Best Mac OCR Apps in 2026: Screenshot to Text, Compared
TextSniper, CleanShot X, Shottr and Notchy compared for grabbing text out of screenshots — accuracy, hotkeys, on-device privacy, price, and the free option.
By Vishva Variya · Published
Text on screen that you cannot select is one of the small daily taxes of computing: a screen-shared slide, a locked PDF, an error dialog, a video frame. OCR removes it. Four Mac tools do this well, and they differ less on accuracy — they all use Apple Vision — than on where the text ends up and what else you are buying.
1. Notchy — OCR from the clipboard, in the notch (free)
Notchy's OCR works from the clipboard: copy any screenshot and the notch turns it into selectable text, on-device via Apple Vision. That inverts the usual flow — there is no capture mode to enter, so the screenshot shortcut you already use is the whole interaction. Free, macOS 13 Ventura and up, and the recognised text lands in the same clipboard history as everything else you copied.
2. TextSniper — the dedicated one ($9.99)
TextSniper is $9.99 one-time on the Mac App Store and needs only macOS 10.15, the lowest floor here. Hotkey, drag a rectangle, text on the clipboard — it is a single-purpose tool executed cleanly, with good handling of columns, tables and handwriting. Nothing else in this list is more direct.
3. Shottr — OCR inside a screenshot tool (pay what you want)
Shottr is a fast screenshot app with text recognition built in, priced pay-what-you-want including free, on macOS Catalina 10.15 and up. If you also want scrolling capture, annotation and measurement, this is the best value in the category by a distance — the OCR arrives as one feature of a much larger tool.
4. CleanShot X — OCR as part of the premium suite ($29)
CleanShot X is $29 one-time including a year of updates and 1 GB of cloud, with Cloud Pro from $8/user/month. Nobody buys it for the OCR; they buy it for the capture, annotation and sharing workflow, and the text recognition comes along. Worth it if you produce screenshots for other people all day, overkill if you just want to grab a serial number.
The comparison
| Notchy | TextSniper | Shottr | CleanShot X | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $9.99 one-time | Pay what you want | $29 one-time |
| Minimum macOS | 13 Ventura | 10.15 | 10.15 Catalina | Apple Silicon, Tahoe ready |
| On-device recognition | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Works from clipboard | Yes | Capture flow | Capture flow | Capture flow |
| Also gets you | Music, clipboard, timers, HUDs | — | Screenshots, annotation | Capture suite, cloud |
Bottom line
One job, done perfectly: TextSniper. Screenshots and OCR together for whatever you feel like paying: Shottr. A whole capture workflow: CleanShot X. If you would rather not add another app for something you do twice a week, Notchy does it from the clipboard for free — and the notch it lives in was doing nothing anyway.
Mac OCR FAQs
Is there a free OCR app for Mac?
Yes. Shottr is pay-what-you-want including free, and Notchy is free outright. Both run text recognition on-device through Apple Vision, so nothing is uploaded. macOS also does live text selection inside Preview and Photos, which covers simple cases with no app at all.
Is TextSniper worth $9.99?
It is the most focused tool in the category — one hotkey, drag a box, the text is on your clipboard, and it handles multi-column and handwriting better than most. At $9.99 one-time on the Mac App Store, with a macOS 10.15 floor, it is a fair price if OCR is a daily habit rather than an occasional one.
Does Mac OCR work offline?
For every app in this list, yes. They all use Apple's on-device Vision framework rather than a cloud API, so recognition works on a plane and nothing about your screen leaves the machine.
What is the difference between OCR and Live Text?
Live Text is Apple's built-in recognition inside Preview, Photos and Quick Look. It is excellent, but it only works where Apple wired it in. A dedicated OCR tool works anywhere on screen — a video frame, a locked PDF, a screen-shared slide, an app that blocks copying.
Can I OCR a screenshot I already took?
With Notchy, yes — copy the image and the notch turns it into selectable text, so screenshots already sitting in your clipboard work the same as a fresh capture.