Screenshot Inbox vs Shottr
Fast, local and free or nearly. The hardest price comparison on this site.
Checked against the current released version on 1 September 2026. If something here is out of date, please tell me and I'll correct it.
What Shottr does better
- Genuinely excellent, and very fast — it feels lighter than anything else in the category.
- Free, or close to it. That is a real advantage and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
- On-device OCR, scrolling capture, pixel measuring and quick annotation.
- Local-first, so it clears the same privacy bar we do.
- Tiny download, no bloat, no account.
We are asking you to pay for one thing Shottr doesn't do
Shottr is a capture tool with OCR. It reads the screenshot in front of you and it does that well. What it doesn't do is remember: there's no persistent library, so a screenshot you took three weeks ago is a file on your Desktop like any other, findable only if you can remember its filename or its date.
Screenshot Inbox exists for that specific gap. Every capture is read, indexed and kept, and a global shortcut searches all of it from anywhere. If you never go looking for old screenshots, this buys you nothing and you should use Shottr.
That's the honest framing. We aren't a better Shottr — we're a different tool, and the question is whether retrieval is worth $22 to you.
Side by side
| Shottr | Screenshot Inbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free / very low one-time | $22 one-time |
| Capture speed and footprint | Excellent | Menu-bar app, no capture UI of its own |
| Scrolling capture | Yes | No |
| Annotation | Quick annotation tools | Redaction only |
| On-device OCR | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent searchable library | No | Yes |
| Search across your whole history | No | Yes |
| Global search overlay | No | Yes |
| Automatic Desktop clearing | No | Yes |
| Import an existing backlog | No | Yes, resumable |
| Retention rules and near-duplicate review | No | Yes |
| Price | Free, with an inexpensive one-time licence for continued use. | $22 one-time. |
You want a fast, free, local capture tool and you don't go back looking for old screenshots. Shottr is a genuinely good piece of software and this is not a grudging recommendation.
You have thousands of screenshots and regularly need one from weeks ago. Retrieval — not capture — is the thing costing you time.
Or both
These two coexist well. Shottr for capturing and annotating, Screenshot Inbox for making everything you've captured findable afterwards.
See the difference
Try it yourself
Fourteen days, every feature, no account and no card. Point it at your existing screenshots on day one and you'll know within an hour whether retrieval is worth it to you.