A free alternative to CleanShot X

CleanShot X is a great paid app. If you want the same everyday workflow — capture, annotate, beautify, share — without paying, try Kadr. It’s free, native and doesn’t need an account.

What you get in Kadr

• Capture an area, a window with its shadow or the whole screen with the familiar ⌘⇧4 / ⌘⇧3 shortcuts, and a preview in the corner.
• Annotate with arrows, shapes, text, numbered steps, highlighter, blur, pixelate, spotlight and magnifier.
• Beautify with gradient backdrops and window, browser, MacBook and iPhone frames.
• Hide private data — e-mails, phone and card numbers, tokens — automatically.
• Scrolling screenshots of long pages and chats.
• OCR and QR: copy text from any image, search your library by text inside screenshots.
• Record your screen to MP4 or GIF with system audio and microphone.
• Pin screenshots on top, make collages, upload to S3 / Cloudflare R2 with the link copied.

Why people switch

• Free, all of it. No trial, no feature limits, no subscription.
• Private. No account and no analytics; screenshots stay on your Mac unless you upload them.
• Native and light. Swift and AppKit, about 3 MB, macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon and Intel.
• 14 interface languages, following your system language.

Install

Paste this into Terminal, or use brew install inkstatim/kadr/kadr:

CleanShot X is a trademark of its owner. Kadr is an independent app and is not affiliated with it.