I take screenshots for other people to read
macOS takes perfectly good screenshots for free, and for years that was enough. What changed isn't the quality of the picture. It's what I do with it afterwards.
Most of my screenshots aren't for me. They're going into documentation, a walkthrough for a colleague, a bug report, a note explaining how something works. That's a different job from capturing a window, and it's the job CleanShot X is built for.
The four things I use
There's a lot more in the app than this. These are the parts I touch:
Scrolling capture. Long pages, long documents, long settings panels — one image instead of four stitched together badly.
Counter markers. Numbered circles you drop onto the image: 1, 2, 3, in order, as you click. When you're explaining a sequence of steps, this is the difference between a picture and an instruction. I use it constantly and I'd miss it most.
Redaction. Client names, account numbers, anything that shouldn't leave the building. It's a built-in part of the editor rather than something I have to remember to do in another app, which means I actually do it.
Capture history. Everything I've grabbed recently, still there. I take a screenshot, move on, and forty minutes later realise I need it. Before, that meant taking it again — assuming the thing was still on screen.
Why it beat the free one
Each of those saves me perhaps thirty seconds. That sounds like nothing until you notice you're doing it a dozen times a day, and that the friction was never the capture — it was everything between the capture and the thing being useful to somebody else.
The editor opens immediately on the screenshot you just took, you annotate it there, and it goes where it's going. No round trip through a separate app, no file sitting on the desktop waiting to be dealt with.
The verdict
$35 once, which includes a year of updates and then an optional $19 a year if you want to keep getting them. There's a Pro subscription at $10 a month for cloud storage and team features, which I don't use. No free trial, but a 30-day money-back guarantee, and it's on Setapp if you're already paying for that. If your screenshots are mostly for yourself, stay with the built-in one. If they're for other people, this pays for itself quickly.
Part of the Mac software I actually use — nineteen tools, one write-up a week. Put together with AI, based entirely on my own use and opinions.
