Looking for a CleanShot X alternative?
CleanShot X is a screenshot tool that also records, and the recording half stops at a bubble and a trim. Prequel frames the camera, cuts it out of the room, puts a background behind the window and places the zooms, then exports at 4K and 120 fps. $9 a month, or $29 once with every update in it.
No credit card required
CleanShot X
The Mac-native toolkit for screenshots, recordings and collaboration.
- Price
- $35 once, or $10/user/mo
- Free
- No free tier
- Platforms
- macOS
Prequel
Cinematic screen recorder for Mac
- Price
- $9 a month, or $29 once
- Free
- 7-day trial, then paid
- Platforms
- macOS 14+, Apple Silicon
Checked on 22 October 2026 against CleanShot X, CleanShot X pricing, CleanShot X screen recording, CleanShot Cloud, CleanShot X 5.0.1 installer.
What is CleanShot X, and what is it good at?
CleanShot X is the Mac capture toolkit most people buy for screenshots. Hide your desktop icons before a shot, annotate it, redact a password, drop it on a background with padding and a shadow, scroll-capture a page taller than the screen, pull the text out of an image, and keep every capture in a history you can reach again. There are over fifty features and the screenshot half of it has no real rival.
It records too: a window or a region, the camera in a bubble, the microphone and system audio, keystrokes drawn on screen, automatic click highlights, smart zooms, and an MP4 or a GIF at the end. Studio Mode adds a Mac-native editor for trimming and zooms. It is $35 once, which includes a year of updates.
Why do people look for a CleanShot X alternative?
Usually because the recording outgrew the tool.
The video is the smaller half of the app. Recording sits alongside screenshots, annotation, OCR, scrolling capture and the cloud, and it is priced and built as one feature among many. A product demo that needs a framed camera, a background behind a window, a cursor that behaves and a timeline with real cuts is asking for a video editor.
The licence stops updating after a year. $35 buys the app and twelve months of updates. Keeping up afterwards is $19 a year, or $10 a user a month on the Pro plan with the cloud attached.
Is Prequel a good CleanShot X alternative?
For the recording, yes. For screenshots, nothing here replaces it.
Prequel records the screen, the camera, the microphone and system audio as separate tracks and opens the editor with the first pass made: zooms placed on every click and every burst of typing, tilted, with focus falling away from whatever the push-in is aimed at. The camera is framed, shaped and cut out of the room behind you. A background sits behind the window with padding, a radius and a shadow. Captions are transcribed on your Mac. The timeline cuts, splits and retimes.
Export is 4K at up to 120 frames a second, and the price is $9 a month or $29 once, with every update included for as long as you hold the licence.
What do you give up by switching?
Screenshots, and everything CleanShot built round them: annotation, redaction, scrolling capture, text recognition, pinned shots, the capture history, the desktop-icon trick. Prequel does not take a screenshot at all, and most people who switch keep CleanShot for exactly that.
Both are macOS-only, so there is nothing to weigh on platform.
How do the features compare?
| Feature | Prequel | CleanShot X |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic zoom on clicks | Included | Included |
| Zoom on what you type | Included | Not included |
| Cursor smoothing and resizing | Included | Not included |
| Camera overlay, shaped and placed after | Included | Included |
| Backgrounds, padding and shadow | Included | On screenshots |
| Layouts for the screen and camera | Fourteen, per clip | A camera bubble over the screen |
| Camera cut out of its background | Included | Not included |
| Perspective tilt and focus falloff on zooms | Included | Not included |
| Captions transcribed on your Mac | Included | Transcripts in the cloud |
| Timeline editing | Included | Studio Mode: trim, and zooms |
| Separate audio tracks | Included | Not included |
| System audio without a virtual driver | Included | Included |
| Reframe to vertical without cropping | Included | Not included |
| Magnifying-glass loupe over the work | Included | Not included |
| Colour looks and filters | Included | Not included |
| Microphone noise reduction | Included | Not included |
| Import a video you already have | Included | Not included |
| Records and exports without uploading | Included | Records locally; the cloud uploads |
| Shareable links | Included | Included |
| Team workspace | Included | On the Pro plan |
| Records an iPhone or iPad | Not included | Not included |
| Maximum export | 4K, 120 fps | Not published |
| Download size | 104 MB | 51 MB |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Apple Silicon | macOS |
| Licence | $9/month or $29 once, 7-day trial | $35 once, a year of updates, $19/yr after |
What CleanShot X is good at
The best screenshot tool on the Mac by a distance: scrolling capture, annotation, redaction, text recognition, pinned shots and a capture history, with recording alongside it.
What does each one cost?
CleanShot X
- Basic$35 once, with a year of updates
- Pro$10 per user, per month, billed yearly
Prequel
- Lifetime$29 once
- Pro$9 a month
Checked on 22 October 2026 against CleanShot X, CleanShot X pricing, CleanShot X screen recording, CleanShot Cloud, CleanShot X 5.0.1 installer.
