What is the difference between Clarify and ScreenSteps?

Both ScreenSteps and Clarify let you do the following:

• Capture images
• Assemble them into "steps"
• Add image annotations
• Add text instructions
• Share documents to Clarify-it.com (formerly ScreenSteps.me)
• Copy documents to your clipboard for pasting into email or word processing documents

Since ScreenSteps focuses on software documentation it includes many more features for creating and publishing documentation including:

• Support for more export formats. In addition to exporting to PDF, you can export individual lessons to Word, HTML, blogs, wikis, content management systems and ScreenSteps Live.
• Create manuals that you can publish to PDF, Word, HTML and ScreenSteps Live.
• Tag lessons.
• Integrate with ScreenSteps Workgroup for content collaboration.
• Library structure that auto saves all of the lessons you create.

Clarify is focused on creating quick, focused communications. It includes the following features that aren't available in ScreenSteps:

• Status menu capture tool
• Single document format (no library for storing lessons)
• Simplified, streamlined user interface

Clarify has a more appealing user interface as well as additional annotation tools and features including:

• Highlight tool
• Expandable image canvas
• Text positioning options (place text above or below the image)
• Image border options (picture frame, etc.)
• Drag and drop exporting of images

All or most of these features will be added to a future version of ScreenSteps (ScreenSteps version 3). We don't have any further information about ScreenSteps version 3 (release dates, pricing, etc.). Suffice it to say that the best things about Clarify will make their way into a future version of ScreenSteps. But ScreenSteps will also include many additional publishing options as well as features that are focused on creating great software documentation.

Both! We use both ScreenSteps and Clarify on a regular basis. We use Clarify for quick, one-off communications. We use ScreenSteps to create documentation for all of our products. If you have to choose just one then this might help:

• If you need to create software documentation, and a lot of it, use ScreenSteps. Software documentation is what it is designed for.
• If you just need a better way to quickly communicate with co-workers, employees, family, friends and clients then choose Clarify.