ShareX for Mac: it doesn't exist

The uploader, above everything. ShareX publishes to more than eighty destinations — Imgur, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Mega, Flickr, Pastebin, FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 — and its custom uploader can be aimed at any endpoint at all. That layer, bound to a hotkey, is what turns a screenshot into a link without a decision in between. Nothing on macOS reproduces it. Every tool below uploads to exactly one place: its own.

The price, which was zero. Not free-with-a-ceiling, not free-for-personal-use, not free-for-a-fortnight. Free, open source, no ads, no account, no tier above it. On macOS the good screenshot tools cost money, and the only one that accepts $0 as a genuine answer is Shottr.

The extras nobody else bundles. QR code generation and reading, a URL shortener, a colour picker, OCR, and an editor with eighteen annotation tools including Smart Eraser, Magnify, Spotlight and Cut Out. Shottr kept QR reading. The rest simply is not part of what a Mac screenshot app is expected to be.

What is not lost: capture and editing. This is the good news, and it is most of the daily work. Area, window, full screen, scrolling, video and GIF, annotation, blur — every Mac tool below covers that ground, and some cover it more comfortably than ShareX did. A German writer meeting ShareX for the first time describes being met with a long error message and dense configuration dialogs before anything worked. None of these will do that.

ShareX is free, open source, ad-free and account-free, and it has been shipping since 2008. Version 20.1 in May 2026 expanded the editor; version 21.0 in July 2026 added image comparison and a background remover running a local AI model. This is not a dying project someone is escaping.

Its editor carries eighteen annotation tools with keyboard shortcuts — Smart Eraser, Magnify, Spotlight, Cut Out, step markers, speech bubbles, blur, pixelate — alongside effects, watermarks, shadows and borders. That is more annotation surface than anything on this page, at a price of nothing.

And then the uploader, which is the real answer to why people miss it. Over eighty destinations plus a custom endpoint, wired into hotkey workflows, so a capture can land in a specific bucket on a specific server and return a link, without a dialog. Every Mac tool here made the opposite choice: one cloud, theirs, integrated tightly. That is a reasonable design and it is not the same design.

The honest summary is that a Mac replacement is a trade, not an upgrade. What is gained is a tool that works on the machine actually being used, and usually one that needs less setting up. What is given up is control over where the file goes.

Every hotkey workflow built around the custom uploader has to be rebuilt or abandoned. If captures were going to a company server over SFTP or into a named S3 bucket, none of these tools will do it. The workable answer is to separate the two jobs — capture with a Mac tool, upload with a script or a folder action — which is more moving parts than ShareX needed.

The price stops being zero, unless Shottr is the pick. That is a small amount of money and a real change in category: a thing that was free becomes a thing that was bought.

QR codes and the URL shortener go. Shottr reads QR codes and nothing here generates them. If those were part of the routine, they now live in a browser tab.

What arrives in exchange is a tool that opens without a configuration session, an editor that appears the instant a capture is taken, and links that can carry a password and an expiry without configuring a destination to provide them.