ScreenArt Pro vs Gyazo: the capture tool that uploads every screenshot by design, and the one that uploads none

Why this comparison is about one design decision

Gyazo’s pitch is honest and it is the whole product: capture, and the link is already on your clipboard. There is no save dialog because there is no saving. The screenshot goes to Gyazo’s servers as it is taken, and what you get back is a URL. Apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, a free plan, and a Pro plan for under fifty dollars a year. For pasting a picture into a chat, nothing is faster.

That decision, upload first and ask nothing, is what this article is about. It is good for the meme and bad for everything else, because the tool cannot know which one it just captured. ScreenArt Pro is the opposite design: nothing is uploaded, ever, and the secrets are found and covered before the file exists. This article compares the two honestly, including the things Gyazo gets right that Lightshot gets wrong.

The short version in one table

	ScreenArt Pro	Gyazo
Price	€1.99 a month, or €24.99 once with two years of updates	Free with limits. Pro about $3.99 a month billed yearly (about $47.88 a year) or $4.99 monthly, from listings
Platform	Windows 10 and 11 (x64). Mac planned.	Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Edge
Where the screenshot goes	Your disk; sharing is a button you press	Gyazo’s servers, automatically, as the capture is taken
Who can see a capture	Nobody; there is no upload	Anyone with the link; long random IDs; passwords on Pro; team-only on Teams
Free plan limit	No free plan; 14-day refund	Unlimited uploads, browse only the 10 latest, 7-second video, ads, watermarked replays
Account required	No	Yes, to see more than the latest captures
Capture	Window, area, display; physical pixels at any DPI scale; sRGB-tagged lossless PNG	Region, with GIF and short video; replay on Windows
Editor	Tool rail, stage and inspector; counters, arrows, boxes, captions, highlights, blur as editable layers	Image and video editing on Pro
Backgrounds and framing	Backdrops, corners, shadow, window lighting, 3D tilt, Beautify, brand kits	None
Hiding secrets	Smart Redact: automatic detection of emails, keys, tokens, card numbers, IPs; colour-matched covers; stills and video	By hand, on Pro; nothing automatic on any plan
Recording	Auto-zoom on clicks, smoothed cursor, captions, keystroke badges, local subtitles, intros, transitions, GPU effects	7 seconds free; 10 minutes on Pro; replay 30 seconds on Pro
Search	On-device text recognition drives Smart Redact and element targeting	OCR text search of your uploads, on Pro
AI agent control	MCP server, 25 tools: capture, sequence, record, replay	None
Offline	Everything on the PC	The capture needs the service

Gyazo’s plan limits were read from its own pricing page in October 2026. Its prices are rendered by a script on that page and did not appear in the page text, so the figures above come from dated 2026 listings and should be checked on gyazo.com before you buy.

What Gyazo does well

• It is the fastest path to a link. Capture and paste. Nothing else in this series is quicker when a link is what you want.
• The links are not guessable. Gyazo says its IDs come from a space of 2 to the 128th power, and the links are unlisted. That is a real improvement on short-link services, where strangers have walked the ID space for years.
• It is everywhere. Four operating systems and three browsers, and your captures follow you.
• OCR search on Pro finds the screenshot from three months ago by a word that was in it.
• Passwords on Pro and team-only sharing on Teams exist, which is more than many hosted capture tools give you.

If the thing you capture is a joke for a group chat, Gyazo is fine. The rest of this page is about the screenshot with something in it you would not post on a billboard, and about the fact that Gyazo cannot tell which one it just took.

The privacy case, made plainly

Gyazo’s links are hard to guess, and that is where the good news ends. The design is upload first. With Gyazo the chain of events is: you press the shortcut, the image is stored on a server you do not control, and a URL comes back. You did not decide to share; the tool did. From there:

