A CleanShot alternative that arrived with the launcher.
Coco captures a region or a window, lets you draw on it, and puts the result on the clipboard, all on one hotkey. It is not a CleanShot X clone and this page will not pretend it is. What it is: the capture and annotation half of CleanShot X, already inside an app you keep running for other reasons, at no separate price.
Why people look for a CleanShot alternative
CleanShot X is a good piece of software and most people searching for an alternative know that. It costs $29 once for the app, and CleanShot Cloud, the part that uploads a shot and hands you a link, is roughly $8 a month on top. It also comes with a Setapp subscription, which is how a lot of people first met it. The searches start for two reasons. Either the cloud tier turned a one-time purchase into a recurring one, or the licence covers a year of updates and the renewal notice arrived and prompted a fresh look at what is actually being used.
That second group is worth taking seriously, because CleanShot X is much larger than most people's use of it. Scrolling capture, OCR, screen recording, GIF export, self-timer, pinned overlays, desktop-icon hiding, wallpapers behind the shot, a browsable capture history. It is a genuinely deep toolkit. Watch your own hands for a week and the loop is usually the same three moves: grab a region, put an arrow on the thing that broke, paste it into a chat. Everything else is there for the days it is needed, which for many people is a handful of days a year.
That narrow loop is what Coco covers. Press the hotkey, the screen freezes, then drag or click and draw. The annotated image is on the clipboard before you have switched back to the window you were in. Coco is a launcher first, so the hotkey habit and the menu-bar slot are already spent. The rest of this page is the capture in detail, the honest table of what CleanShot X does that Coco does not, and the cases where the right answer is to keep paying for CleanShot X.
What Coco's capture actually does
One hotkey, three ways to choose the frame
Control-Command-A by default, and you can change it. Every display dims and freezes, so a tooltip or a dropdown stays open while you select it, which is the single most common reason a capture has to be retaken. Drag for a region. Click a window and the selection snaps to its edges. Press F, or click the mark in the corner, for the whole display. Two monitors get their own overlay each. Esc abandons the whole thing and writes nothing anywhere.
Annotation that opens by itself
Let go of the drag and a toolbar appears beside the selection. Arrow, rectangle, ellipse, line, freehand pen, text, each on a single-letter shortcut: A, R, O, L, P, T. Shapes draw outlined or filled, in five colours and three stroke weights. Command-Z steps back, Shift-Command-Z forward. V is the select tool, so you can still nudge the capture bounds after you have started drawing. There is no separate editor window and no file to open first.
A mosaic brush, because most shots have something in them
Press M and whatever the brush touches becomes a block of pixels. Three sizes, round or square tip. This is the tool for the email address in a support screenshot and the licence key in a settings pane. The same brush switches to emoji stamps if a sticker reads better than a grey square, either from a small palette or any character you type. It is a brush rather than a rectangle, so a column of names in a table is covered in one stroke.
The clipboard is the destination
Return, a double-click inside the selection, or the tick on the toolbar puts the annotated PNG on the clipboard, with a TIFF copy alongside for the apps that only read that. Command-V into Slack, an email or a bug tracker. No banner, no sound, no thumbnail to catch before it slides away. Pixels come off the display at its real resolution, so a Retina screen gives a Retina file. The Save button copies first and then opens the standard save sheet, defaulting to Pictures/Coco/Screenshots.
And what it does not do
No scrolling or full-page capture. No OCR. No screen recording and no GIF export. No self-timer, no pinned floating overlays, no desktop-icon hiding, no decorative backgrounds, no capture history to browse, and nothing is ever uploaded, so there is no share link either. Five of those are the reasons to buy CleanShot X, and if you use any of them weekly then this page has already answered your question in the other direction.
CleanShot X and Coco, row by row
Read the top block first: those rows are where the two do the same job, and there is no meaningful daylight between them for a region grab with an arrow on it. The middle block is CleanShot X's actual case, and it is a strong one. The bottom block is Coco's, and it is a different argument entirely, because those rows are not screenshot features at all. They are the reason the app is running in the first place.
On price, CleanShot X is $29 once for the app with a year of updates, plus about $8 a month if you want the cloud and share links, or it comes bundled with Setapp. Coco is $99 for one Mac, $49 at the launch price, bought once, with a seven-day trial that needs no card and no account. The capture is not an add-on or an upsell inside it; it is one of the things the hotkey does, next to the launcher, the clipboard and the calculator.
| CleanShot X | Coco | |
|---|---|---|
| Region and window capture | ||
| Screen frozen while you select | ||
| Annotation toolbar opens on capture | ||
| Blur or pixelate part of the image | ||
| Annotated result straight to the clipboard | ||
| Scrolling and full-page capture | ||
| Text recognition (OCR) | ||
| Screen recording and GIF export | ||
| Self-timer and delayed capture | ||
| Pin a capture as a floating window | ||
| Hide desktop icons before shooting | ||
| Cloud upload with a share link | ||
| Browsable history of past captures | ||
| App launcher on the same hotkey | ||
| Clipboard history that keeps images | ||
| Everything it does is in the one-time price |
Trying it without uninstalling anything
Switch capture on
Capture ships off, so nothing changes until you ask for it. Open Coco's settings, pick Screenshot, and turn on screenshot capture. The shortcut field below it holds Control-Command-A. Click it to record a different combination, or clear it if you would rather leave your existing capture hotkeys alone for now.
