folie and CleanShot X
Checked 4 October 2026
CleanShot X is a screenshot and screen recording app for Mac. It captures, annotates, records, reads text with OCR and uploads to its own cloud for sharing.
folie is not a replacement for it. folie is where a screenshot of design work goes to be kept: filed by component, style, typefaces and colours, searchable months later.
Side by side
| Feature | folie | CleanShot X |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A Mac menu-bar app. Press ⌘⇧7, drag a box over anything on screen, and the screenshot is filed. | A Mac app for screenshots, scrolling capture, screen recording, annotation and sharing. |
| Price | $9 once at launch (first 100 copies), then $15. Two Macs $18, then $30. Three Macs $27, then $45. | Basic $35 once, with one year of updates, then $19 a year to keep updating. Pro $10 per user a month, billed annually. |
| Keeping old captures | A permanent library you can search by component, style, colour, typeface, site and text. | Capture history of up to one month. |
| Text in screenshots | Read on device and stored with every capture, so it is searchable. | Text recognition (OCR) in 30+ languages, to copy text out. |
| Cloud | No folie cloud. Captures and their index stay on your Mac. The image goes only to the model you pick. | 1 GB on Basic, unlimited on Pro, for share links. |
| macOS | 14 or later. | 13 or later. |
Competitor details are from their own pages, linked at the bottom, as they read on 4 October 2026. Prices change; check theirs before you decide.
Where CleanShot X is better
- Everything to do with taking and sharing a screenshot: annotation, scrolling capture, recording, share links.
- It runs on macOS 13. folie needs 14.
- It does not need an AI key for anything.
folie is Mac only, has no phone app, does not sync between machines, and needs your own Claude or ChatGPT API key (about a tenth of a cent a capture on Claude) or your own model endpoint.
Where folie is different
- It keeps captures for good and files them, where CleanShot's history is for recent ones.
- It records the page a capture came from, its real typefaces and five colours.
- Insights shows which components and styles you keep saving.
Which one to pick
They do different jobs and sit fine side by side. Use CleanShot X to take, mark up and send screenshots. Use folie's own ⌘⇧7 for the ones you want to keep as reference.
Questions
Can folie file screenshots I took with CleanShot X?
Yes. Copy one and press ⌘V in folie, or drop the file on folie's Dock icon, and it is filed the same way as a capture. It will not know which page it came from.
Is folie a screenshot tool?
It takes its own region screenshots, but it has no annotation, recording or sharing. It is a library.
Sources
Checked 4 October 2026. If something here is wrong or out of date, it will be corrected.
Other comparisons are on the alternatives page.