Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

CleanShot X VS Plotly

Compare CleanShot X VS Plotly 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.

CleanShot X logo CleanShot X

Capture your Macโ€™s screen like a PRO โšก๏ธ

Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps
  • CleanShot X Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-14
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31

CleanShot X features and specs

  • Comprehensive Screenshot Tools
    CleanShot X offers a variety of screenshot tools including capturing entire screens, specific windows, or user-defined areas.
  • Advanced Annotations
    The application provides extensive annotation options to mark up screenshots with text, shapes, emojis, and more.
  • Integrated Screen Recording
    CleanShot X allows users to record their screen activities with options for including or excluding system audio and microphone input.
  • Cloud Storage Integration
    Screenshots and recordings can be automatically uploaded to CleanShot Cloud, making it easy to share via a link.
  • Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts
    Users can set their own keyboard shortcuts for various screenshot and recording actions, enhancing workflow efficiency.
  • Offline Use
    CleanShot X can be used offline, ensuring that essential features remain accessible without an internet connection.
  • Privacy and Security
    Local storage options and secure cloud integration provide users with control over their data, ensuring privacy and security.

Possible disadvantages of CleanShot X

  • Subscription Model
    CleanShot X operates on a subscription model rather than a one-time purchase, which may be a drawback for some users due to continuous costs.
  • MacOS Only
    As of now, CleanShot X is only available for macOS, limiting its use for those on Windows or other operating systems.
  • Cloud Storage Limitations
    CleanShot Cloud comes with storage limitations, and additional storage requires an upgrade to a higher subscription tier.
  • Learning Curve
    With its extensive features, new users might face a learning curve to fully leverage all the application's capabilities.
  • System Resource Usage
    Running CleanShot X continuously in the background can be resource-intensive, potentially affecting system performance on lower-end hardware.

Plotly features and specs

  • Interactivity
    Plotly offers highly interactive plots that allow users to pan, zoom, and hover over data points for more information. This enhances the user experience and provides deeper insights.
  • High-quality visualizations
    It provides aesthetically pleasing and highly customizable charts, making it suitable for publication-quality visuals.
  • Versatility
    Plotly supports multiple chart types including line charts, scatter plots, bar charts, and 3D plots, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
  • Python integration
    Plotly is well-integrated with Python and works seamlessly with other popular data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn.
  • Web-based
    The plots can be easily embedded in web applications or dashboards, making it ideal for sharing insights over the internet.
  • Open-source
    Plotly offers an open-source version, which allows users to create and share visualizations without any cost.

Possible disadvantages of Plotly

  • Performance
    Rendering very large datasets can sometimes be slow, which may not be suitable for real-time data visualization requirements.
  • Learning curve
    Even though the library is well-documented, the extensive range of features can have a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Cost for advanced features
    While the basic functionality is free, more advanced features, such as export to certain formats and additional customizable options, require a paid subscription.
  • Dependency management
    Plotly has a number of dependencies that need to be managed properly, which can sometimes complicate the setup process.
  • Complexity
    For simple visualizations, Plotly might be overkill and simpler libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn could be more appropriate.

Analysis of CleanShot X

Overall verdict

  • CleanShot X is a well-regarded tool among macOS users, especially those who need a robust and versatile screen capturing solution. It offers value through its comprehensive set of features and streamlined user experience. While it requires a subscription, the investment can be justified by the productivity gains for those who frequently work with screenshots.

Why this product is good

  • CleanShot X is considered a powerful screen capturing tool for macOS users, offering a variety of features that extend beyond basic screenshot capabilities. It is appreciated for its high-quality capture, editing features, and cloud integration, making it suitable for professionals who require detailed and flexible screen capturing options. Users especially enjoy its ability to annotate images, blur sensitive data, and capture scrolling content. The interface is intuitive, and the utility offers quick sharing options, which enhances productivity.

Recommended for

  • Professionals who frequently need to capture and annotate screenshots
  • Content creators looking for an advanced tool for screen recording
  • Users who need to share screenshots quickly and efficiently
  • Individuals who appreciate a clean and intuitive interface
  • Teams that require a collaborative atmosphere with cloud sharing capabilities

Analysis of Plotly

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Plotly is a strong choice for those looking to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations, thanks to its range of features and ease of integration with web technologies.

Why this product is good

  • Plotly is considered good because it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for creating interactive visualizations that can be used in web applications, reports, and dashboards. It supports many different types of plots, is easy to use for both beginners and experienced developers, and integrates well with popular programming languages like Python, R, and JavaScript.

Recommended for

    Plotly is recommended for data scientists, analysts, and developers who need to create interactive and visually appealing data visualizations. It's particularly useful for those who work with Python or R and want the ability to embed their visualizations in web applications or dashboards.

