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Comparison · free tiers
A free GoFullPage alternative, with nothing behind a paywall
Every full page screenshot extension in the Chrome Web Store is listed as free, and almost none of them are free all the way through. The capture is the free part. The paywall sits one step later, on the thing you were actually going to do next: draw an arrow on it, black out a customer name, or hand someone a PDF. This page is only about that: what each free tier withholds, and which ones withhold nothing.
Looking for the broader comparison — permissions, local versus cloud capture, sticky headers, batch work? That is the main GoFullPage alternative page. This one deliberately covers a single question.
What each free tier actually gives you
| On the free tier | Full Page Screenshot | GoFullPage | Capture Full Page | FireShot | Awesome Screenshot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full page capture | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PNG export | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| JPEG export | Yes | Yes | Yes | Pro only | Yes |
| PDF export | Yes | Yes | Yes | Pro only | Yes |
| Crop | Yes | Premium | Yes | Pro only | Yes |
| Arrows, boxes, text | Yes | Premium | Yes | Pro only | Yes |
| Redaction / blur | Yes | Premium | Yes | Pro only | Yes |
| Account required | Never | Only for Premium | No | Only for Pro | For sharing & cloud |
| Anything uploaded | Nothing, ever | No | No | No | Yes, for share links |
| Paid tier exists at all | No | Yes, ~$1/mo | Varies | Yes, one-time ~$40 | Yes, team plans |
Tiers checked 28 August 2026 from each vendor's own pages and store listings. They change without notice and without telling you, so confirm before you pay for anything — including confirming that you do not need to.
Line GoFullPage Premium up against this, row for row
The table below is not mine. The rows and the tier names are GoFullPage's own, copied from their pricing page, because the fairest way to answer "what does Premium get me that free does not" is to let the vendor set the question. The only column I added is the third one.
| GoFullPage’s own feature list | GoFullPage Basic | GoFullPage Premium | Full Page Screenshot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unlimited screenshots | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced scroll capture | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Image cropping | Paid | Yes | Yes |
| URL and date/timestamp | Paid | Yes | Yes |
| Smart PDF page splitting | Paid | Yes | Yes |
| Annotations: blur, text, highlight | Paid | Yes | Yes |
| Priority customer support | Paid | Yes | No — one person, one inbox |
Six of the seven things GoFullPage puts behind Premium are in mine at no charge: cropping, the URL and timestamp band, PDF page splitting, and blur, text and highlight annotation. The seventh is priority support, and I am one person — that is a real thing Premium buys and I will not pretend otherwise.
It is also worth saying that GoFullPage Premium is about $1 a month. This is not a table about someone gouging you. It is a table about what a paid tier exists to hold back, and whether you need to cross that line at all.
The paywall is never on the capture
This is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing that catches people out. No mainstream extension charges you to take a full page screenshot. They charge for the step after it. So "is it free?" is the wrong question, and "is my whole workflow free?" is the right one.
Run your actual sequence in your head. For most people it is some version of: capture the page → crop off the footer → draw a box round the broken bit → blur the customer's email → export a PDF and attach it. That is five steps, and on GoFullPage's free tier you get stopped at step two, on FireShot's you get stopped at step two and step five.
What "free" means, tool by tool
Full Page Screenshot: free with no second tier to upgrade to
Mine, so read the rest of this page with that in mind. There is no Premium
edition, no licence key, no account and no upsell screen, because there is
nothing else to sell — capture, crop, arrows, boxes, text, highlighter,
redaction and PNG, JPEG and PDF export are the whole product. It asks for
Chrome's activeTab permission only, which grants access to one
tab in response to your click and then expires, and it makes no network
requests of any kind, so there is no telemetry and no cloud to meter.
Captures live in your browser and are deleted after 24 hours. It is MIT
licensed, which also means it can be loaded unpacked if a store ever
removes it — as August 2026 demonstrated, not a hypothetical.
GoFullPage: free to capture, Premium to mark up
The capture flow that eleven million people installed is free, and so is PDF export. Annotation and markup are Premium, priced around $1 per month when checked. That is a genuinely cheap subscription and for many people the honest advice is that it is fine. Its original listing left the Chrome Web Store on 10 August 2026 over a copyright complaint its developers say was raised in error, but GoFullPage BETA has been in the store since, so the free tier is installable today.
FireShot: the strictest free tier here
Free FireShot captures a full page and saves PNG. JPEG, PDF, the editor and batch capture across tabs are all on the Pro licence — a one-time payment of roughly $40 rather than a subscription, which some people much prefer to another monthly line item. If you capture dozens of tabs at once it is still the best tool in the category and worth paying for. If you wanted a PDF, the free tier will not get you there. More in the FireShot comparison.
