Greenshot vs Lightscreen

Greenshot is free, open-source screenshot software for Windows PCs. It can capture a selected region, a window, or the full screen, and can capture scrolling web pages from Internet Explorer. Users can annotate and highlight screenshots, obscure selected portions, and extract text with OCR. Images can be saved, printed, copied, emailed, sent to Office, or uploaded to photo sites such as Flickr or Picasa. Listed export formats are PNG and JPEG. Greenshot is intended for people who create screenshots, including project managers, developers, technical writers, and testers. The Windows plan is listed at free, and an optional cost contribution is $1.99 as a one-time purchase. The latest stable Windows release listed is version 1.3.315, dated 20 Mar 2026. Source code is available in Git repositories. Windows 8 users may be prompted to install.NET 3.5, though they can skip that installation.

Lightscreen automates screenshot capture and saves and catalogs images on disk according to user preferences. It can run as a hidden background process and respond to global hotkeys, with six configurable capture actions. Users can resize or adjust the capture area, then review an image in a preview window with an integrated viewer. Captures can be named sequentially or with customizable date and time formats. For sharing, Lightscreen uploads to Imgur and compatible pomf clones; users can also add other compatible hosts manually. Imgur uploads are anonymous, and the help page describes account uploads as planned for a later version. Portable mode stores preferences in config.ini so settings can move with the installation. Lightscreen supports Windows and Linux, and the site lists version 2.5 with improvements to area capture and fixes for cursor capture, crashes, and SSL issues. Uploads may require OpenSSL support on either platform. The code is licensed under GNU General Public License version 2, and the listed Free plan costs nothing.