How is this different from the built-in macOS screenshot?

The built-in tool ends at a file on your desktop. Floatie ends at a floating shot on your screen: you can annotate it, copy the text inside, fade it, pin it above other apps, and drag it straight into Slack or Finder — without opening an editor or hunting for a file.

Is it a subscription?

No. Floatie is free for 14 days with everything unlocked. After that, a single one-time purchase — Floatie Pro — unlocks it for good on all your Macs. No recurring billing.

Do my screenshots leave my Mac?

Never. Floatie runs sandboxed. Capture, editing, recording, and text recognition all happen on-device, there is no account, and everything keeps working with the network off.

Which languages does text recognition support?

English, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), recognized locally through Apple’s Vision framework. The interface itself ships in over 90 languages.

Can I change what the corner buttons do?

Yes. Each of the four corners can hold any action — ghost, pin, edit, OCR, shrink, flip, color picker, cute float, share, or close — in Settings → Appearance → Corner Buttons. Recordings have their own set.

Can I record my screen too?

Yes. Region (⌥⇧2), window (⌥⇧3), or full screen (⌥⇧1) to MP4. The recording lands in a floating preview you can trim, crop, and blur before dragging it out.

What happens to a shot I close?

It waits in the history rail (⌘⇧H, or nudge the screen edge). History is kept locally and survives a restart. Click a thumbnail to bring the shot back, or remove it for good.

Which Macs are supported?

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. Full VoiceOver support and a keyboard-only capture mode are included.

CleanShot X and Shottr Alternatives: How Floatie Compares

CleanShot X and Shottr are well-known Mac capture apps. Here's how Floatie differs from both — price and features, verified September 2026.

Search for a Mac screenshot app and CleanShot X and Shottr come up first. Both have been around a long time and both are solid. The question people keep asking is how Floatie is different.

This post compares the three on price, distribution, scrolling capture, text recognition (OCR), and pinning captures on screen. CleanShot X and Shottr figures come from their official sites as of September 2026. Anything we couldn’t verify is left as ”—” in the table.

The short version: all three can leave a capture floating on your screen instead of dropping a file. The differences are in what stays free, how the app is distributed, and the details of the tooling.

What CleanShot X does best

CleanShot X has the richest editing kit. Pixelation, spotlight, numbered steps, seven text styles, and background-styling tools. There’s also a separate video editor that polishes recordings with smart zoom and motion blur.

Captures stay in a history for up to a month, and a paid cloud add-on turns any shot into a shareable link. If you want editing and sharing to live deep inside one app, CleanShot X fits better.

What Shottr does best

Shottr carries precision tools: a pixel ruler and a color-contrast checker. Color values read out in HEX, RGB, OKLCH, and more. For work where the numbers matter — design QA, say — that’s an advantage.

It’s also cheaper, and one license covers up to five machines. After 30 days it keeps working with no feature limits, so if you want to live with an app for free for a long while first, Shottr is the one.

What makes Floatie different

Floatie also leaves the capture floating on your screen. The difference is the four corner buttons riding on that shot, each one assigned to whatever action you want. The defaults are ghost (Pro) top-left, edit (Pro) top-right, text recognition (OCR, Pro) bottom-left, and shrink/enlarge (free) bottom-right.

You can fold a shot into a cute float and park it in a corner, or turn on ghost mode (⌘L, command+L) so clicks pass straight through it. If most of your captures are glances rather than edits, that handling is quicker. The history rail (⌘⇧H, command+shift+H) keeps up to 100 closed shots you can pull back out.

Distribution is App Store only. No license key, no checkout page — you install and update through your App Store account. The interface ships in more than 90 languages.

Try it

⌘W Close

Close a shot and it stacks in the history widget under the notch.

Price and feature comparison (verified September 2026)

	CleanShot X	Shottr	Floatie
Distribution	Direct download from the official site (also bundled in Setapp)	Direct download from the official site (FastSpring checkout)	App Store only
Price	$35 one-time (includes 1 year of updates, then optional $19/yr). Team Pro is a $10/mo subscription	$12 (Basic) or $30 (Friends Club) one-time, one license for up to 5 Macs	14-day free trial, then a one-time purchase (not a subscription, covers all your Macs). See the App Store for the amount
Still free after 30 days	No (only a 30-day refund guarantee before purchase)	Yes (no feature limits, just a purchase prompt)	Some features stay free (region and full-screen capture, floating shots, resize, opacity)
Scrolling capture	Yes	Yes	Yes (Pro)
Text recognition (OCR)	Yes (30+ languages)	Yes (Apple Vision)	Yes (Pro; Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese)
Pin on screen	Yes	Yes	Yes (floating, resize, and opacity are free; always-on-top and ghost are Pro)
Capture history	Kept up to 1 month	—	Up to 100, stored locally
Screen recording	Yes (MP4/GIF)	—	Yes (Pro; MP4/MOV/HEVC/GIF)

Who Floatie fits, and who it doesn’t

If you keep captures on screen as reference material instead of filing them away, Floatie fits. So does wanting to jump between editing, text recognition, and pinning with a corner button. And if you’d rather install only what’s on the App Store, that settles it.

If you need video editing or shareable cloud links, CleanShot X gives you more. If you need a pixel ruler or a contrast checker, Shottr is the better tool. And if you want scrolling capture and OCR free forever, note that both are Pro features in Floatie.

Get Floatie