CleanShot: The Mac screenshot tool now does more with video
CleanShot has been our default screenshot tool on the Mac for over two years. We’ve recommended it more times than we can count, and it’s one of the few apps we install immediately on every new Mac without reconsidering.
The latest version 5 is the biggest update since we started using it — and the first one that significantly expands what CleanShot can do without changing what makes it useful.
This review reflects hands-on testing of CleanShot 5.0 on an M2 MacBook Air running macOS Tahoe. If you’re a new buyer, we’ll tell you whether it’s worth starting with.
About CleanShot
CleanShot is an all-in-one screenshot and screen recording tool built exclusively for macOS. It can replace the native screenshot utility for many Mac users — and then goes significantly further. Over time it has become the default capture tool for Mac power users, designers, developers, and writers who need more control than Command-Shift-3 offers without the complexity of a dedicated video production suite.
The app lives in your menu bar, integrates with macOS keyboard shortcuts, and feels native within the first day of use. That hasn’t changed in version 5.
What has changed is significant.
What’s new in CleanShot 5
The headline addition is Studio Mode — built around a brand-new video editor that activates after you finish a screen recording. Smart Zooms, cursor cleanup, trimming, motion blur, video backgrounds, and hardware-accelerated Apple Silicon export are all part of it. We cover Studio Mode in depth in the screen recording section below.
Beyond Studio Mode, version 5 brings a redesigned settings experience, post-recording adjustments, and a collection of smaller refinements across the app.
What It’s Like to Actually Use CleanShot Every Day
CleanShot doesn’t have a traditional app window. It lives in your menu bar, stays out of the way until you need it, and integrates with macOS keyboard shortcuts so completely that after the first week it stops feeling like a third-party tool.
That’s the experience version 5 preserves — and it’s worth establishing before getting into specific features, because it’s the foundation everything else is built on.
Here’s how it holds up across the areas that matter most.
Setup and getting started
CleanShot 5 requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. You can install and set it up in a few minutes. The process takes less time if you get the app from a source like Setapp.
After installation, CleanShot appears in your menu bar. During setup, you’ll need to grant permissions for Accessibility and Screen Recording. Once that’s done, you can configure CleanShot’s shortcuts and capture behavior to fit your workflow.
User interface and user experience
We always use keyboard shortcuts for typical screenshots, such as full-screen and window. However, when you want something special like All-in-One, OCR, or Scrolling Capture, you need to access the widget. Either way, the UI is intuitive and easy to navigate.
It is also convenient that CleanShot integrates so well with macOS. After a day or two, the app feels like a native feature. Therefore, we have more praise for CleanShot’s overall User Experience. The constant improvement pace is genuinely impressive — CleanShot ships meaningful updates regularly, and it shows in how the app has evolved.
Screenshot capture
As we said, CleanShot lets you capture a variety of screenshots: All-In-One, Capture Area, Capture Window, Full-screen, and Scrolling Capture.
Depending on the option, you get a different set of on-screen controls. You can also tell CleanShot what to do after the capture, whether that means opening the Quick-Access Overlay, saving, copying the file to the clipboard, or handing it to one of the built-in processing tools.
The cloud service takes it a step further by uploading the screenshot for you and giving you a shareable URL.
You get the standard controls for background, shadow, and screenshot quality, along with the choice to freeze the screen or keep the cursor in the shot. You can also control the output format and other capture settings to fit your workflow. Plus, CleanShot integrates seamlessly with macOS, and the latest version supports Raycast Chat so that you can pull up your captures from there.
Editing options
Capturing what you want is one thing, while a great screenshot also needs the right editing tools. CleanShot gives you three of them, and you can mix and match until the shot looks right.
The first interface handles cropping and resizing with custom measurements or presets, and it also changes the image’s background and aspect ratio. We use this section to bring two different screenshots onto a single canvas. Once the crop is done, the annotation tools let you drop in shapes, arrows, and text elements, and more importantly, redact or highlight information.
Third is the Background tool, which does far more than add backgrounds, offering background images, colors, alignment, and a long list of aspect ratios. Its presets are a lifesaver if you regularly create content for a blog or social media profiles, so the editing side of CleanShot saves you the most time. We maintain a large set of presets for media, including screenshots and feedback notes.
Screen recording & studio mode
Screen recording has always been part of CleanShot, but version 5 makes it considerably more useful after you stop recording.
