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. TechSmith's Snagit is the best software for the job. The app's previous updates added new tools, revamped existing features, and streamlined the interface, and Snagit 2022 polishes the experience even further. Despite being significantly pricier than competitors such as Ashampoo Snap, Droplr, Screencast-O-Matic, and Windows Snip & Sketch, Snagit once again snags our Editors' Choice award for screen-capture utilities due to its flexibility, power, and ease of use.
How Much Does Snagit Cost?
Priced at a relatively expensive $62.99, Snagit is available for macOS and Windows. The base price grants you a two-device license. It also gives you one year of the "Maintenance" download, which 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. After the first year, Maintenance cost $12.60 per year to renew if you so choose. Existing Snagit owners can upgrade to the 2022 version 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 money, the free Windows Snip & Sketch is a solid alternative that comes baked into every Windows 10 and Windows 11 PC. Screencast-O-Matic’s free version provides many useful screen capture and recording tools, and upgrading to the deluxe version for $4 per month unlocks even more great features, especially for video editors. A Droplr subscription starts at $6 per month, while Ashampoo Snap, another strong Snagit competitor, costs $39.99.
Snagit's New Features for 2022
As was the case with Snagit 2021, Snagit 2022 mostly improves on terrific new features designed to improve the user experience in previous years, with a couple of standout new features.
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Picture-in-Picture Video finally lets Snagit 2022 you record your screen and face through a webcam at the same time. 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. This brings the software in line with current, video-focused capture utilities, such as the free, video-only Vimeo Record. Video sync is generally improved, too.
Snagit 2022 also improves cloud-sharing functionality across Mac and Windows devices. You can still export to the storage service of your choice, but edits you apply to files now stay more consistent even if you open them on different desktop operating systems. This makes Snagit feel more flexible, a quality we also appreciated in Droplr.
How to Use Snagit
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. To get past this Wi-Fi restriction, you'll need to sync your files across an outside cloud storage service, and then open that storage to access those files on whatever device you want. That's pretty easy to do, but Droplr does a better job putting all your files into one easy cloud ecosystem for all devices.
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 With Snagit
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, or combine both feeds into one. This proves 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 Snagit 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.
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 mark up the combined photo with arrows, text, and other items. With Snagit, 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, 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, as it's able to intelligently recognize and simplify 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 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.
Is Snagit Worth It?
Snagit is a beautifully designed, reliable, and efficient app that does just about everything screen-capture software should do. Rival products such as Ashampoo Snap, Droplr, Screencast-O-Matic, and Windows Snip & Sketch simply don't match Snagit's all-around functionality. Ashampoo Snap has many Snagit features and costs less, but Snagit's $23 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 PCMag Editors' Choice winner for screen-capture utilities.
For more, check out How to Capture Screenshots in Windows 11.
Snagit continues its reign as the screen-capture utility of choice. The app costs more than competitors, but its strong and versatile toolset remains unmatched.
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