Stillio Alternative: Screenshot API for Developers

Stillio captures screenshots on a schedule and stores them in a cloud archive. That's what it does — and for marketing teams who need dated records of web pages, it does it well. But if you need screenshots triggered by code, on demand, at whatever scale your app requires? Stillio isn't built for that. I run screenshotrun, so read this with that context in mind. Every claim below is verifiable against the public documentation of both products.

This comparison covers where Stillio and screenshotrun overlap, where they diverge, what each one gets right, plus why developers looking for a stillio alternative usually need something architecturally different.

Dashboard tool vs developer API

The core difference between Stillio and screenshotrun isn't a feature gap. It's a category gap.

Stillio is a web dashboard. You paste URLs, pick a schedule (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly), then the system captures screenshots automatically. You browse the archive through their web interface, tag screenshots, share them with a link. The whole workflow happens inside a browser window. No code involved.

screenshotrun is an HTTP API. You send a GET request with a URL and parameters, and you get back an image — or a PDF, a base64 string, a webhook delivery. There's no dashboard for browsing screenshots because the screenshots go wherever your code sends them: S3 buckets, databases, Slack channels, CI artifacts. The API doesn't store anything on our side unless you want it cached.

These are fundamentally different products solving different problems. Stillio asks "which pages do you want archived?" screenshotrun asks "what do you want to capture right now?"

Side-by-side feature breakdown

Both products capture screenshots of websites. Stillio gives you an archive with a browsable interface; screenshotrun gives you a programmable endpoint. If you need both — scheduled captures plus an API you can call from code — screenshotrun handles the on-demand side while a cron job or scheduled task handles the timing.

Stillio's API only reads — it can't capture

This surprised me when I checked their docs. Stillio does have an API (v3, REST, JSON-LD format), but it's read-only. You can fetch screenshots that were already captured through the dashboard. List webpages, list screenshots for a webpage, get a specific screenshot by ID. That's it.

There's no endpoint to trigger a new capture. No way to pass custom parameters like viewport size or output format. No way to capture a URL that isn't already configured in your dashboard. If your application needs to screenshot an arbitrary URL based on user input or an event in your system, Stillio's API won't help.

screenshotrun's API is the opposite — every capture starts with an API call. Pass any URL (or raw HTML, or Markdown), set whatever parameters you need, get the result back. The API is the product.

curl "https://api.screenshotrun.com/v1/screenshots/capture?url=https://example.com&format=webp&full_page=true&block_ads=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

One request, one screenshot. No pre-configuration step.

Pricing works on different axes

Stillio charges by the number of tracked pages. screenshotrun charges by the number of screenshots. Sounds like a minor distinction, but the math plays out very differently depending on how you use screenshots.

The gap gets wider when you factor in what's included at each tier — and it's a big reason developers start looking for a stillio alternative in the first place. Stillio's $29/mo Snap Shot plan covers 5 pages with daily captures. Custom CSS and JS injection don't unlock until the Big Shot plan at $199/mo. All Stillio plans include 6,000 screenshots per month, with overages at $0.05 each.

screenshotrun's $9/mo plan includes 3,000 screenshots with every feature — ad blocking, dark mode, retina, stealth, CSS/JS injection, webhooks, all six output formats. No feature gating between plans. The $29/mo plan bumps that to 15,000 screenshots. Same capabilities, more volume.

When Stillio is the better pick

Stillio wins in a few specific scenarios. I'd genuinely recommend it over screenshotrun for these.

Non-technical teams who need dated website records probably shouldn't be wrangling API keys. Marketing departments, legal teams, compliance officers — they want to paste a URL into a dashboard and forget about it. Stillio does exactly that. Paste, pick a schedule, done. Screenshots show up in the archive with timestamps.

The watermark feature is another real advantage for legal use. Stillio bakes the capture timestamp plus the source URL directly into the image. For legal teams that need to prove "this page looked like this on October 3rd at 2:15 PM," the watermark saves a documentation step. (screenshotrun takes a different approach here — certified screenshots with cryptographic proof, which is stronger evidence technically but requires more setup.)

The 36-month cloud archive with a browsable timeline is genuinely useful for competitor tracking. If you want to scroll through six months of a competitor's homepage changes without building any infrastructure, that's built in. And the Google Drive / Dropbox sync means marketing teams can share screenshot evidence across departments without touching a terminal.

Stillio has real customers doing real work — CNN, L'Oréal, Washington Post are on their client list. For teams that want a visual archive without touching code, it's a solid product at a premium price.

Where developers hit walls with Stillio

The complaints I see in reviews come back to one root cause: Stillio wasn't designed for developers.

