Presenters, journalists, bloggers, meme creators, forum posters, IT workers, and anyone else who works or plays online will eventually need to capture what's on their screens. They should consider TechSmith's Snagit (starting at $39 per year), which is the best screenshot utility we've tested, thanks to its wealth of features (including new AI tools) and a polished, easy-to-navigate interface. Despite the subscription-only software being significantly pricier than competitors' offerings, Snagit is our Editors' Choice award winner for paid screen-capture utilities due to its flexibility and power.

Plans and Prices

Snagit is available for macOS and Windows, but it cannot be purchased outright. Instead, Snagit is only available as an annual subscription, which makes it a more significant commitment than Ashampoo Snap (an app that lets you go either the subscription or purchase route). Individuals pay $39 per year, while businesses pay $48 per year. Meanwhile, students and educators receive discounts: $20 and $39.36 per year, respectively. Enterprises must request a quote from a Snagit representative. Regardless of what you pay, a Snagit subscription grants you all the latest features on an ongoing basis.

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If you need basic screen-capture features but don't want to spend money, the free Windows Snipping Tool is a quality alternative that comes preinstalled on every Windows 11 PC. Similarly, the free version of ScreenPal offers numerous useful screen capture and recording tools. However, upgrading to ScreenPal's Solo Deluxe version ($4 per month, billed annually) unlocks even more helpful features, particularly for video editors.

Taking Screen Captures With Snagit

When you launch Snagit, the app appears as a mini control box featuring a big icon for taking a screenshot and smaller buttons for various settings options. The screen-capture icon is only one of many possible ways to start a screen capture. By default, Snagit lets you press the PrtSc key (or create your own shortcut) to capture a portion of your screen by dragging crosshairs across a specific area.

Once you highlight a section, you can clip it or enter the app's incredibly useful panoramic scrolling mode, which makes it a breeze to clip tall or wide images by scrolling vertically or horizontally. It's ideal for capturing items from infinite-scroll webpages. In a nice touch, you can lock the tool to capture images in either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios. Snagit also supports 4K resolution.

If you've tried snapping screens, you know that it isn't easy to capture cascading menus and other Windows features that tend to disappear when you press a key. Snagit makes it easy thanks to its counter tools. You simply set the delay counter to the number of seconds you prefer (up to 60) and tap the capture shortcut key—that's it. Likewise, you can also set screen-capture interval times (every few seconds, minutes, or hours) and schedule a screen capture; Snagit gives you a lot of freedom to capture screens in the way you want. Ashampoo Snap and Windows Snipping Tool have similar delay options. Premium ScreenPal users can zoom in on screen areas while recording, which is useful for highlighting certain elements.

(Credit: Snagit/PCMag)

Snagit also lets you easily apply special effects to an image (like grayscale, text, arrows, and borders) without aspiring to be a super-tool like Adobe Photoshop. It's simple and intuitive; you don't need in-depth instruction to get your desired effects. Need to add audio? Snagit's video-recording tool lets you include an audio track from either a microphone or Windows' own audio output—for example, from an MP3 recording or a YouTube video. TechSmith's related, and free, Fuse mobile apps for Android and iOS let you export images from your smartphone to a desktop running Snagit (or Camtasia) if the devices are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Alternately, you can sync files using an external cloud storage service, as Snagit does not have its own. That's pretty easy to do, but Droplr does a better job of consolidating files into a single, easy-to-use cloud ecosystem that works across all devices.

Snagit's editor serves two purposes: it opens captured images and houses all of your screencaps. In a much-appreciated move, all screenshots you capture are accessible from the program cache, even if you don't explicitly save them. Ashampoo Snap and Ashampoo Snap do the same, although Snap's interface is far too busy.

From the editor, you can save images to disk in one of 19 formats, including BMP, GIF, JPG, and PSD. You can even add hotspots that act as hyperlinks if you save your capture as MHTML, PDF, SWF, or Snagit's own SNAG format. Ashampoo supports just nine formats, including JPG, PDF, PNG, and WMV. ScreenPal only exports BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, and TIFF files. The Snipping Tool supports only a few formats: JPG, GIF, and PNG.

