Like the Snipping Tool, you have a wide array of shortcuts for capturing specific areas, your active window, or nearly any other configuration imaginable. However, unlike the Snipping Tool, you can customize those shortcuts to fit your preferences.

It also makes capturing screenshots of any active window incredibly simple.

Since I'm able to change the hotkeys, I adjusted them from the default settings and assigned those custom shortcuts to my mouse buttons using Razr's Synapse software. This allows me to take screenshots with just a click, which proves far more convenient than it sounds—especially if you do this often.

ShareX Can Do So Much More Than Snipping Tool

Although they share many core functions, ShareX expands upon everything the Snipping Tool offers, pushing it well beyond its limits while adding dozens (perhaps even more) extra features.

Related ##### 8 Snipping Tool Features You Need to Know

Snip and record like a pro!

The Windows Snipping Tool really only provides five basic capture options: active window, desktop, a rectangle selected by the user, or a video.

In contrast, ShareX includes all of those options and goes further by supporting GIF captures—an extremely popular animated image format—as well as scrolling screenshots, which are incredibly useful when trying to capture something larger than your current screen.

Additionally, there’s an autocapture feature that takes screenshots at set intervals. While somewhat specialized, I've found this useful when collecting images from a presentation.

Versatile Image Editing

The Snipping Tool does come with some basic editing tools, but they're very limited. You can draw simple shapes, highlight, crop, and sketch.

ShareX, on the other hand, is roughly comparable to Microsoft Paint—minus AI features, of course. It supports blurring and pixelating images, cropping, resizing, rotating, adding emojis, drawing shapes, and best of all, it includes a color picker. That last feature makes annotating screenshots much easier so they blend seamlessly with the content.

Cloud Sync

You can configure the Snipping Tool to save screenshots directly into your OneDrive folder if that's your preferred cloud service, though going beyond that requires some manual setup.

With ShareX, syncing screenshots to the cloud is surprisingly effortless.

By default, ShareX uploads your screenshots to the cloud automatically. This should be disabled right away—you’ll see how later in this article.

Out of the box, ShareX supports over 20 different file, text, and cloud-sharing services. Chances are, if you use one, it’s already integrated.

If your preferred service isn’t included by default, you can still manually configure almost any other cloud storage provider you want—even self-hosted ones, if that’s your thing.

A Little Busy with a Learning Curve

The main drawback of ShareX is its overwhelming number of settings, customization options, and features—which aren't always easy to locate.

For example, if you want to adjust what happens after taking a screenshot, you have control over nearly every detail.

You get that level of control across most aspects of the app—if you’re willing to search through the settings to find it. For the most part, though, I’ve found the default settings work fine without needing too much tweaking.

A Word of Warning: Disable Automated Uploads

Strikingly, ShareX is pre-configured to upload your screenshots automatically to a public-facing cloud—and it doesn’t even notify you about it. I strongly suggest disabling this function immediately until you figure out which cloud-sharing options you’d prefer to use.

To do this, right-click the ShareX icon and choose "Application settings."

Navigate to "Advanced" in the left-hand menu, then scroll down to the Upload section. Click the button next to DisableUpload and switch it from "False" to "True."

Just to be safe, I also blocked outgoing traffic for ShareX in my firewall.

If you accidentally uploaded something sensitive, don’t worry—it can be deleted, although the option is buried deep within the program.

Go to the Main Window and open the Image History. Right-click the image you want to remove and select Open > Deletion URL. If Deletion URL appears grayed out, that means the image hasn’t been uploaded yet.

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Normally, the automatic uploading of screenshots to the internet would be an immediate red flag for me, but since ShareX excels in nearly every other way, I choose to work around this issue.

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