Awesome Screenshot: free tools, metered cloud
The editing is generous and free; the trade is somewhere else. It is really a shared workspace that also takes screenshots, so the free plan meters what you keep in their cloud, sharing wants an account, and the extension asks for broad host permissions to do what it does. If your team lives on share links that is a fair exchange. If you want a PNG in your Downloads folder it is a lot of machinery to accept for it. More in the Awesome Screenshot comparison.
Chrome's built-in command: free, installed already, and limited
No extension needed. ⌘⇧P in DevTools → "Capture full size screenshot". PNG only, no editing, no PDF, and it does not pre-scroll the page, so lazy-loaded images below the fold frequently come out blank. Genuinely the right answer when you need exactly one screenshot and never think about it again. Walkthrough in how to take a full page screenshot in Chrome.
What free actually costs, if anything
Free software is funded somehow, and with browser extensions the two usual mechanisms are a paid tier and your browsing data. It is reasonable to assume the second until you have checked, and checking takes about fifteen seconds:
Open the store listing and read the permissions. An extension that asks to "read and change all your data on all websites you visit" holds standing access to your bank tab and your work tools, permanently, whether or not you are capturing anything. One that asks only for
activeTabcannot see a tab until you click the icon on it.Find out where the rendering happens. If a tool loads the URL on its own servers, it cannot see anything behind your login — or it can, and you would rather know how.
Look for a privacy policy that names what is collected. "We may collect usage data to improve our services" is a paragraph that means nothing and permits everything.
Apply all three to mine as well. Its privacy page exists to be checked, not to be trusted on principle.
Switching, in three minutes
Do not uninstall GoFullPage first. Leave it in place until you are sure of the replacement — and note that the copy you have is the original, which the store no longer serves; reinstalling means the beta.
Get anything you still keep inside it out as ordinary files, into a folder you control.
Install the replacement and rebind the shortcut. Go Full Page used Alt⇧P; this one ships with ⌘⇧Y and you can set it to whatever your fingers already know at
chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
The obvious disclosure. This page was written by one of the tools in the table, and so was most of what you will find searching this phrase this month. The table is checkable; go and check it. Where a competitor's free tier is better than I have said, tell me and I will correct the row.
Where free is the wrong trade
Free is not automatically the right pick, and there are jobs mine does not do:
- Batch capture across many tabs — buy FireShot Pro. Nothing free does this well.
- Screen recording — Awesome Screenshot. Mine is stills only.
- Share links and a team library — that is a cloud product, and cloud products cost money to run.
- Scheduled or API-driven capture — use a screenshot API.
A decade of edge cases — GoFullPage has eleven million users behind it. Mine has a test suite and one author who answers email. Weigh that honestly.
Test it on the page that usually breaks
The dashboard, the long email thread, the report with a sticky header. Fifteen seconds on that page tells you more than any comparison table, including this one.
Free. No account, no premium tier, no network requests.
FAQ
Is there a completely free alternative to GoFullPage?
Yes. Full Page Screenshot has no paid tier at all: capture, cropping, annotation, redaction and PNG, JPEG and PDF export are included. Capture Full Page is also free for the core flow. Chrome's own DevTools command is free and needs no install, but exports PNG only.
Is GoFullPage itself free?
The capture is. Its markup and annotation tools are part of GoFullPage Premium, which was around $1 per month when checked on 28 August 2026. So if your workflow ends at "save the PNG", the free tier is enough; if it ends at "circle this and send it", it is not.
Which free full page screenshot extension exports PDF?
Full Page Screenshot, Capture Full Page and GoFullPage all export PDF on their free tier. FireShot does not: its free tier is PNG only, with JPEG and PDF on the Pro licence. Chrome DevTools does not export PDF either.
Does "free" mean my screenshots pay for it some other way?
That is the right question to ask, and the answer differs per tool. Check two things on the store listing: the permissions it holds, and whether capture happens in your browser or on the vendor's servers. Full Page Screenshot asks only for activeTab, makes no network requests of any kind, and has no analytics, so there is nothing to monetise; other free tools fund themselves through a paid tier, a cloud workspace, or a team plan.
Do I need an account for any of these?
Not for capture. Accounts appear where the cloud does: Awesome Screenshot wants one for sharing and its workspace, FireShot wants one to hold a Pro licence, and GoFullPage wants one for Premium. Full Page Screenshot has no account system at all.
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