4 Best Stepshot Guides Alternatives for You to Try Today

What is the best way to teach someone how to do something?

It’s showing them. For me it is, at least. That’s why I’m obsessed with screenshots. Even for the littlest explanations, I use screenshots to visualize what I’m talking about.

So when I found out that there was a tool that lets me create screenshot PDFs easily, I was thrilled.

The actual tool, Stepshot, wasn’t quite exciting, though.

So I did the research for you to easily find an alternative to Stepshot.

I will briefly talk about Stepshot and why you might need an alternative. You can skip directly to the alternatives if you know about the tool.

What is Stepshot?

StepShot Guides Pro enables you to produce step-by-step tutorials and videos in a matter of seconds.

Well - at least it used to.

Stepshot is an easy-to-use application that allows you to create beautiful tutorials with just a few clicks. The tool allows users to capture moments on the screen and then highlight different steps in the tutorial to allow readers to follow along visually.

Stepshot simply lets you take screenshots with one mouse click, add titles and descriptions to it, and convert the collection of screenshots into PDF, Word, or other commonly used formats.

Up until a couple of years ago, the tool wasn’t available for Mac, Which shows us that it’s still a product that is in the development stage.

And the developers left it as it is apparently...

Also, Stepshot is not a SaaS product anymore (since 2019), which means that you have to download it from the internet to your computer to be able to use it. It’s not available on Google Play Store or App store either.

Stepshot Pricing

• Free trial available (no credit card required)
• SaaS version not available, free to use on desktop.

Stepshot Reviews

👍 Pros:

“Pro version allows to quickly create knowledge base articles and easily transfer & share knowledge within an organization.”

👎 Cons:

“I’d love to have more integrations with other platforms.”

Why you need a Stepshot Alternative

There might be a number of reasons for your search of an alternative to Stepshot.

From what I’ve experienced, and from the reviews I’ve found online about Stepshot, I have a few theories:

1- 🤔 Lack of Information About the Tool

Stepshot was launched on Product Hunt, which means it has been more of a stealth tool than an open-source product. This means people don't really know about the full functionality and range of features that the tool provides, and that is why you might want to use another one.

2- 🧩 Lack of Information within the Tool

It looks like the people behind Stepshot did not provide much information about how to use their tool and what is the process taken to create tutorials. While there is a written guide available within the tool, it did not cover all aspects and did not explain all steps of the process in detail.

3- 😮‍💨 Learning Curve for Using the Tool

From the reviews we’ve found online, a lot of people were complaining about the learning curve for Stepshot. Creating tutorials can be complicated to start with. While Stepshot has tried to make it as easy as possible to create a tutorial through their initial screen, adding clear instructions and adding tutorials on how to use the tool would have helped.

4- 🎨 Lack of Ability to Customize

Stepshot has limited options in terms of customizing your tutorials (for example, you can’t change the background color). If you need more flexibility, like adding music or having control over which section appears first or last within your tutorial, Stepshot might not be the right fit for you.

Top Stepshot Alternatives

Now that you know what Stepshot is, what it’s used for, and the main challenges you encounter when using it; we can dive straight into the alternatives.

Here are the top 4 alternatives to Stepshot:

1. UserGuiding
2. Loom
3. Clarify
4. Fleeq

Let’s start with our first product:

1- Stepshot vs. UserGuiding

If you're creating a guide or a tutorial for a web product, UserGuiding might be the only Stepshot alternative you need.

UserGuiding is a no-code product walkthrough software that helps you provide better in-app experiences in web products and apps.

With UserGuiding, you can create:

• In-app interactive guides, like the one above,
• User onboarding checklists that offer a sense of gamification,
• Tooltips and hotspots that can be used to highlight features and inform users,
• Self-help resource centers where you can unify your UserGuiding content, knowledge base articles, and help-center documents.
  (take a look at the right side of this page to see this feature in action!)

Also, you can use UserGuiding’s Segments feature to segment different user groups and target them with personalized content.

And UserGuiding’s Analytics feature helps you track the performance of your creations.

UserGuiding Pricing

UserGuiding offers scalable plans that grow with your business, as the plans change based on the number ofactive users you have. When billed annually:

• 14-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Basic Plan: Starting from $69/month.
• Professional Plan: Starting from $199/month.
• Corporate Plan: Custom quote.

UserGuiding Reviews

👍 Pros:

“Best tool for onboarding users, Easy to use, clean guidance while using the product, Good customer support”

👎 Cons:

“The analytics part is probably enough for most teams. We needed a little more control over data, which led us to use another product for it.”

UserGuiding vs Stepshot

‍

2- Stepshot vs. Loom

Loom is an app that lets users record HD quality videos of their screens as they are recording or live streaming content on Facebook or YouTube or Twitch.

It’s considered as a Screencast & Screenshots tool and it’s very similar to Stepshot. Once you record your screen, Loom lets you edit the video and annotate important parts of it.

Loom can also compress videos before uploading them to YouTube, which is something that Stepshot doesn’t do for you.

I personally use Loom for work, especially to show how I do things to my teammates. I find it much more effective than a meeting. I don't have to find an available time slot for everyone, and I don't have to show multiple times if they forget or don't understand.

Still, if our team was bigger or if I had to train a whole company, I would definitely create a guide which lets them interact with the process so that the training is fool-proof.

Loom Pricing

• Starter pack: free of charge
• Business pack: $8/month per creator if paid annually
• Enterprise pack: contact the sales team.

Loom Reviews

👍 Pros:

“The thing that I like best about Loom is how easy it is to get configured and use. It takes only a couple of minutes to get a feel for the controls and how to generate a video screen recording.”

👎 Cons:

“Sometimes crash during loom making. And need extensions for the other browsers”

3- Stepshot vs. Clarify

Clarify is a very similar alternative of Stepshot - with a bit of spice on top.

It is a software that allows you to create and manage screenshots. It lets you name, annotate and group your screen captures so they're easy to find later.

Clarify allows you to use existing images in your product tour - making it better than Stepshot.

It also features real-time collaboration like UserGuiding and Loom, which lets more than one collaborator work on the same project at the same time.

Clarify Pricing

Clarify is free to use on the desktop!

4- Stepshot vs. Fleeq

Fleeq is a new player in the market of image hosting services. 

Fleeq is a new way to create and share animated GIFs from video files. With Fleeq you can shoot videos with your camera, select the moments you want to share and automatically convert them into great-looking animated gifs which you can easily post on your website.

This solution is quicker than sharing large video files, but the fact that it takes a whole another process to add sound might make it difficult to use in complicated processes.

Also, make sure that you have a great computer and a stable internet connection to use this tool, or else, it is going to be difficult waiting for a single GIF to be done and downloaded.

Fleeq Pricing

• 14-day free trial available
• Enterprise plan: contact the sales team to get a price.

Fleeq Reviews

👍 Pros:

“The tool is easy to use and the UI is also good. That is the first thing I liked. Apart from that, features like adding voiceover (Which comes with 3-4 different voices) is also something I loved.”

👎 Cons:

“Video rendering sometimes takes too much time. I have experienced video rending taking more than 20 minutes sometimes so a lot of wait is needed to be done to download the video.”