CleanShot X vs Tella Comparison 2026
Both cover screen recording. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Mac screen capture that replaces the built-in
Screen recordings that look designed, not captured
Why people weigh these two
- Tella instead of CleanShot X
- Tella keeps a free tier before its $13 plan, well under CleanShot's one-time $29, when recording is the whole job and screenshots do not matter.
- CleanShot X instead of Tella
- CleanShot X replaces the built-in Mac capture at $29 once, for polish without a subscription.
At a glance
- Tella starts cheaper, at $13.
- Only Tella has a free tier.
Side by side
CleanShot X | Tella | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $29 | From $13 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | One-time purchase | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing (they differ) | One-time purchase | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
CleanShot X
Mac screen capture that replaces the built-in
CleanShot X is the tool Mac users buy once and then cannot work without: scrolling captures, an annotation layer, a cursor you can hide, and a desktop it tidies before the shot. Recordings export as GIF or MP4 without a round trip through an editor. It is macOS only, and the cloud sharing that competes with Loom is a separate subscription.
Our note
Buy the $29 licence and ignore the cloud tier unless you are sharing captures with a team every day. Loom is the better answer for anything that needs to be watched rather than looked at.
Only on this side
- Covers design & graphics
Tella
Screen recordings that look designed, not captured
Tella records a screen and a camera and then does the thing that usually takes an editor: backgrounds, rounded corners, zooms that follow the cursor and clean cuts between takes. A product demo comes out looking like it was made on purpose rather than grabbed in one sitting. The output is a hosted video with its own link. Somebody who needs frame-level control will find the constraints exactly as constraining as they sound.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.