CleanShot X videos

SCOM0953 - CleanShot X for macOS - Preview

Plotly videos

Create Real-time Chart with Javascript | Plotly.js Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Introducing plotly.py 3.0
  • Review - Is Plotly The Better Matplotlib?
  • Tutorial - Plotly Tutorial 2021
  • Review - Data Visualization as The First and Last Mile of Data Science Plotly Express and Dash | SciPy 2021

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CleanShot X and Plotly)
Screenshot Annotation
100 100%
0% 0
Data Visualization
0 0%
100% 100
Screenshots
100 100%
0% 0
Charting Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare CleanShot X and Plotly

CleanShot X Reviews

Top 10 Productivity Apps for MacOSย 2025
Screenshots, screen recordings, annotations โ€” CleanShot X just crushes it. It replaces the clunky default screenshot tools with something way more powerful and polished. You can blur sensitive info, add arrows and text, and even record GIFs. If you do anything involving tutorials, feedback, or content creation, this oneโ€™s an essential
Source: dev.to
5 Best Screenshot Tools for Mac in 2024 (Free & Paid)
In conclusion, these five screenshot apps for Mac offer a range of features to cater to different user needs. Xnapper stands out as the best all-in-one screenshot tool with its automatic beautification and screen recording capabilities. CleanShot X and Snagit are feature-rich and ideal for professionals, while Lightshot is perfect for users who prefer a simple free...
Source: storychief.io
The best screenshot tools for Mac
You could purchase a basic version of CleanShot for a one-time payment of $29, and it will bring with it a year of software updates and 1GB of cloud storage. But CleanShot X has the added advantage of being part of the Setapp subscription plan, which gives you access to more than 230 Mac and iOS apps for $9.99/month.

Plotly Reviews

Best 8 Redash Alternatives in 2023 [In Depth Guide]
Plotly is specifically designed for companies who want to build and deploy analytic applications like dashboards using Python, Julia, or R without needing DevOps or Javascript developers.
Source: www.datapad.io
5 Best Python Libraries For Data Visualization in 2023
Plotly is a web-based data visualization toolkit that comes with unique functionalities such as dendrograms, 3D charts, and also contour plots, which is not very common in other libraries. It has a great API offering scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, error bars, box plots, and other visualizations. Plotly can even be accessed from a Python Notebook.
Top 8 Python Libraries for Data Visualization
Plotly is a free open-source graphing library that can be used to form data visualizations. Plotly (plotly.py) is built on top of the Plotly JavaScript library (plotly.js) and can be used to create web-based data visualizations that can be displayed in Jupyter notebooks or web applications using Dash or saved as individual HTML files. Plotly provides more than 40 unique...
5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries
Plotly is a graphing library thatโ€™s available for various runtime environments, including the browser. It supports many kinds of charts and graphs that we can configure with a variety of options.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CleanShot X should be more popular than Plotly. It has been mentiond 81 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

CleanShot X mentions (81)

  • 7 Underrated Mac Apps Every Developer Should Try in 2026
    CleanShot X makes the built-in screenshot tool look like a toy. Scrolling capture, annotations, screen recording, auto-hiding desktop icons, OCR on any screenshot โ€” it does everything. The cloud upload feature lets you share annotated screenshots with a single link. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • An eBPF Loophole: Using XDP for Egress Traffic
    CleanShotX [0] is what I used. Honestly the cloud hosting aspect is overpriced but it does make sharing a picture/video super easy for cases like this. I know macOS has annotation tools built-in for screenshots but CleanShotX's tools are about 1 billion times faster/easier to use. I use this tool all the time just to take a quick screenshot, add some arrows/circles/text/numbers and send it off. Not affiliated in... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Flameshot โ€“ Powerful, yet simple to use open-source screenshot software
    On Mac I swear by CleanShot X [1] which has more than justified its price many times over for me. [1] https://cleanshot.com/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Two Days Indie Dev Life: Mailchimp, Webflow & Zapier - A Love Story
    Above you see the final result of the download page on web. While working on this page I was going back and forth finetuning the design and I remembered there was this tool that could show you dimensions on the screen with the click of a button. Iโ€™m a pixel perfect guy by nature and I do a lot of measuring when I develop my apps, but Iโ€™m a bit more loose when I do something like this. However, some things were... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Tools that keep me productive
    I take screenshots or short video recordings almost daily, and Cleanshot X is so great for this. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
View more

Plotly mentions (34)

  • How to Analyze 47 Million Hacker News Posts: A Data Scientist's Dream Dataset Just Got Better
    Let's dive into some practical examples. First, you'll need to set up your environment with the right tools. I recommend using pandas for data manipulation and plotly for visualization. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Python for Data Visualization: Best Tools and Practices
    Plotly is perfect for interactive visualizations. You can create interactive charts and graphs that allow users to hover, click, and zoom in. Plotly is also great for web-based visuals, making it easy to share your findings online. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Generative AI Powered QnA & Visualization Chatbot
    Front End: A React application that leverages React-Chatbotify library to easily integrate a chatbot GUI. It also uses the Plotly library to display the charts/visualizations. The generative AI implementation and details are entirely abstracted from the front end. The front-end application depends on a single REST endpoint of the backend application. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Build a Stock Dashboard in less than 40 lines of Python code!๐Ÿค“
    In this tutorial, Mariya Sha will guide you through building a stock value dashboard using Taipy, Plotly, and a dataset from Kaggle. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Essential Deep Learning Checklist: Best Practices Unveiled
    How to Accomplish: Utilize visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly in Python to create histograms, scatter plots, and bar charts. For image data, use tools that visualize images alongside their labels to check for labeling accuracy. For structured data, correlation matrices and pair plots can be highly informative. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CleanShot X and Plotly, you can also consider the following products

ShareX - ShareX is a free and open source program that lets you capture or record any area of your screen...

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

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

RAWGraphs - RAWGraphs is an open source app built with the goal of making the visualization of complex data...

Snagit - Screen Capture Software for Windows and Mac

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.