Shottr vs CleanShot X: free until a capture must travel

Stay on Shottr if your screenshots end in your own clipboard, a design review or a bug ticket. It is free to use (commercial use needs the 12-dollar Basic licence), a 2.4 MB download, and it scrolls, reads text and measures pixels. Move to CleanShot X when a capture has to become a link someone else opens, or a screen recording: it costs 35 dollars once. Shottr records nothing, and its upload link needs a token and carries no storage guarantee.

I use CleanShot all day to show things to clients and to coach the team. I have not run Shottr day to day, so everything below about Shottr comes from its own site, terms and release notes.

Count where last week's captures went

The two apps split on one question: who opens the capture next. Scroll back through last week's screenshots and put each one in a row of this table.

If your week sits in the first three rows, Shottr covers it and you pay nothing. The last two rows are where the money goes. If the count for them is close to zero, you are not the buyer for CleanShot, and no feature list will change that.

Install Shottr if you measure, extract and paste

Shottr's page calls it a tiny native app, a 2.4 MB download, and the developer says it grabs a screenshot in 17 ms and shows it to you in about 165 ms. Those are the developer's claims, and we did not time them. What it does with the capture is the better argument: scrolling screenshots in any app or window (20,000 px tall by default, with a setting that raises the limit to 200,000 px), text recognition that copies to the clipboard, QR code reading, a screen ruler, a colour picker, pinned always-on-top screenshots, backdrops with gradients and shadows, and upload to any S3-compatible bucket since version 1.9 on 23 November 2025. CleanShot's product page names no ruler and no colour picker among the features it lists, so this is the one area where the free app has the edge.

The price is on a page of its own. The home page only shows a pay-what-you-want box that lets you enter $0 and get Shottr for free, but the purchase page lists Basic at 12 dollars, one-time, and a Friends Club tier at 30 dollars with experimental features and better support. Free use has no end date according to the FAQ; after 30 days the app asks you to upgrade, and commercial use requires a licence. The terms give a 14-day refund on purchases made directly from Shottr, and one licence covers one user on up to five computers.

Two smaller facts. Shottr needs an internet connection to validate a licence, and it sends telemetry. The developer says it contains nothing identifiable, and a setting turns it off. And its release notes show fixes for macOS 27 on 17 and 24 September 2026, so it is being kept current.

Buy CleanShot X when a capture has to travel

My use is narrow and daily: show a client where to click, show a colleague what is wrong on a screen. The capture parks in the corner, I drag it into Slack, and I blur names and amounts before it leaves. Scrolling capture handles a long pricing page in one image. That is the disposable half of capturing: take it, send it, forget it. Anything meant to be kept gets recorded in Tella instead.

What Shottr does not have is the other half of the page. CleanShot records the screen with a webcam bubble, click highlights, keystroke display and voice plus system audio, and exports MP4 or GIF. Version 5.0, released on 1 September 2026 according to its changelog, added Studio Mode and a video editor with zooms that follow the cursor. Add one-click sharing to CleanShot Cloud, a capture history you can restore from, and a switch that hides desktop icons before you shoot. Shottr's own poll of what to build next lists video or GIF recording and hiding desktop icons as options, not features.

The money, as listed on cleanshot.com/pricing:

CleanShot Basic is 35 dollars once: the Mac app, one year of updates and 1 GB of cloud storage. Renewing updates after that year is optional, at 19 dollars a year, and the app keeps working if you don't.

CleanShot Pro is 10 dollars per user per month, billed annually. It adds unlimited cloud storage, a custom domain and branding, SSO and SCIM.

There is no trial. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, a 30 percent discount with a university email, and a 7-day trial if you take it through Setapp.

It requires macOS 13.0 or newer, and there is no Windows version.

Do the arithmetic before you click

Year 3 is a cumulative total. The renewed Basic row is 35 plus 19 plus 19, and Pro is 10 dollars times 12 months for each year.

Pro is not the price of the app. Basic already includes the app. Pro buys the shared cloud, the custom domain and the team controls, so a solo user who sends the odd link is looking at the first CleanShot Basic row, and the Pro rows are for a team that wants links on its own domain.

Keep client screens off Shottr's upload

Shottr can upload a screenshot and copy a public URL, but the access token it needs is free and not instant. With a licence you get one through a form. Without one you email the developer, who warns the wait can be long. The page then lists what you are not getting: no image expiration policy for now, no guarantee that the storage service keeps your files, and the developer says plainly that Shottr is not secure image storage. Every upload is public and the author may review images for moderation. For anything a client's name appears on, point Shottr at your own S3 bucket or save the file locally.

CleanShot Cloud is the paid version of the same idea: one-click link, comments on captures, and on Pro a custom domain and branding. Its page cites ISO 27001. A link that is easy to share is also easy to share by accident, so the rule from our earlier piece on screenshot links holds in either app: blur before the link exists.

Run Shottr for a week, then decide

Install Shottr now, since it costs nothing, and keep the tally from the first section for seven days. If the tally stays at clipboard, tickets and measurements, you are done and you have saved 35 dollars. If you caught yourself wanting a link or a recording, buy CleanShot X; without a trial, the 30-day guarantee is your test.

Going the other way, from CleanShot to Shottr, you lose recording, GIFs, cloud links and the capture history, and you keep scrolling, OCR, annotation, pinning and backdrops. Going from Shottr to CleanShot, you lose the ruler, the colour picker, a very small footprint and any Mac older than macOS 13. Both apps are patching for macOS 27 right now: a CleanShot update on 26 October 2026 fixed text capture there, according to its changelog.

Shottr is not an affiliate of this site: we earn nothing if you choose it. CleanShot is: we earn a commission if you buy through our link on the CleanShot page.