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An open-source FireShot alternative, with the editor included

FireShot is closed source and puts its complete editor behind a paid Pro licence. OpenCapture's core is published under AGPL-3.0-or-later, the editor is free, and nothing leaves your browser. If you searched for an open-source FireShot alternative, that's the short version.

Last checked against both products in September 2026. FireShot's tier boundaries have changed over the years — verify the current split on their site before relying on this table.

Side by side

What you're actually choosing between

Where the paywall sits

FireShot's model is a free tier that captures and exports, plus a paid Pro licence that unlocks the editing toolset. If you only ever capture and save, the free tier covers it.

OpenCapture puts the line somewhere else entirely: everything involved in capturing, editing and exporting is free, and the single paid feature is watermarking — tiling a logo or text across an export, which is a publishing task rather than a screenshotting one. If your reason for looking at FireShot Pro was the editor, that's the gap this fills.

Open source versus closed source

FireShot is closed source and has been for its whole life. OpenCapture's core is AGPL-3.0-or-later on GitHub. For a tool that by definition sees every page you point it at — including the logged-in ones — being able to read the code is a meaningful difference, particularly if you need to justify the install to someone else.

This is usually the reason people go looking for an open-source FireShot alternative in the first place: not ideology, but that a screenshot extension has broad access to page content, and "read the source" is a stronger assurance than "trust the vendor". The AGPL also means any hosted derivative has to publish its changes.

If you came here looking for a FireShot licence key

A Pro key is something FireShot sells; there is no legitimate free one, and the generated keys floating around are neither legal nor safe to install. So the questions worth answering are the other ones: what the key actually buys, what happens when the trial runs out, whether it moves with you, and whether you need a key at all. Everything below about FireShot was read off getfireshot.com on 24 September 2026.

What the licence costs and who it covers

Two ways to buy: $39.95 a year, or $99.95 once for what FireShot calls a Lifetime License, sold as unlimited usage on two devices. Their purchase FAQ is the clearest statement of scope — a licence works across multiple browsers and profiles on 2 devices, for personal use, and additional devices or users need a separate licence. The licence agreement adds that the software can be used by the licence key owner only, and that you may not sell, rent, lease or sublicense it. It is a personal licence with a device ceiling, not something you can hand on or resell.

Inside that ceiling it travels well. The agreement says your licence covers any browser supporting FireShot Pro, so one purchase covers Chrome and Edge and Firefox rather than one key each, and a reinstall is a matter of signing back in with the activation link. Purchases carry a 7-day money-back window.

The trial is 10 days, and then it stops quietly

You can switch the full Pro feature set on to try it. FireShot's own page states both the length and the outcome: 10 days of trial, after which FireShot switches itself to Lite mode, free forever. Nothing is confiscated — the PNGs and PDFs you already saved are files on your disk and stay readable — but the Pro tools stop being available, and their trial-expiry page words the alternative as reverting to the free version with limited features.

Lite is a real free tier rather than a countdown. By FireShot's own comparison table it still captures the full page, the visible area and a selection, and still writes a single-page PDF. What it does not include is the editing set, multipage PDFs, batch capture of tabs and URL lists, and the upload destinations; history narrows to the last week, and the free tier carries advertisements.

Check this before you buy the editor

FireShot's comparison table splits Pro into two columns, Pro (non‑Windows) and Pro (Windows), and the editing rows — unlimited shapes and annotations, unlimited undo and redo, resizing, the multi-editor interface, editing annotations back into a saved PNG — are ticked only in the Windows column. Their purchase page lists the same item as “Editor & smart annotations (on Windows)”. If you are on macOS or Linux and the editor is the reason you were about to buy a key, that is the thing to confirm first.

The two models side by side

What carries over if you switch

Less than you would think, which is the useful part. Screenshots are files: a PNG or a PDF FireShot wrote is not tied to it and opens anywhere. What does not carry over is FireShot's project format and its ability to re-open and edit annotations inside a saved PNG — if you keep captures as re-editable FireShot projects, those stay with FireShot, and that is a real reason not to move. OpenCapture has no project format at all: you capture, edit, export, and what you have afterwards is an ordinary image or PDF.

There is nothing to key on this side. Capture, cropping, annotation, blur, unlimited undo and PNG or PDF export are free, need no account, and do not expire. One feature is paid — tiling a logo or text watermark across an export — and it is a one-time unlock, $5 for 1,000 credits, through an account rather than a key file. If the watermark is not something you need, you never sign in.

Questions people ask