Greenshot vs Lightshot

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.

Lightshot is a free screenshot tool for capturing a selected area of a desktop. It lets users edit an image during capture or later in an online editor, add annotations, save locally, or upload it and share a short link. Supported image formats are PNG, BMP, and JPG. Lightshot can also search for images similar to a selected area on screen. The maker offers desktop applications for Windows and Mac, plus browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. There is no application designed specifically for Linux; the maker describes running it with Wine and says Ubuntu compatibility has been tested. On Windows, a selected screenshot can be copied to the clipboard with Ctrl+C. A prntscr.com account is required to find all screenshots taken through the service. Uploaded images are public to anyone with their URL, and the service is not intended as secure image storage. Lightshot is offered free, with no paid plan or usage limits stated on the listed pages.