Grant screen recording, then restart
macOS hands no app the pixels on your screen without permission. The first time you press the hotkey, Coco explains this and opens Privacy and Security to the Screen Recording list. Tick Coco there and relaunch the app. The permission genuinely does not take effect until the restart; that is Apple's rule, not a bug.
Take a real shot, not a test one
Wait for the next screenshot you actually have to send someone. Press the hotkey, drag the region, put an arrow where it needs to go, mosaic anything that should not travel, press Return and paste. That round trip is the whole product, and it either felt shorter than your current one or it did not.
Check the middle block of the table against your week
After a week, look back at the captures you took. If none of them needed a scroll, an OCR pass, a recording or a share link, CleanShot X was doing one job you now have covered. If two of them did, keep CleanShot X and let Coco handle the launcher and clipboard. Both on one Mac is a normal setup, not a compromise.
Questions people actually ask
- What is the best CleanShot X alternative for Mac?
- It depends which part of CleanShot X you use. If your captures need scrolling shots, OCR or screen recording, the honest answer is Shottr, which does all three and has a generous free tier, or staying with CleanShot X. If your loop is grab, annotate, paste, then the field is wide and the built-in macOS tools plus Markup already cover a lot of it for free. Coco's case is narrower and worth stating plainly: it does that loop on one hotkey with the annotation toolbar opening automatically, and that hotkey is already bound because the same app is your launcher and clipboard. You are not adding a second menu-bar utility to get it.
- Is there a free CleanShot alternative?
- Yes, and the first one is already installed. Shift-Command-5 gives you region, window and full-screen capture plus screen recording and a timer, and clicking the floating thumbnail opens Markup for arrows, shapes and text. It is free and, for a screenshot going into a folder, sufficient. Shottr is the closest free alternative to CleanShot X specifically, with scrolling capture and OCR at no cost and a paid tier above that. Flameshot is open source and cross-platform, though it feels less at home on macOS. Coco is not free: seven days with no card, then a one-time purchase. What it does not do is charge separately for the capture.
- Does Coco do scrolling screenshots or OCR?
- No to both, and neither is quietly planned behind a coming-soon label. Scrolling capture stitches a tall web page or document into one image, and OCR pulls selectable text out of a picture, and CleanShot X and Shottr both do them well. Coco captures what is visible on the display at the moment you press the hotkey, and nothing more. If you file bug reports against long pages or regularly lift text out of screenshots, that is a real gap and you should choose on it. Everything else on this page is written on the assumption that you read this answer first.
- Is CleanShot X still worth it in 2026?
- For a heavy user, yes. Nothing in the free tier of this category matches the breadth: scrolling capture, OCR, recording with GIF export, pinned overlays, a self-timer, desktop cleanup and a searchable history, all in one well-built app for $29 once. The subscription question is separate. CleanShot Cloud at around $8 a month is genuinely useful if your job is sending links to colleagues all day, and pure overhead if you paste into Slack instead. Decide those two purchases separately. Plenty of people should buy the app and never the cloud, and a smaller number need neither because their captures never leave the clipboard.
- Can I run Coco and CleanShot X at the same time?
- Yes, and it is a reasonable setup. They are separate apps with separate hotkeys and neither takes over the system capture shortcuts, so Shift-Command-5 keeps working too. A common arrangement is CleanShot X kept on its hotkey for the scrolling and recording work, and Coco on Control-Command-A for the quick grab-and-paste that happens twenty times a day. That one is faster because the annotation toolbar is already open and the result lands on the clipboard. Nothing here requires a choice on day one. If Coco's capture ends up unused, turning it off in settings restores the previous arrangement exactly.
- Where do Coco's screenshots go, and is anything uploaded?
- Nothing is uploaded, ever. There is no account, no server and no cloud tier in Coco's capture, so a screenshot exists in exactly two places you control. Pressing Return puts it on the clipboard as PNG, with a TIFF copy for apps that need it, and it also appears in Coco's clipboard history alongside your other copies. Pressing Save copies it and then opens the standard macOS save sheet, defaulting to Pictures/Coco/Screenshots, with a name like Coco 2026-09-03 14-05-22.png. You can save anywhere else. There is no gallery of past captures inside Coco, because the clipboard history and the folder already are one.
Copy the prompt, or send it straight to the AI you already use — it drives Coco through the same commands you would type yourself.
Install the Coco skill (npx skills add butterflydream-ai/Coco --skill coco -g -y), then use coco to help me with A CleanShot alternative that arrived with the launcher..