Greenshot vs Snipping Tool

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.

Snipping Tool is a free Windows utility for capturing screen images and video, then editing, saving, and sharing them. Image captures can use freeform, rectangular, window, or full-screen modes; video snips use a separate overlay. Windows+Shift+S opens image capture, while Windows+Shift+R opens video capture. A delay control provides a one-to-five-second countdown. Image snips support pen, highlighter, shapes, emojis, erasing, and cropping. Text actions use OCR to extract selected or all text and can redact email addresses or phone numbers. Microsoft says recognition runs locally on the device. Captures save automatically to the Screenshots folder, with settings to change saving behavior or the default folder. Recorded video can open in Clipchamp for editing, including captions or audio. The app ships with Windows 10 and Windows 11 and can be obtained from the Microsoft Store if missing. Scrolling capture is not supported.