When you start a recording, you can choose Record in Studio Mode. Once the recording is finished, CleanShot opens it in the new Studio Mode editor rather than sending you to a separate video application.
The biggest convenience is Smart Zooms. Studio Mode can automatically identify moments where the action on screen would benefit from a closer view, then add smooth zooms around your cursor. More importantly, these aren’t fixed effects: you can select a Zoom point on the timeline and adjust the area, focus, and animation yourself.
The cursor controls are similarly practical for tutorial videos. You can change the cursor size and appearance, hide it entirely, add click effects, and control how it behaves while moving, resting, or typing. Keystrokes can also be displayed on screen and customized in size, position, and appearance.
Basic editing is straightforward. You can trim the recording, cut unwanted sections, and make simple adjustments directly on the timeline. Studio Mode also adds motion blur and lets you customize the video background and the appearance of the recording window, including its size, margins, shadow, and rounded corners.
If you record with a microphone or webcam, those can be adjusted after recording as well. You can control microphone and system audio, while the webcam overlay can be resized and repositioned.
This is where CleanShot 5 starts to feel different from the version we’ve used for years. You can record a software walkthrough, clean up the cursor, emphasize important areas, remove mistakes, and give the final video some visual polish without leaving CleanShot.
It still isn’t a replacement for a dedicated video editor when you need a deeper timeline, complex transitions, advanced audio work, or more elaborate post-production. But for software tutorials, product walkthroughs, documentation, and quick demos, Studio Mode covers a surprisingly large part of the workflow.
Additional features
Before we get to the extras, it helps to know how customizable CleanShot actually is. You can change almost every aspect of how it works, from file formats to whether your screenshots carry a shadow, so fitting the tool into your workflow is easier than you might think.
OCR
CleanShot’s OCR mode makes it a viable replacement for apps like TextSniper. When you want to copy text you can’t normally select, activate OCR and select the relevant area; CleanShot extracts the text directly to your clipboard.
CleanShot Cloud
Cloud makes it easy to upload a screenshot, get a shareable link, and pass it around publicly or within your team. You’d love this option if you organize screenshots for software documentation or something more enterprise-grade, while the basic cloud features are included in CleanShot’s one-time purchase plan.
These are only a few of the 50+ features CleanShot offers, and the developers keep adding more through regular updates. The recent Smart Highlighter, for instance, detects the text size in a screenshot and adjusts the brush size to match.
Another one we love is custom file naming, so instead of random names, you can include your company name, the date, or the app name in the file name. Small things make a huge difference in a complex workflow.
A word on performance
Though it packs so many features, CleanShot has a minimal software footprint, so even at full capacity, it does not eat up many resources. That matters when you are multitasking — the last thing you need is a screenshot utility consuming RAM and CPU in the background.
We never ran into that, even while leaning on the Quick-Access Overlay and the deeply integrated Capture History. We must also add how optimized the brand-new Studio Mode is. Even when attempting Full HD+ video with ample modifications, CleanShot did power through.
Pricing
The app plus Cloud Basic costs $35 as a one-time purchase and includes all features and 1GB of cloud storage. If you want the full cloud features, it is $10 per user per month for unlimited storage and custom branding along with team collaboration options. In addition, students and existing PixelSnap owners get a discount.
There is no free trial, although the 30-day money-back guarantee makes up for it. You can also get CleanShot through Setapp subscription, and its 7-day trial lets you try the full version alongside 200+ other apps. Overall, given how much capture, editing, and recording functionality CleanShot brings together, the pricing is reasonable.
The Final Take
We’ll just say it: CleanShot is still the first screenshot tool we’d install on any new Mac, and version 5 makes that recommendation easier to give than ever.
The screenshot workflow hasn’t changed. Everything that made CleanShot the right call before version 5 is still there, still works the same way, and is now surrounded by a more polished experience. Getting a screen recording that looks professional used to mean opening a second app. Studio Mode removes that requirement for most use cases — software walkthroughs, product demos, tutorial clips, documentation videos — without changing what CleanShot fundamentally is. It remains a screenshot-first tool. It just no longer stops there.
If you’re an existing user weighing the upgrade cost, we’ve answered that question separately — Is CleanShot 5 Worth the Upgrade?
For everyone else: CleanShot is the easiest version of this tool we’ve ever recommended.
Updated on Sept. 9, 2026, by TheSweetBits Team