Open Source CleanShot X Alternatives
A curated collection of the 3 best open source alternatives to CleanShot X.
The best open source alternative to CleanShot X is Cap. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source CleanShot X alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to CleanShot X are: Screenity and Kap.
CleanShot X alternatives are mainly Screen Capture & Recording but may also be Browsers & Extensions. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of CleanShot X.
Screen recorder with local editing, instant share links and storage you control, for teams sending async video instead of meetings.
Screen, camera and microphone go in; a share link or a finished file comes out. Cap is built for the moments where showing the work beats scheduling another call: product demos, bug reports, onboarding, tutorials, design reviews and async standups.
Two recording modes cover the two reasons people record. Instant Mode uploads while you record and produces a share link the second you stop, which is what a bug report needs. Studio Mode records locally and opens an editor with backgrounds, zooms, trimming, captions and export controls, which is what a tutorial needs.
Around the recording sits the collaboration layer.
- Comments and analytics: reactions, transcripts and viewer analytics keep feedback attached to the video instead of scattered across chat threads.
- Cap AI: titles, summaries, clickable chapters, captions and transcripts are generated for you.
- Team workspaces: shared spaces, public or private links, password protection and your own domain on share pages.
- Storage you choose: Cap Cloud, your own bucket on S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO or Wasabi, or recordings that never leave the machine.
- Loom import: existing Loom videos come across so the library stays in one place.
Desktop apps run on macOS and Windows with a web dashboard behind them, and the desktop client can be pointed at your own server from its settings. Self-hosting the full platform, meaning web, API, database, media server and object storage, is a Docker Compose command, with Railway and Coolify as alternative routes.
Chrome extension for unlimited screen recording and annotation, made for people who want demos and tutorials without an account.
Screenity is a screen recorder and annotation tool that lives in Chrome. There is no time limit, no watermark and no sign in, which removes the usual reason people ration what they record.
Capture covers a tab, a selected area, the whole desktop, a single application or the camera alone, with microphone or internal audio and push to talk. Videos stay on your own machine, no data is collected, and the extension keeps working offline.
Most of the tool sits in what happens around the raw capture.
- Annotation: draw anywhere on the screen and add text, arrows and shapes as you record.
- Focus tools: smooth zoom, click and cursor highlighting, spotlight mode and blur over sensitive parts of a page.
- Editor: cut, trim and crop, remove or add audio, and set an alarm that stops the recording for you.
- Camera effects: AI-powered backgrounds or blur applied to the camera feed.
- Export: save as mp4, gif or webm, or send the video to Google Drive for a shareable link.
Install it from the Chrome Web Store, or load a release build yourself, in which case it runs local-only with no API calls, sign-in flows or platform features. A development version needs Node.js 14 or newer, and enabling Google Drive uploads means swapping in your own OAuth client id. The current MV3 releases are licensed GPLv3.
A macOS screen recorder that lives in the menu bar, for anyone who needs a quick clip of part of their screen.
Recording part of a macOS screen with Kap starts and ends in the menu bar. The recorder is open source and built with web technology, and it removes the ceremony of opening an application, arranging its window and hunting for an export button before anything gets captured.
Clicking the menu bar icon brings up the recorder. You select the portion of the screen to capture, press record, then click the icon again to stop. Holding Option while clicking pauses a recording in progress, and a right click opens further options mid-capture.
A few practical details shape how the project is used day to day.
- Installation: downloads for Apple silicon and for Intel machines, or a single Homebrew cask command.
- Plugins: a documented plugin system, with a guide for anyone writing their own.
- Development builds: the main branch and any other branch can be downloaded directly, though those builds are unsupported and may misbehave.
- Contribution guide: a dedicated document explains how to work on the application itself.
- Related repositories: the website and Aperture are maintained alongside the main project.
Kap is macOS only, with separate builds for the two processor families rather than one universal download. Hosting, builds and error reporting are donated by Vercel, CircleCI and Sentry, and the application is kept going by the contributors listed in the repository.