- Record your screen and cameraPick a display, a window or an area you drag out, with your camera, microphone and system audio each on their own track.
- Zooms and layout are applied automaticallyPrequel reads where you clicked and typed, then places the zooms, frames your camera and sets a background behind it.
- Edit, export and shareMove a zoom, trim a clip or fix a caption, then export one MP4 at up to 4K or send a link that plays anywhere.
Zoom and pan
Zooms that follow the action
Prequel automatically zooms in when you click or type, then softens the rest of the window so viewers know where to look. Every zoom is added to the timeline, so you can move, retime or delete it at any time.
Layouts
Switch layouts clip by clip
Choose from fourteen layouts for the same take: camera in the corner, beside the screen, split with it or hidden entirely. Use one layout for the whole video, or change it clip by clip.
Subtitles
Subtitles you can edit like text
Prequel transcribes every word on your Mac when the editor opens. Fix captions by typing in the transcript, choose a subtitle style or delete a sentence to remove it from the video.
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thisisthecheckoutweshippedlastweek
Thanks so much for jumping on this call
Iwanttoshowyousomethingcool
[pause here]
we’ve been building for the past few months
Teleprompter
A teleprompter that follows your voice
Prequel hangs your script from the notch, just under the camera, and follows your voice — the word you're saying lights up as you say it. Wander off script and it waits for you; skip ahead or fall behind and it catches up within a couple of words.
Apple Silicon · macOS 14+
Native
Built for your Mac
Prequel is a native app for Apple Silicon. It records with the system’s own capture, encodes on the video hardware and draws every frame in Metal. Your recordings stay on your disk.
The editor
Everything you would have done by hand
It opens by itself when you stop recording, on the take you just made. Nothing to import, nothing to line up.
Guide attention automatically
Prequel zooms into the part of the screen that matters: the cursor, a region you draw, or whatever you are typing into. Set the level, the speed and how much the rest of the frame blurs.
Look present without taking over the video
Your camera stays framed and out of the way: circle, squircle, rounded, wide or portrait, in any corner and any size. It is never burned into the recording, so none of it is decided while you record.
Make recordings look designed
Add a background, padding and a shadow without editing any of it by hand. Your own wallpaper by default, seven bundled presets, gradients and solids.
Cut the parts nobody needs to see
Trim the pauses yourself, slice by slice, with a waveform under every clip. Layout, background and audio can all change mid-take.
Keep the pointer out of the way
Fifteen pointer styles, resized so the cursor survives a zoom. Smoothed while it travels, and hidden after a few seconds of stillness.
Export the frame you approved
The preview and the exporter draw the same plan, so the file matches what you signed off in the editor.
Quality
Videos stay sharp at 4K
Capture and export run on your Mac's own media engine. 1080p at 60 fps records without dropping frames, and 4K is a setting you pick.
- Resolution
- Up to 4K
- Frame rate
- Up to 120 fps
- Codecs
- H.264 · HEVC
- Encoding
- Hardware, VideoToolbox
- Compositing
- Metal
- Output
- Constant frame rate MP4
Formats
Export in any frame
Turn one recording into different formats without manually reframing every element. Switch from landscape to vertical and the layout stays intact.
- Landscape 16:9
- 4K
- Vertical 9:16
- Square 1:1
- Portrait 4:5
- YouTube
- Shorts
- TikTok
- Reels
- X
Record demos worth sharing
Free for 7 days. No watermark on anything you export.
No credit card required
Curious about the internals? Read the blog
FAQ
Zooms, exports and the rest
What is the best CleanShot X alternative?
It depends which half you use. For screenshots, annotation, scrolling capture and OCR, nothing on the Mac replaces CleanShot X and this page is not pretending otherwise. For recording, Prequel: zooms placed on every click and every burst of typing, a perspective tilt, focus falling away from the subject, a camera framed and cut out of the room, a background behind the window, and export at 4K and 120 fps.
How much does CleanShot X cost?
$35 once for the Mac app with 1 GB of cloud storage and a year of updates, with an optional $19 a year to keep updating after that. CleanShot Pro is $10 per user per month billed annually and adds the cloud. There is no free tier. Checked on 22 October 2026.
Does CleanShot X zoom in automatically?
Yes. Smart zooms are generated for you and Studio Mode lets you adjust them. What it does not do is read what you type, tilt the push-in, or pull focus away from the subject of the zoom, which is where Prequel's pass differs.
Is Prequel a good CleanShot X alternative?
For video, yes, and most people keep both: CleanShot for screenshots, Prequel for anything that has to be watched. Prequel records screen, camera, microphone and system audio as separate tracks, opens the editor with the first pass made, transcribes captions on your Mac and exports at up to 4K and 120 frames a second. It is $9 a month or $29 once, with updates for as long as you hold the licence.