27001, with data encrypted at rest and in transit.

The company behind it, MTW, is based in Poland, so it works under GDPR, and its infrastructure runs on AWS with backups kept in several locations. Pro adds password protection, link expiry, file access control, SSO and SCIM. Using CleanShot Cloud is optional: the app works without uploading anything, and text recognition runs on your Mac.

How do you get CleanShot X cheaper?

Students get 30% off with a university email address, and existing PixelSnap 2 customers get 20% off.

Annual billing takes Pro from $12 to $10 a month, a 17% saving. If you don't need unlimited cloud storage or team features, the one-off Basic licence is cheaper over time than any subscription. Setapp subscribers get CleanShot as part of their plan.