The best Shottr alternatives for Mac

Shottr is a small, fast screenshot app for the Mac. It captures an area, a window or the whole screen, scrolls down long pages and chats, and opens every capture in an editor with text, freehand drawing, highlights, spotlights, step counters and backdrops (gradients, shadows and rounded corners). It can pixelate or remove things, read text and QR codes off the screen, pin a capture on top of your windows, measure distances in pixels and pick colours. It needs macOS Catalina or later, and the current version is 1.9.3.

The price is unusual. On Shottr's purchase page the Basic tier is $12 once, and the Friends Club tier is $30. One license covers one person on up to five Macs, and a license is required for commercial use. You can keep using Shottr without paying: most features stay on, and it asks you now and then to buy it. Uploading to S3 needs a license.

We make Koi, so read this with that in mind. Koi is first below because it's ours, and it only covers part of what Shottr does: Koi doesn't take screenshots at all. Every fact about another app comes from that app's own site, checked October 21, 2026. We didn't run tests or benchmarks.

Shottr is cheap and quick, and for many people it's the right tool. The reasons to look elsewhere are usually specific:

• You need screen recording or GIFs, and want one app for both captures and videos.
• You mark up pictures you already have, like photos, scans or a designer's mockups, not only fresh captures.
• You want the polished look in one click: an automatic background and padding for social posts.
• You'd rather not install anything and the Mac's own Screenshot and Markup tools are enough.
• You use it at work, where Shottr needs a paid license.

The free way, built into macOS, from Apple's screenshot guide:

1. Press Shift-Command-4 and drag over the part of the screen you want. Shift-Command-5 opens the Screenshot panel with more options.
2. Click the thumbnail that slides in at the bottom right before it disappears.
3. Mark it up: shapes, text, a loupe, highlights, a signature, or crop.
4. Click Done to save it.

With Koi, for a screenshot or any other picture already on your Mac:

1. Take the screenshot as usual, or find any picture in Finder or on the desktop.
2. Start dragging it, then press and hold Shift. Koi's wheel opens round the pointer.
3. Drop it on Annotate. Add arrows, text, boxes, rings, pen strokes, highlights, numbers or a magnifier, in six colours. Every mark can be picked up and moved after.
4. Click Save annotated copy. Koi saves the copy beside the original and shows it in Finder.

The full list of what the wheel does is on the Shift wheel page, and the step by step is in how to use the Shift wheel.

The two start in different places. Shottr opens its editor the moment you take a capture, so the markup happens while the screenshot is still fresh. Koi starts from a file: a screenshot you took a minute ago, a photo from your phone, a scan, a design someone sent you. If you mark up captures the second you take them, Shottr's flow is quicker. If you mark up pictures that already exist, Koi's is.

Next to Annotate, Koi's wheel covers the jobs that usually come after a screenshot:

• Add BG: thirty gradients (Koi's skies and well-loved sets like WebGradients and uiGradients), a soft mesh, a colour or another picture blurred behind it. Padding, Corners and Shadow for the picture, and a canvas of Auto, 1:1, 16:9 or 4:5 with its own rounded corners.
• Redact: draw boxes and cover them in a solid colour, a blur or pixels, or let Find Faces or Text cover what Apple's Vision finds. It runs on your Mac.
• Collage: several screenshots on one canvas, as a grid, a row, a column or one featured, for a before and after or a set of steps.
• Compress: get a big Retina screenshot under the size a form or a chat app allows.
• Convert: PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, AVIF, BMP or PDF.

Shottr has things Koi doesn't: text and QR codes read off the screen, a ruler, a magnifier with a colour picker, and overlays for two-frame animations. Koi's Magnifier is a mark you place on the picture, not a live loupe.

Screenshots carry more than you think: an email address in a sidebar, a customer's name, a token in a URL. Every app here edits on your Mac. The differences are in sharing. Shottr can upload to S3-compatible storage, once you activate it. CleanShot X has its own cloud for share links. Xnapper and Koi's Redact both help you cover what shouldn't be seen before you share.

Koi never uploads a picture from the wheel. Every tool writes its copy beside the original, like “Screenshot annotated.png”, numbered when the name is taken. For a photo rather than a screenshot, Koi's Metadata wedge shows what the file says about itself, the camera, the date and where it was taken, and Remove all takes them out before you post it.

From each app's own site. “Not listed” means the site doesn't mention it.

• Screenshots, scrolling captures, recordings and GIFs in one paid app? CleanShot X.
• Screenshots for social posts, with the padding and redaction done for you? Xnapper.
• Free and already installed? macOS Screenshot and Markup.
• Mark up, blur, crop and compress any picture, plus dictation and an assistant in the same app? Koi.

A common setup is the Mac's own Shift-Command-4 for the capture and Koi for the rest: drag the file with Shift held and drop it on Annotate, Redact or Add BG. If the picture is too big to send after, the Clop alternatives page covers compressing it. The Shift wheel is on every Koi plan; see Koi's plans.