ShareX vs Snipping Tool

ShareX is a free, open-source screenshot and screen-recording tool for Windows. It captures the full screen, a selected region, the active window, a scrolling page, or a monitor, and can record video and GIFs. Its image editor provides annotation and redaction tools, while OCR recognizes text in images. After a capture, ShareX can copy, open, shorten, or share links, and supports many upload destinations as well as custom uploaders. It also lists browser extension support and supports many languages, including English, Hindi, and Spanish. ShareX requires no account and has no advertisements. The ShareX Team maintains the software, which has had more than 18 years of active development and over 33 million downloads worldwide. The maker describes its approach as privacy first. The website provides documentation guides and links to related GitHub projects. ShareX is available for Windows.

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.