Software Alternatives & Startups

Clarus.dev VS Cozystack

Compare Clarus.dev VS Cozystack and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Clarus.dev logo Clarus.dev

Screenshots, scrolling capture and screen recording for Windows, with a real video timeline and annotation editor. Offline text recognition makes every capture searchable by the words inside it. Free tier is permanent, no account needed.

Cozystack logo Cozystack

With Cozystack, you can transform your bunch of servers into an intelligent system with a simple REST API for spawning Kubernetes clusters, Database-as-a-Service, virtual machines, load balancers, HTTP caching services, and other services with ease.
  • Clarus.dev
    Image date //
    2026-08-22
  • Clarus.dev
    Image date //
    2026-08-22
  • Clarus.dev
    Image date //
    2026-08-22

Clarus is a Windows screenshot and screen-recording app built around one idea: a capture should still be useful a month later.

Take a shot with Win+Shift+S — Clarus takes over the Snipping Tool's shortcut — and a capture card appears in the corner. Drag it straight into any app, copy it, annotate it, or pin it on top of everything else.

Recordings open in an editor with a real timeline: trim, split, move clips, add zoom segments, blur anything sensitive, and export.

Everything is searchable by the text inside it. Text recognition runs entirely on your machine, so you can search "invoice" and get the screenshot of an invoice you took in March. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose to share it.

Free forever, no account: area, window and fullscreen screenshots, screen recording with audio, the annotation editor for both, pin on top, the screen colour picker, and capture history with search.

Pro adds: scrolling capture for whole pages, Copy Text extraction, webcam in recordings, backgrounds, capture folders and multi-drag, Instant Replay, and 5 GB of cloud storage with expiring, password-protected share links.

$5.99/month, $39/year or $99 once. 30-day trial, no card required.

Not present

Clarus.dev

$ Details
freemium $3.25 / Monthly (Pro, billed annually at $39)
Platforms
Windows
Release Date
2026 August
Startup details
State
Sharjah
City
Sharjah
Founder(s)
Tarik Al-Hadethi
Employees
1 - 9

Cozystack

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

Clarus.dev features and specs

  • Capture modes
    Area, window, fullscreen, and scrolling capture for whole pages
  • Screen Recording
    System and microphone audio, webcam, on a real video timeline
  • Search inside captures
    Every capture is indexed by the text in it and findable months later
  • Text Recognition
    Runs entirely on your machine — nothing is sent to a server
  • Annotation editor
    Arrows, shapes, text, step numbers, highlighter, blur and pixelate
  • Video Editing
    Trim, split, move clips, zoom segments, redaction baked into the export
  • Instant Replay
    Rolling buffer — save the last few minutes after something happens
  • Pin on top
    Keep a screenshot floating above every other window
  • Colour picker
    Screen-wide picker with HEX, RGB and HSL
  • Cloud sharing
    Expiring, password-protected links. 250 MB free, 5 GB on Pro
  • Shortcut takeover
    Replaces Win+Shift+S, so it's where your hand already goes
  • Free plan
    Permanent, no account required

Cozystack features and specs

  • Free and Open Source
    Cozystack is a fully open-source platform (under Apache 2.0 license) built on top of proven open-source technologies like Kubernetes, Talos Linux, and FluxCD, allowing users to inspect, modify, and contribute to the codebase without vendor lock-in.
  • All-in-One PaaS/IaaS Platform
    Cozystack provides a comprehensive platform that combines PaaS and IaaS capabilities, offering managed Kubernetes clusters, databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, etc.), virtual machines, load balancers, and monitoring out of the box, reducing the need for multiple separate tools.
  • Built on Battle-Tested Technologies
    The platform leverages well-established cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization, Kamaji for managed Kubernetes, and Cilium for networking, providing a solid and reliable foundation rather than reinventing the wheel.
  • Simplified Bare-Metal Deployment
    Cozystack is designed to be installed directly on bare-metal servers using Talos Linux, making it relatively straightforward to set up your own cloud infrastructure without needing pre-existing cloud providers or complex manual configurations.
  • GitOps-Driven and Declarative Management
    Using FluxCD and Helm charts under the hood, Cozystack follows GitOps principles, enabling declarative infrastructure management, reproducible deployments, and easy customization of platform components through a standardized workflow.

Possible disadvantages of Cozystack

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Cozystack requires solid knowledge of Kubernetes, Talos Linux, networking, and various cloud-native technologies. Users unfamiliar with these ecosystems may find the initial setup and ongoing management challenging.
  • Relatively Young and Small Community
    Compared to established platforms like OpenStack or major managed Kubernetes services, Cozystack has a smaller user community, which means fewer community-contributed resources, tutorials, third-party integrations, and slower issue resolution from peers.
  • Limited Enterprise Support and Ecosystem
    As a relatively new open-source project, Cozystack lacks the extensive enterprise support contracts, professional services, and partner ecosystems that more mature platforms offer, which may concern organizations requiring SLA-backed support.
  • Hardware and Infrastructure Requirements
    Cozystack is designed for bare-metal deployments and requires a minimum cluster of nodes with specific hardware capabilities (e.g., for KubeVirt virtualization), which may not be accessible or cost-effective for smaller teams or those without dedicated infrastructure.
  • Limited Documentation and Maturity
    Being a newer project, the documentation can be sparse or incomplete in certain areas, and some features may still be evolving, potentially leading to breaking changes or gaps in functionality compared to more mature alternatives.