The API is a read-only retrieval layer. You can't call Stillio from your code and get a screenshot back — every capture has to be pre-configured through the dashboard. If your app needs to screenshot a URL that a user just typed in, you're stuck. I spent about twenty minutes going through their API docs hoping to find a hidden capture endpoint. There isn't one.

On-demand capture doesn't exist either. Reviews mention wanting an "instant capture" button, and Stillio doesn't have one. Every screenshot happens on schedule. If a page changes right after a scheduled capture, you wait until the next interval. (The Top Shot plan gets captures every 5 minutes, but that's still a schedule — not a response to an event in your system.)

Then there's the output format issue. PNG only. No WebP or AVIF for smaller file sizes. No PDF generation either. If you're embedding screenshots into a web app where file size matters, you're converting formats after the fact. screenshotrun supports six output formats — pick the one that fits your use case in the API call itself.

What the migration looks like

If you're currently on Stillio for scheduled monitoring and you want API-driven captures on top (or want to replace Stillio entirely), the transition depends on which parts of Stillio you actually use.

Just need screenshots of specific URLs on a schedule? Set up a cron job, a GitHub Action, or a Zapier schedule that calls screenshotrun's API. Store the images wherever you want — S3, local disk, your database, a shared Google Drive folder. You pick the schedule. You pick the storage. Cost drops from $29-199/mo to $9/mo for most monitoring use cases.

Need the archive and visual timeline? That's the one thing screenshotrun genuinely doesn't replicate out of the box. You'd need to build a basic viewer (a page that queries your stored screenshots by date) or use a tool like website change monitoring to detect when pages actually change, so you're not storing 30 identical daily screenshots of a page that hasn't moved.

Need on-demand captures from your app? This is where screenshotrun slots in cleanly. Sign up for the free tier (200 screenshots/month, no credit card, no expiration), test your integration, scale up when you're ready:

GET https://api.screenshotrun.com/v1/screenshots/capture?url=https://example.com&format=webp&width=1280
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

That returns a WebP image of the page. Add full_page=true for the full scroll, block_ads=true to strip ads, dark_mode=true for dark theme. All parameters work on all plans, including the free tier.

Output format and file size

Stillio captures everything as PNG images. That's standard for a visual archive — PNG is lossless, it opens anywhere. For browsing an archive in a web dashboard, totally fine.

For developers building applications, format flexibility changes the economics. A full-page screenshot of a complex site might weigh 3-4 MB as PNG. The same screenshot as WebP? Around 800 KB to 1.2 MB. AVIF pushes it even lower. If you're capturing thousands of pages and serving those images to users, format choice directly affects your storage bill and page load times.

screenshotrun also handles PDF output from the same endpoint. Swap the format parameter from png to pdf and the response is a PDF document instead of an image. No second subscription, no separate API. Stillio has no PDF option at all — if you need a PDF version of a captured page, you'd need another tool entirely.

Dynamic URL lists and scale

Stillio tracks pages. Five on the cheapest plan, 25 on the next, 100 on Big Shot, unlimited on Top Shot ($299/mo). Each tracked page gets its screenshot on the schedule you set. That model works when you have a fixed list of pages you want to monitor.

It falls apart when the list of URLs isn't fixed. E-commerce sites where product pages appear and disappear. User-submitted URLs for link previews. Competitor pages that change URLs. With Stillio, any scenario where the set of pages is dynamic requires you to manually add and remove URLs from the dashboard. At 100+ pages on the Big Shot plan, that management overhead adds up fast. This is probably the strongest reason to consider a stillio alternative if your URL list changes frequently.

screenshotrun doesn't have a concept of "tracked pages." Every API call captures whatever URL you pass it. Your application decides which URLs to capture and when. Capture a million different URLs in a month, or capture the same URL a million times — the billing counts total captures, not unique URLs. That per-capture model fits workflows where the URL list is unpredictable.

Pick the tool that matches your workflow

Stillio and screenshotrun sit on opposite sides of the screenshot market. Stillio is a managed archive for teams that want visual records without writing code. screenshotrun is a capture API for developers who want full control over what gets captured, what format it comes back in, where it ends up.

If your use case is "archive these 20 pages and let me browse the history" — Stillio does that well. You should probably keep it.

If your use case involves capturing URLs from code, dynamic URL lists, on-demand triggers, format control, PDF generation, webhook delivery, CI/CD integration — screenshotrun is the tool that was built for that job. The free tier gives you 200 captures per month with no credit card and no time limit. Enough to run a real integration test before committing.

For a broader look at the screenshot API market, the best screenshot API roundup covers more options. And if you're evaluating Stillio specifically for website archiving, the website archiving use case page breaks down how an API-first approach handles that workflow.

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