Taking Video Captures With Snagit

Snagit's earlier versions recorded video in AVI format, but starting with version 11, Snagit adopted the MP4 format. Ashampoo Snap offers the option to save as WMV or AVI, while ScreenPal exports as AVI, MP4, or FLV. In contrast, the Snipping Tool only records MP4s. Recording video is as simple as ever, but the software gives you the option to switch feeds by jumping between your screen and webcam, or combine both feeds into a single stream. This proves handy for people who craft online presentations.

(Credit: Snagit/PCMag)

Picture-in-Picture Video lets Snagit simultaneously record your screen and face (the latter via a webcam). With it, presenters can use their face, body language, and whatever visual aids they may have on hand to better explain what's happening on screen, as well as add more personality to recordings. Vimeo Record has similar functionality.

You can preview captured videos in Snagit's video editor, capture individual frames, and trim unwanted sections. To improve sound quality, Snagit allows you to clean up audio in your videos using its AI-powered Noise Removal tool. In testing, Snagit did a good job of suppressing background fan noise, but we learned that the noise-cancellation tech only works if you activate it before recording; you can't remove noise in post.

You can share captured video to Camtasia, Dropbox, FTP, Google Drive, TechSmith Relay, ScreenCast.com, or YouTube.

Smart Redact, Combine Images, and Other Useful Features

Years of improvements and refinements have given Snagit a robust set of features. For example, it now contains several additional AI-powered tools for automating specific tasks, such as automatically blurring phone numbers and email addresses in screenshots (Smart Redact). It worked well in testing, although it sometimes missed a number or letter. Yes, AI is a bit of an annoying, inescapable buzzword across all of tech right now, and adding too many features runs the risk of making Snagit bloated. However, considering how seemingly simple and straightforward screen capture is, the added depth is appreciated in a paid product.

Combine Images is a terrific feature that lets you display multiple screen captures in one image, and it's easy to do. You simply highlight the images you want to combine and select Combine in Template. As with other images, you can annotate the combined photo with arrows, text, and other elements. Similarly, you can combine images into a video or a GIF with the integrated GIF maker. You can add narration and annotations to make a how-to guide or a dumb social media meme. 

Downloading, creating, sharing, and modifying templates helps team projects look professional, cohesive, and creative. With Snagit, teams can share custom color palettes, design styles, and fonts as a single and reusable aesthetic scheme. 

The Simplify Tool is designed for folks who frequently update a specific image—presenters, in particular, come to mind. With the Simplify Tool, you can create Simplified User Interface (SUI) graphics, which are stripped-down versions of captured images containing only the bare essentials that you use on a regular basis. This way, you can start with a clean palette each time, without the need to delete any previously used elements. This feature works well, as it intelligently recognizes and simplifies complex interfaces into readable and customizable SUI designs. 

If you frequently use Snagit features, such as Arrow or Blur, click the Favorites Tool star icon in the menu to add the tool to the Quick Styles box. After that, you simply click the icons in the Quick Styles box instead of digging through menus when you want to access said tools. It's a time-saver.

Snagit features a ridiculous number of pre-made Stamps, the app's name for icons, symbols, cursors, and other items. Fortunately, you can browse the stamp library using keywords, another significant time-saver, rather than having to pore through menus.

Like Ashampoo Snap, Snagit features Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text-reading functionality that lets you extract text from screen captures. It supports English, as well as international languages, such as French, German, and Spanish. It's a terrific feature that successfully pulled words from our Google Doc in testing.

Additionally, Snagit lets you create presets that determine exactly what happens when you take a screenshot. For example, you can set Snagit to send all snaps to your Pictures folder and apply a favorite visual filter. This is an extremely helpful feature, as it lets you skip the editing process.