Carbon

Carbon is the original and most-referenced code-screenshot tool, but newer competitors (Ray.so by Raycast, CodeImage, Snappify) offer features Carbon lacks: better preset themes, AI summarization, multi-snippet collages, and team-shared brand kits. For a quick MIT-licensed open-source tool with no account, Carbon is still the simplest choice. For polished marketing visuals, paid alternatives may produce better results faster.

Yes — Carbon is fully free with no account or paywall. The codebase is MIT-licensed (carbon-app/carbon on GitHub) and self-hostable as a Next.js app. There are no paid tiers, ads, or watermarks. The maintainers fund the project via GitHub Sponsors and similar; the hosted carbon.now.sh has been free since launch in 2017.

Ray.so (by the Raycast team) has more curated theme presets, cleaner default typography, and better social-media-optimized presets out of the box. Carbon has broader language coverage, full open-source code, and more granular customization (custom backgrounds, exact padding control). For a quick beautiful screenshot with sensible defaults, Ray.so wins; for fine control or self-hosting, Carbon wins.

Yes — Carbon is installable as a PWA, and the rendering pipeline (syntax highlighting via Prism.js, image export via dom-to-image) runs client-side. After the first visit caches the bundle, you can generate code screenshots without a network. Cloud-sharing features (Twitter, gist) require network, but local PNG/SVG export does not.

Carbon is used by developer-relations teams at companies like Stripe, Vercel, and Cloudflare for blog post screenshots and Twitter cards, by technical bloggers building Hashnode/Substack content, and by conference speakers preparing slide decks. It has been embedded in dozens of dev-tool tutorials since 2017 and remains the most-referenced code-screenshot tool in developer marketing.