ScreenArt Pro vs Greenshot: upgrading from the free Windows classic

Why people are finally replacing Greenshot

Greenshot has been on a lot of Windows machines for a very long time. It is free, open source, light, and it does the thing: press PrtSc, drag a region, draw an arrow, save or paste. IT departments installed it by default. Plenty of people have never used anything else.

It is also, by the project’s own release history, a tool from another era. The last stable Windows release is 1.2.10 from 2017. The 1.3 line has been in preview for years. The editor paints onto the bitmap, obfuscation is a rectangle you draw, the scrolling capture is for Internet Explorer, and the DPI model predates the 4K laptop on which most people now run it. None of that is a criticism of volunteers; it is simply where the tool stopped.

What sends people looking is usually one of three moments: a blurry capture on a 150% display, a screenshot that shipped with a customer’s email in it, or the first time they needed a video. ScreenArt Pro is the Windows app built for all three. This article compares the two honestly: what Greenshot still does well, where it stopped, and what ScreenArt Pro does instead.

The short version in one table

	ScreenArt Pro	Greenshot
Price	€1.99 a month, or €24.99 once with two years of updates	Free, open source (GPL); a paid Mac version in the App Store
Platform	Windows 10 and 11 (x64). Mac planned.	Windows; a separate Mac app
Last stable release	Updated regularly	1.2.10, 2017; 1.3 in preview
High-DPI and mixed scaling	Physical pixels on every monitor through Windows Graphics Capture	Known rough edges on 125% and 150% displays
Output	sRGB-tagged lossless PNG; Enhanced Render for UI text	PNG, JPG, BMP, GIF
Capture	Window, area, display	Region, window, full screen, last region; scrolling in Internet Explorer
Editor	Tool rail, stage and inspector; counters, arrows, boxes, captions, highlights, blur as editable layers	Built-in editor: arrows, rectangles, ellipses, text, highlight, obfuscate, counters; painted into the image
Backgrounds and framing	Backdrops, corners, shadow, window lighting, 3D tilt, Beautify, brand kits	Border and shadow effects
Hiding secrets	Smart Redact: automatic detection of emails, keys, tokens, card numbers, IPs; colour-matched covers; stills and video	Obfuscate by hand (pixelate or blur)
Recording	Auto-zoom on clicks, smoothed cursor, captions, keystroke badges, local subtitles, intros, transitions, GPU effects	None
Export destinations	File, clipboard, share button	File, clipboard, printer, email, Office apps, Imgur and photo-site plugins
AI agent control	MCP server, 25 tools: capture, sequence, record, replay	None
Offline	Everything on the PC	Yes

Greenshot’s feature list and release history were read from getgreenshot.org and its GitHub project in October 2026.

What Greenshot does well

• It is free and open. No account, no telemetry, source you can read, and a licence that lets a company install it on every desk.
• It is light and quick. PrtSc, drag, done. It has never got in anyone’s way.
• The export menu is wide. Clipboard, file, printer, email, straight into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote, and photo sites through plugins.
• The editor covers the basics. Arrows, boxes, ellipses, text, highlight, counters and obfuscate.
• It has outlasted a lot of paid tools. Reliability counts.

If you grab a region twice a week and paste it into an email, Greenshot is still fine and you can stop reading. The rest of this article is about the three moments above.

Where Greenshot stopped

The 4K laptop

Greenshot 1.2 predates Windows per-monitor DPI scaling. On a 125% or 150% display, and especially on a laptop plugged into a monitor with a different scale, users report blurry captures, selection rectangles that do not match the pointer, and dialogs that render small. These are open issues the 1.3 preview addresses, but 1.3 has been a preview for years.

ScreenArt Pro treats mixed-DPI, fractional scaling, HDR and wide-gamut displays as the normal case. Capture comes through Windows Graphics Capture at the physical pixels of each display, on every monitor at once, and goes out as an sRGB-tagged lossless PNG, so a 12px label is as crisp as it was drawn and the colours survive the trip through a browser. Enhanced Render then reconstructs captured UI text and flat geometry at the output resolution where it is confident, labelled as derived. The promise on the home page is “the highest-quality screenshots on Windows”, and the 4K laptop is where it shows most.

The email in the frame

Greenshot’s obfuscate tool is a rectangle you draw. It works when you remember, and it does nothing about the one in the CC line you did not see.

