Whether you are creating a tutorial-based guide or just helping a friend out, screenshots come in handy.
And you might say that windows have its own screenshot tool but when it comes to editing, custom capture, quick shortcuts, or other major functions it stays behind.
Plus not to mention mac doesn’t have a snipping tool like windows so more reasons on finding the perfect screen capturing tool for you.
But first, let’s quickly see what makes a good screen capturing tool:
- UI: Obviously we need easy navigation to find the features we want to use without any jargon.
- Hotkeys: We can’t always manually go to the launcher and start snipping every time we need a screenshot, so having keyboard shortcuts comes in handy and makes things easier.
- Editing: When it comes to a snipping tool we need to make sure that it has basic editing features like cropping, highlighting, etc.
- Sharing: It would be great if the tool could also provide you with great export and sharing options like uploading to your cloud after taking screenshots, or exporting to pdf, etc.
Now that you know how to compare, here are the best paid and unpaid tools for you:
1. ShareX:
If you want a powerful screen capturing tool that is fast on your pc, ShareX is the one to explore.
ShareX is a free and open-source tool for screen capturing, recording, and sharing.
The tool has a variety of features to help you make your screen capturing the best experience possible.
Highlights of ShareX:
- Scrolling screen capture: You could capture an entire web page etc.
- Screen recording
- Lightweight powerful tool.
- Supports multiple media formats
- No Watermarks
- Uploading to cloud networks
- Automation tools after screen capturing.
One of the best features this tool offers that its competitors don’t is screen recording, it can even record your screens using keyboard shortcuts and export without watermarks.
Hotkeys are the game, as mentioned earlier you launching applications every time can be exhaustive.
So you can even add more Hotkeys, you heard it right!
You can create custom shortcut keys to further make your process easy.
And yes, this one is completely free and open-source, so what’s not to like.
2. Greenshot:
If you are looking no-nonsense tool that does the job, you would love Greenshot.
The tool is available for Windows and paid for Mac users.
The application has been created by SourceForge who has bought a lot of great software previously.
The main highlights of Greenshot are:
- Great image editor and export.
- Capable of adding annotations and highlights.
- Selected regions specific screenshots like full screen, window, etc
- Sharing features like Email, send to a printer are available.
- Free plugins with Jira, Microsoft office, etc
The annotations and highlights tools are great to make any screenshot more informative.
3. Snagit:
Snagit has a different approach when it comes to screen capturing.
If you are constantly creating e-guides or have a team to explain instructions or documentation then Snagit is your one-stop.
One of the most professional tools for screen capturing that lets you get the best out of both worlds.
In short, Snagit is one of the most powerful and feature-rich tools that can give you bang for your buck.
The highlights of Snagit are:
- Screen recording and capturing.
- Scrolling capture
- One of the best editing features that let you even make informative guides.
- Available for both Mac and Windows.
- Ability to extract text from a screenshot.
- Feature-rich marking tools.
As it is paid tool with free trials, and a one-time fee of $49.95
4. PicPick:
Another great snipping tool focused on simplicity but this one is aimed more towards graphics and mockups in images.
It includes markup like a highlighter, blur effect, color palette, crosshairs, texts, arrows, elements, shapes, and more.
This is more focused on what you can do once you capture your screen.
Some highlights about PicPick:
- Ability to share the snap at Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
- Multiple editing features.
- Scrolling captures as mentioned in the most in this list.
- Captures graphic-rich screenshot.
- Multiple export options like exporting to pdf, png, etc.
PicPick is right now only available for windows which is bad news for other OS users.
However, this extremely feature-rich tool is free for personal use and 21$ for additional technical support and more features with no ads.
So if you are looking to do more with your snaps then PicPic is the app for you.
Inbuilt Tools:
If you only want your screen capturing tools for the basic reasons like capturing screen and don’t want to install any additional tools,
Then you can use the built-in tools provided by each operating system below:
For Windows:
Press and hold: Win+PrtScn
For macOS:
Press and hold these three keys together: Shift+Command+3
For Ubuntu/Linux:
Press and hold Alt+PrtScrn
So have you decided which tools suit you the best? Or are you going old school and using built-in tools? Let us know below.
Thank you for reading!
