The one-line version
CleanShot X captures what the screen looked like. Deiko captures what you were trying to say about it. The picture is the easy half.
Where CleanShot X is the better tool
- You need the image to be good. Annotation, arrows, blur, backgrounds, scrolling capture, GIFs, screen recording. Deiko does none of this and never will.
- A person is going to look at it. A polished annotated shot in a PR or a doc is CleanShot's whole point.
- You want a cloud link to hand someone. That is a feature Deiko deliberately does not have.
Where Deiko is the better tool
- The reader is an agent. Claude Code does not benefit from a nice arrow. It benefits from a tight crop, the element's accessibility label, the window title, and a sentence saying what should have happened instead.
- You would otherwise type the explanation. With CleanShot you take the shot and then write the paragraph. With Deiko you say the paragraph while you point, and it is already attached to the right crop.
- There are six things wrong, not one. Point and talk, six times, one session. What comes out is one ordered brief rather than six loose PNGs you have to caption from memory.
- You keep forgetting which screenshot was which. Every crop carries what you said about it.
These are not really competitors
Most people who use Deiko will keep CleanShot X installed, because annotating a picture for a human being is a real job and Deiko does not do it. The overlap is one specific moment: you have found something broken, you are about to screenshot it, and the next thing you were going to do is write four paragraphs explaining the screenshot to an agent. That is the moment Deiko replaces.
Practical differences
- Output. CleanShot gives you an image or a video. Deiko gives you a folder of cropped images plus a written brief, made to be dragged into a coding agent.
- Permissions. Deiko needs Accessibility, Screen Recording, Microphone and Speech Recognition. A red bar sits at the top of the screen for the entire time a session runs and does not auto-hide.
- Privacy. Screenshots never leave your Mac. If a credential is detected in one, it is withheld from the brief and the brief says so. Full policy.
- Platform. macOS 14 or later.
- Price. Free and open source, no account, no card. Every Mac gets two hours of hosted transcription a month; past that Deiko transcribes on-device, and your own Groq key has no limit. Pro is $6.99 a month, $69 a year or $169 once, for ten hours.
- Source. All of Deiko is open source under MIT, the relay included, so every privacy line here can be checked in the code.