ScreenToGif
Record your screen, webcam, or sketchboard, then edit frame-by-frame into a perfect GIF.
About
ScreenToGif is a free, portable, open-source screen recorder for Windows by Nicke Manarin, with nearly 28,000 GitHub stars. It records a selected screen area, a webcam feed, or drawings on a sketchboard, then opens a real editor: delete or reorder frames, remove duplicates, add title frames, text, subtitles, watermarks, borders, and drawings, and export to GIF, APNG, video, PSD, or image sequences. FFmpeg integration extends encoding options, and the whole app is a tiny portable executable that needs no install.
It is donation-funded with no ads, which is part of why the editing quality punches far above freeware norms. The limits are honest ones: Windows only, one main maintainer, and the Microsoft Public License rather than a more standard OSI license for some redistribution scenarios. There are no published independent benchmarks, but at ~7MB portable there is not much to benchmark.
What it can do
- Screen region, window, and fullscreen recording with adjustable FPS
- Webcam recorder and sketchboard recorder
- Frame-by-frame editor: delete, reorder, dedupe, reverse, delay control
- Titles, text, subtitles, watermarks, borders, drawings, keystrokes overlay
- Export to GIF, APNG, video, PSD, and image sequences with FFmpeg support
- Portable ~7MB executable; also on winget and PortableApps
- Free, open source, ad-free, donation-funded
Setup
Download the portable build or installer from screentogif.com (also on winget and PortableApps); no install or account needed.
Prerequisites
Windows 7/8.1/10/11.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: GitHub confirms ~27,800 stars under MS-PL with 98 releases, and reviews verify the recorder modes, frame editor, and GIF/APNG/video/PSD export with FFmpeg. Strengths: the best free GIF screen recorder on Windows, genuinely portable, ad-free and donation-funded. Docked for: (1) Windows-only; (2) single-maintainer bus factor; (3) the MS-PL license is less standard than GPL/MIT for redistribution. License: MS-PL (open source).
★ 27,800 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Nicke Manarin; ~27,800 GitHub stars; 98 releases
- · Records screen region, webcam feed, or sketchboard drawings
- · Frame-by-frame editor: delete, reorder, dedupe, reverse, delay control
- · Titles, text, subtitles, watermarks, borders, drawings, keystrokes overlay
- · Export to GIF, APNG, video, PSD, image sequences with FFmpeg
- · Portable ~7MB executable; winget and PortableApps
- · Windows-only; single maintainer
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.