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 | None. Everything stays on your Mac. | 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 either your own Claude API key (about a tenth of a cent a capture) or a model running on your Mac.
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.