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 screen. TechSmith’s Snagit is the software for the job. The app’s previous excellent updates added new tools, revamped existing features, and streamlined the interface. Snagit 2021 polishes the experience even further. Snagit once again snags our Editors’ Choice award for its flexibility, power, and ease of use, despite being pricier than competitors Ashampoo Snap, Screencast-O-Matic, and Windows Snip & Sketch.
Snagit’s Price
Priced at a relatively expensive $49.99, Snagit is a screen-capture utility for Windows and macOS. The base price grants you a two-device license, while an optional $12.49 “Maintenance” download adds several perks, including a guaranteed update to next year’s version, priority phone support, and access to the Snagit Certification course that teaches you how to use the software. Existing owners can upgrade for $34.99, a price that includes a license for next year’s version. In addition, TechSmith has a $274 bundle that includes Snagit and Camtasia, the company’s education-focused screen-recording and video-editing software (if separately purchased, they’d cost you $298).
If you need basic screen-capture features but don’t want to spend any money, the free Windows Snip & Sketch is a solid alternative that comes baked into every Windows 10 PC. Please note that Windows 10 has another free, built-in screen-capture utility: Snipping Tool. You can pretty much ignore it, as it’s been surpassed by Snip & Sketch. In fact, Microsoft is phasing out the app in a future update. Screencast-O-Matic’s free version provides many useful screen capture and recording tools, and upgrading to the deluxe version for $1.65 per month unlocks even more great features, especially for video editors. Ashampoo Snap, another strong Snagit competitor, costs $39.99.
New Snagit Features
Instead of some major new innovation, Snagit 2021 mostly improves on last year’s terrific new features designed to improve the user experience. Overall performance speed is also faster.
Combine Images is a terrific feature that lets you display multiple screen captures in one image. 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 mark up the combined photo with arrows, text, and other items. With Snagit 2021, you can now combine images into a video or a GIF with the integrated GIF maker. Add some 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 2021, teams can now share custom color palettes, design styles, and fonts as a single and re-usable aesthetic scheme.
Simplify Tool is for people who frequently update a particular image—presenters immediately come to mind. With Simplify Tool, you can create Simplified User Interface (SUI) graphics, stripped-down versions of captured images that just contain 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 even better in Snagit 2021, as it’s able to intelligently recognize and simplify complex interfaces into readable and customizable SUI designs.
Start Snagging
When you launch Snagit, the app displays a mini control box that peeks out from the top edge of your display. It sports a big, red 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 also lets you press the PrtSc key (you can also 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 horizontally or vertically. It’s great for capturing items from infinite-scroll webpages. In a nice touch, you can lock the tool so that it captures images in either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios. Snagit also supports 4K resolution.
If you’ve tried other screen-capture apps, you know that it isn’t easy to find one that can capture cascading menus and other Windows features that tend to disappear when you press a key. With Snagit, you simply set the delay counter to the number of seconds that you prefer (up to 60) and tap the capture shortcut key. You can also set screen-capture interval times (every few seconds, minutes or hours), and schedule a screen capture. Ashampoo Snap gives you many timed-capture options, many of which are similar to what Snagit offers. Snip & Sketch, on the other hand, simply gives you three- or 10-second delay options. Premium Screencast-O-Matic users can zoom in while recording the screen.
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 Illustrator. In addition, its video-recording feature lets you include an audio track from either a microphone or Windows’ own audio output—for example, from an MP3 recording on disk 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 on the same Wi-Fi network.
Snagit’s editor serves two purposes. It opens captured images and houses all of your screencaps. One great thing about Snagit’s image saving is that any screenshot you snag is accessible from the program cache, even if you don’t explicitly save it. Screencast-O-Matic and Ashampoo Snap do the same, although Snap’s interface is far too busy, with menus running across the entire perimeter.
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. Snip & Sketch supports even fewer formats: JPG, GIF, and PNG. Screencast-O-Matic only exports PNG files.
Video and Sharing
Snagit’s earlier versions recorded video in AVI format, but starting with version 11, Snagit adopted the MP4 format. Ashampoo Snap gives you the option to save as WMV or AVI; Screencast-O-Matic exports as AVI, MP4, or FLV; and Windows Sketch & Snip doesn’t let you record video at all. Recording video is as simple as ever, but the software gives you the option to switch feeds by jumping between your screen and webcam. This could prove handy for people who craft online presentations.
You can preview captured videos in Snagit’s video editor, capture individual frames, and trim unwanted sections. Captured video can be shared to Camtasia, Dropbox, FTP, Google Drive, TechSmith Relay, ScreenCast.com, or YouTube. You can share still images to even more destinations, including Clipboard, Email, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
Returning Features
The newest Snagit has many returning image-related features, such as Watermark, Color Adjustment, and Highlight. We’ll highlight a few of our frequently used favorites.
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 doing 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 more than 2,000 pre-made Stamps, the app’s name for icons, symbols, cursors, and other items. Stamp Search and Browsing lets you comb through the stamp library using keywords instead of poring through menus. Like Favorite Tools, Stamp Search and Browsing is a time saver.
Like Ashampoo Snap, Snagit has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text-reading functionality that lets you pull text from screen captures, now compatible with Spanish and Portuguese. It’s a terrific feature that can prove useful when creating a presentation.
One essential feature for anyone making screenshots of internet applications is the Blur tool, which comes in handy when you want to mask elements in an image—obscuring email addresses or phone numbers in screens that are going to be publicly shared, for example.
Even better, 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 by automatically applying an effect or sending the capture directly to a desired destination.
Snagtastic
Snagit is a beautifully designed, reliable, and efficient app that does just about everything a screen-capture app should do. Rival products, such as Ashampoo Snap, Screencast-O-Matic, and Windows Snip & Sketch, don’t match Snagit’s all-around functionality. Ashampoo Snap has many Snagit features and costs five dollars less, but Snagit’s $5 premium gives you more options. Screen-O-Cast offers an impressive amount of features for free, but its paid version also can’t quite surpass Snagit.
Of course, if you’re using Windows, you can fire up the built-in Snip & Sketch for fast-and-easy screen captures, but it won’t be enough for serious screenshot takers willing to pay for a premium experience. In that case, Snagit is the answer. Snagit is an outstanding app that stands tall as the PCMag Editors’ Choice for screen-capture utilities.