ScreenArt Pro’s Smart Redact runs text recognition on your PC and finds email addresses, API keys, bearer tokens and JWTs, card numbers and IBANs, phone numbers, IP addresses and connection strings with a password in them, then covers each one in the colour sampled from around it, flat or gradient, so it reads as part of the page rather than a black block. Every match is listed by type with a count; switch one off, switch it to Blur, Pixelate or Secure, or draw one by hand. Secure flattens the pixels so the text cannot be recovered. It works the same way on video, for every frame a secret is visible. For anyone screenshotting a ticket queue, a CRM or a terminal, this is the feature that removes a review step.

The first video

Greenshot takes stills. The day you need a 30-second clip of a feature, you are installing something else.

ScreenArt Pro records the screen and opens the take in an editor where the polish is already on the timeline: a zoom that follows your clicks, a smoothed cursor you can scale up or give a glass look, captions and keystroke badges placed where they happened, subtitles generated on your PC with SRT and VTT export, a magnetic timeline, sixteen intro styles, twelve transitions, a 3D card with motion blur, all rendered on the GPU, exported as MP4, WebM with transparency or GIF in 16:9, 1:1, 4:5 or 9:16. The recording page has the details.

Where ScreenArt Pro goes further still

Annotations you can come back to

In Greenshot the editor paints into the picture; once saved, an arrow is pixels. In ScreenArt Pro counters, arrows, boxes, highlights and captions are layers you move, restyle or delete until you export, with the original capture always one comparison away and the project editable after export. Presets keep the arrow in the README the same shade as the one in the help centre.

A finished picture in one click

Greenshot adds a border and a shadow. Beautify puts the capture on a backdrop with room around it, rounds the corners, drops a soft shadow, lets a window light fall across the card and tilts it in 3D, with annotations and redactions staying on the card. A brand kit saves the look so every screenshot you publish matches the last one.

Your AI agent can take the screenshots

This is the feature no screenshot tool has had before. ScreenArt Pro runs as an MCP server, the open protocol Claude, Codex and most coding assistants use to call tools. Added in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex or any MCP client, your agent can list your windows, read the labels on them, and save a cropped, annotated, branded screenshot of each step, singly or as a numbered set with a manifest, with Smart Redact applied by default. It can record a scripted walkthrough with the real pointer and replay a task you rehearsed once. You approve each session, anything that moves the mouse asks again, and Esc stops everything. Nothing is uploaded. The automation page lists all 25 tools.

“Screenshot every step of the SSO setup for our help centre” is the whole request. For the IT and support teams that standardised on Greenshot, this is the real reason to move: not a nicer editor, but a way to stop taking screenshots by hand.

Where Greenshot is still the right choice

• It has to be free and open source, for licensing or policy reasons.
• You need the Office and printer exports in the capture menu.
• You cannot install anything new and Greenshot is already there.
• A region grab into an email is the whole job.

Price, in full

Greenshot is free on Windows; the Mac version is a small paid app in the App Store.

ScreenArt Pro has two plans, and the whole app is in both:

• €1.99 a month. Every update for as long as you subscribe. Cancel from your account.
• €24.99 once. Two years of updates, then keep the last version you installed for as long as you like.

€24.99 is a fraction of what the other paid tools charge: Snagit is $39 a year, CleanShot X is $35 for one year of updates on a Mac, Screen Studio is $108 a year on a Mac. Polar is the merchant of record, so there is a VAT-compliant invoice at checkout, and both plans have a 14-day refund. Like Greenshot, nothing leaves your PC and no account is needed to run it.

Who should pick which

• Anyone on a high-DPI or multi-monitor setup who cares what the capture looks like: ScreenArt Pro.
• A developer or support agent screenshotting real data: ScreenArt Pro. Smart Redact covers it before the file exists.
• A team that also needs demo clips: ScreenArt Pro. One editor, one brand kit.
• A documentation team: ScreenArt Pro, for the MCP server.
• Someone who needs free and open source, and grabs a region into an email: Greenshot.

The bottom line

Greenshot earned its place and then stopped in 2017. ScreenArt Pro is the Windows screenshot tool for the machines people actually have now: physical pixels on every display, annotations that stay editable, secrets covered on their own, a finished look in one click, a real screen recorder, and an AI agent that can do all of it for you. €1.99 a month or €24.99 once.

Install it next to Greenshot, capture the same window with both on your 150% display, and look at the small text. If it is not the one, the refund takes 14 days.