pixelcoords vs PixelSnap 2
A polished paid mac tool for designers, and a free cross-platform tool for machines.
The short version
PixelSnap is genuinely excellent at what it does: its edge-snapping makes measuring a design on screen feel effortless, and for a designer measuring specs all day, $39 is a fair price for that craft. pixelcoords doesn't compete on measuring feel — it competes on what the measurement becomes. Where PixelSnap ends at dimensions on your screen, pixelcoords produces session.json, labeled crops, click code, and verification a script can run. And if you searched for PixelSnap on Windows or Linux: it's macOS-only, and pixelcoords isn't.
Feature for feature
| Feature | pixelcoords | PixelSnap 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $39 one-time |
| Platforms | macOS · Windows · Linux | macOS only |
| What you get out | session.json + labeled crops + cutouts + click codephysical-pixel coordinates in three spaces, per-monitor DPI scale | On-screen measurements; screenshots with dimensionsits edge-snapping while measuring is genuinely excellent |
| Live on-screen measuring | not offered | Yes — live edge-snapped measuring |
| OCR | not offered | not offered |
| Point verification | assert — exit codes for CI and agents | not offered |
| Re-location after UI drift | find — template re-location with deltas | not offered |
| License | MIT, open source | Proprietary |
When to pick PixelSnap 2
- You measure designs on a Mac all day and want the smoothest measuring experience that exists — the edge-snapping is the best in this category.
- You want dimensions burned into screenshots for design handoff.
- A one-time $39 for a daily-driver design tool is an easy yes for you.
When to pick pixelcoords
- You're on Windows or Linux — PixelSnap doesn't run there.
- You want free and open source (MIT), with no license to manage.
- The output needs to be data: coordinates in three spaces with DPI scale, crops, cutouts, click code.
- You need verification and drift-healing — assert exit codes for CI, find for when the UI moves.
Thirty seconds of pixelcoords
What happens in this demo
A private browser window on the Google homepage is frozen by pixelcoords with an amber outline marking the targeted window. Four shapes are drawn over the page — a rectangle, an ellipse, a triangle, and a hexagon — in committed green, then a freehand region in preview blue with the live coordinate chip showing its position and size. The control panel lists every key. The session is saved, and the demo ends on the resulting session.json open in a browser: schema, monitors, target window, and one record per marked selection.
Two ways in
cargo install pixelcoordsOr skip the toolchain: prebuilt binaries for macOS, Windows, and Linux — download, unpack, run.