Top 5 GIF Screen Recorder Apps you should know about!
It’s important for me to have a good screen recorder in my workflow. Nearly every day I am capturing my screen to show off a new feature or fix an occasional weird bug in the wild within an app… Gotta capture em’ all!
…and no, I am not Ash Ketchum
Here are my two favorite screen recorders followed with honorable mentions!
1. Kap (FREE)
Being a Software Developer Consultant, sometimes I have to work on a machine provided by a client. Because Kap is free, open-source, and cross-platform, I can take it with me to whichever machine! So Kap has been the de-facto GIF recorder application I’ve used daily for the past couple of years. Here are some additional key features that keep me coming back to Kap:
- I can select a window I want to record or put in a custom screen size/aspect ratio.
- After I capture a GIF, I can resize and reduce FPS to optimize GIFs for export. This helps when you’re uploading to places that have file size limits, like GitHub Pull Requests.
- There are plugins! A cool one is the Vercel plugin allowing one to export and deploy a GIF to the world wide web 😱 — The power of open source tools!
2. CleanShot X (Paid)
I only use CleanShot on my personal machine; otherwise, I would have to purchase another license. CleanShot has 50 features, whereas Kap’s core competency is just recording the user’s screen. Although I use Kap “on-the-daily”, it lacks many features I need daily, such as the ability for screenshots and annotating. Although I find the need for something like CleanShot on a client’s computer, I default to using Kap and other tools that are free on macOS… and yes, CleanShot is macOS only! Here are some features I find handy:
- It uses the default macOS shortcut (⇧⌘4) to take a screenshot so you don’t have to memorize something else!
- Scale Down Retina — Have you ever GIF-ted 🥁 a GIF where the text was just too small to read? Well, it’s likely you recorded on a monitor with too high of a resolution, making the captured GIF not friendly for the other person’s monitor. Recording at a higher resolution will increase file size too, so uploading and downloading takes longer. The Scale Down Retina feature helps standardize your recordings at a friendlier resolution and file size!
- Scrolling capture — So handy… The ability to scroll your screen and curate a full screenshot is helpful to create a holistic context within an image. This is handy when you’re within an app where you need to screenshot any overflow-x or overflow-y content!
- Combine multiple images into one — I find combining images with Mac OS Preview a little wonky… Wonky enough to go as far as to combine images and annotate them within Figma, but CleanShot allows for combining images quickly and provides the ability to annotate!
Honorable Mentions
3. Giphy (Free)
Giphy is very basic, but for the purpose of recording GIFs it’s one of the best choices! …oh and it’s free! I still enjoy what Kap has to offer, but Giphy would be the next choice with its UX. A neat feature within Giphy is the ability to add captions and give them durations for when they appear and hide within a GIF. This can be handy when you want to focus the viewers' attention on parts within a GIF. With Kap, I would have to open the GIF and annotate each frame individually — YIKES! Instead, I use Kap’s handy feature of showing the cursor and highlighting clicks.
4. Gifox ($14.99)
I used Gifox before Kap. I only had the “free download version”, but I was still able to experience enough of what I needed, and that was primarily recording my screen and exporting it as a GIF 😄 — Gifox comes in fourth because it doesn't have many more features than Kap. Unlike CleanShot, you can purchase Gifox on the Mac App Store and will be able to take the app to other MacBooks without needing to revoke licenses.
5. GIF Brewery ($4.99)
I went away from GIF Brewery because of the UX. Its utilitarian approach most definitely gets the job done, but it’s a clunky piece of software. I wanted to spice up my life with something better! Although Gif Brewery, unlike Kap, does allow for you to take an existing video and convert it into a GIF — these days I have a different tool for the job! Because you may need it, I will leave you with a bonus app that will convert any video into a GIF!
Gifski (Bonus App!)
Here is an open-source tool that you can use to take a video and turn it into a gif!
Conclusion
Kap and CleanShot are my two favorite GIF screen recorder applications for macOS. There are plenty of others to choose from, so get experimenting and find out what fits in your workflow! Go forth and capture GIFs!