• Every capture is on the server, including the ones you never meant to share. The quick grab of a terminal to check a value, the billing page you captured to compare two numbers, the chat window. All of it goes up, because there is no other mode.
• The free plan hides your history; it does not delete it. You can browse your ten latest. The rest are still stored, and Gyazo says that on downgrade it will not delete any of your captures. Your archive is their retention policy, with an ad on top.
• Anyone with the link can open it. A long ID stops guessing. It does not stop forwarding, and there is no access list to revoke. A password is a Pro feature you apply per capture.
• Nothing in the tool checks the frame. No plan lists automatic detection. The customer’s email in the CC line, the API key in the terminal, the card number on the billing page go up with the rest.
• Deletion is a request to a third party. A file you want gone from your disk is a file you delete. An image on a vendor’s server has copies, caches and a retention policy you did not write.
• It is a compliance question. For anyone under customer-data, health, finance or residency rules, a tool that uploads every screenshot of a production system by default is an incident waiting for a date.

ScreenArt Pro removes the chain. Capture, editing, text recognition, redaction and recording run on your PC. There is no upload path in the app at all. Smart Redact 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, and covers each in the colour sampled from around it, so the cover reads as part of the page, before the file exists. When you do share, it is through your Drive, your Slack, your Notion or your own site, with the access rules and retention your organisation already has. The headache is not smaller; it is not there.

Where ScreenArt Pro goes further

The capture itself is better

Gyazo grabs a region for the upload. ScreenArt Pro captures through Windows Graphics Capture at the physical pixels of each display, across monitors with different scaling, and writes an sRGB-tagged lossless PNG, so a 12px label is as crisp as it was drawn and the colours survive. Enhanced Render 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”.

A real editor, included

Gyazo’s editing is a Pro feature applied to an image already on its server. ScreenArt Pro’s editor is in both plans and laid out like every editor you know, a tool rail on the left, the picture in the middle, an inspector on the right. Counters renumber when you reorder them; arrows, boxes, highlights and captions are layers you move, restyle or delete until you export; the original capture is always one comparison away; the project stays editable after export.

A finished picture in one click

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. Gyazo has nothing like this on any plan.

A screen recorder, not a seven-second clip

Gyazo’s free plan records seven seconds; Pro records ten minutes and uploads the result. 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, captions and keystroke badges, subtitles generated on your PC with SRT and VTT export, 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. Smart Redact works on the recording too, for every frame a secret is visible.

Your AI agent can take the screenshots

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.

Where Gyazo is still the right choice

• The picture is harmless and the link is the point. A meme, a game clip, a screenshot for a public forum.
• You capture on a phone or a Mac as much as on Windows and want one archive that follows you.
• You want a searchable cloud archive of everything you have ever captured, and you are happy for a vendor to hold it.
• You want free, and you have read the section above and are fine with it.

Price, in full

Gyazo’s free plan uploads without limit and lets you see your ten latest. Pro is listed at $3.99 a month billed yearly, about $47.88 a year, or $4.99 billed monthly; two years of Pro on yearly billing is about $95.76. Teams is listed at roughly $6 to $7 per person per month, billed monthly only, with a five-user minimum. Gyazo’s own pricing page shows the figures only after its script runs, so check them there.

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 once is about half of one year of Gyazo Pro and about a quarter of two. Polar is the merchant of record, so there is a VAT-compliant invoice at checkout, and both plans have a 14-day refund. No account is needed to run the app.

Who should pick which

• Anyone who screenshots work systems, customer data or terminals: ScreenArt Pro. Nothing is uploaded, and the secrets are covered before the file exists.
• A developer publishing screenshots in docs, READMEs and release notes: ScreenArt Pro. Physical-pixel text, editable counters, a finished look in one click.
• A documentation or support team: ScreenArt Pro, for the MCP server.
• A founder or creator who also needs demo clips: ScreenArt Pro. The recorder is in the same project.
• Someone sharing harmless pictures from several devices into group chats: Gyazo.

The bottom line

Gyazo is a fast, well-made capture tool whose whole design is uploading every screenshot before you have decided anything, with the free plan hiding your history behind a paywall and no automatic redaction on any plan. ScreenArt Pro is the Windows screenshot tool that never uploads, covers secrets on its own, captures at the physical pixels, makes the picture finished in one click, records demo-grade video, and lets an AI agent take the screenshots for you. €1.99 a month or €24.99 once.

Install it, press the capture shortcut on the same window, and notice that the only place the file goes is where you put it.