Analysis of Cozystack

Overall verdict

  • Cozystack is a solid choice for teams wanting a free, open-source PaaS built on Kubernetes, Kubevirt, and Flux, offering a self-hosted alternative to public cloud platforms with strong automation and GitOps principles baked in.

Why this product is good

  • Fully open-source and free, avoiding vendor lock-in and licensing costs
  • Built on proven CNCF technologies like Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and Flux CD
  • Provides a unified platform for both containers and virtual machines
  • Enables self-service infrastructure provisioning similar to major cloud providers
  • Strong GitOps-native approach simplifies deployment consistency and rollback
  • Active development backed by a community and commercial support options
  • Reduces operational overhead by automating cluster and tenant management

Recommended for

  • Organizations wanting to build an internal private cloud platform
  • DevOps teams already invested in Kubernetes and GitOps workflows
  • Companies seeking to reduce reliance on public cloud providers
  • Managed service providers offering PaaS/IaaS to clients
  • Teams needing both VM and container workloads unified under one platform
  • Cost-conscious enterprises looking for open-source cloud infrastructure alternatives

Clarus.dev videos

No Clarus.dev videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Cozystack videos

Cozystack community meeting 2024-07-04

More videos:

  • Review - Sunkworks - Pt. 56 (Build, Test Cozystack 0.9-pre)
  • Review - Cozystack community meeting 2024.05.09

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Clarus.dev and Cozystack)
Screenshots
100 100%
0% 0
PaaS
0 0%
100% 100
Screenshot Annotation
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Hosting
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Clarus.dev and Cozystack.

What makes your product unique?

Clarus.dev's answer

Every capture is indexed by the text inside it. Text recognition runs locally the moment you take a screenshot or finish a recording, so months later you can search for a word you remember seeing and get the picture straight back. Most capture tools leave you with a folder of files named by timestamp; Clarus leaves you with something you can actually search.

It also takes over Win+Shift+S, so it lives where your hand already goes rather than asking you to learn a new shortcut.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Clarus.dev's answer

Most Windows users are really choosing against the Snipping Tool, which they already have. Clarus does everything it does, then keeps the capture useful: a searchable history, screen recording on a real editing timeline, annotation for both screenshots and video, and share links you can expire or password-protect. The Snipping Tool captures and forgets.

Against a paid tool like Snagit, the differences are that text recognition runs entirely on your machine rather than in a cloud, the free tier is permanent and needs no account, and nothing leaves your computer unless you explicitly choose to share it.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

Clarus.dev's answer

People on Windows who take a lot of screenshots as part of their work and keep losing them: developers filing bug reports, support and QA teams, designers collecting references, writers and teachers making documentation, and anyone who screenshots a receipt, a booking confirmation or an error message and needs it again weeks later.

It is built for individuals and small teams rather than large IT-managed rollouts.

What's the story behind your product?

Clarus.dev's answer

It started as a personal annoyance. I took screenshots constantly and never found them again — a folder of thousands of files named by timestamp is not a record of anything. The obvious fix was to make the pictures searchable by what is written in them, which meant running text recognition locally on every capture instead of shipping them off to a server.

Everything else grew out of using it daily: the annotation editor, then screen recording, then a real video timeline, because trimming a recording in something else was slower than building the tool. Clarus is made by one person in the UAE.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Clarus.dev's answer

Rust and Tauri 2 for the native Windows layer, React 19 with TypeScript for the interface, and Vite for the build.

Capture uses Windows Graphics Capture and DXGI Desktop Duplication; recording encodes through Media Foundation with hardware H.264 where the GPU supports it. Text recognition is PaddleOCR running locally through tract, a pure-Rust inference engine, with the Windows OCR API as a fast first pass.

The cloud side is Supabase with Cloudflare Pages.

User comments

Share your experience with using Clarus.dev and Cozystack. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Clarus.dev and Cozystack, you can also consider the following products

Greenshot - Greenshot is a free and open source screenshot tool that allows annotation and highlighting using the built-in image editor.

LightShot - The fastest way to take a customizable screenshot.

Snagit - Screen Capture Software for Windows and Mac

CleanShot X - Capture your Mac’s screen like a PRO ⚡️

Snipping Tool - Use Snipping Tool to capture a screen shot, or snip, of any object on your screen, and then annotate, save, or share the image

ScreenSnap Pro - Stop sharing plain, boring screenshots. Add stunning backgrounds, pro annotations, and instant cloud links — all in one click. Pay once, own it forever.