Screenshot redaction tools compared

Every option below removes data from an image. They differ in how much you have to remember, how easy it is to make a mistake, and whether the original ever leaves your machine. We build one of them, so read the last section with that in mind — the rest is as fair as we can make it.

1. The screenshot tool that ships with your OS

Windows Snipping Tool / macOS Preview. Free, already installed, no upload. Snipping Tool can capture and annotate; Preview draws filled rectangles and recent macOS versions have a redaction tool.

Good for: one image, one or two items, when you are not in a hurry.
Watch out: highlighters are semi-transparent by default — the text underneath is still readable if you drag the wrong tool. The unedited original also stays in your clipboard history and often in the Screenshots folder.

2. An image editor (Paint, GIMP, Photoshop, Figma)

Good for: full control, batch work if you know the tool, adding arrows and callouts for a bug report.
Watch out: exporting to a layered format (PSD, native Figma link) keeps the box as a separate layer that anyone can move. Always export a flattened PNG or JPG, and never share the source file.

3. Online "redact image" websites

Fast and free, and they work on any device. The trade is explicit: you upload the very image you were trying to protect. For a screenshot of a customer record, that upload may itself be the data breach you were avoiding, and it is very hard to prove to an auditor what happened to the file afterwards.

Good for: personal, non-sensitive images.
Watch out: anything covered by GDPR, LGPD, HIPAA or a customer contract. If the tool has no local mode, assume the file is stored.

4. PDF redaction tools

Acrobat and dedicated tools like Redactable do true redaction: the text object is deleted from the file, not covered. That matters for documents, where a black rectangle drawn on top still has selectable text underneath — the classic redaction failure that shows up in the news.

Good for: contracts, statements, anything that is already a document.
Watch out: price (usually a subscription), and the fact that most of them are cloud-based. For screenshots specifically they are the long way around: you would export the image into a PDF to redact it.

5. Screen recorders and demo tools with blur

Loom, Scribe and similar tools can blur regions of a recording or a captured flow. They are excellent for documentation, and blur is applied at export.

Good for: product walkthroughs and step-by-step guides.
Watch out: blur is not erasure. For short, predictable strings — a six-digit ID, a card's last four, an email at a known domain — a determined person can compare candidates against the same blur. Use solid boxes when the content is sensitive rather than merely private.

6. Automatic redaction before capture (what we build)

Cloakshot takes the opposite approach: it reads the page, covers what looks sensitive with solid boxes on the page, and only then captures. The sensitive pixels are never written into the image, so there is nothing to recover, and the detection and capture happen inside your browser — no upload, no account.

Good for: people who take several screenshots a week from a system with real customer data in it: support, developers filing bug reports, finance, HR, recruiting.
Watch out: pattern detection finds structured data — emails, phone numbers, card numbers with a valid checksum, CPF/CNPJ, SSN, IBAN, API keys and tokens, IP addresses. It does not know that "Maria Oliveira" is a customer name; you click those yourself, or add them as keywords. It also only works on web pages, not on your desktop or native apps.

Side by side

Option	Stays on your device	Finds data for you	Best for
OS screenshot tool	Yes	No	Occasional, one or two items
Image editor	Yes	No	Annotated bug reports
Online redact site	No	Sometimes	Non-sensitive images
PDF redaction	Depends	Sometimes	Documents, contracts
Recorder with blur	Depends	Sometimes	Walkthroughs, training
Redact before capture	Yes	Yes	Frequent screenshots of real data

How to choose in one question

Ask how often you do this. Once a month, any tool works and the OS one is free. Several times a week, from a screen full of customer records, the deciding factor is not the tool's features — it is whether the safe path is the fastest one. If redacting costs two extra minutes, it will be skipped exactly on the busy day when it matters most.