Best Screenshot MCP Servers in 2026 — 6 Real Options Compared

If you want your AI agent to capture web pages, you need a screenshot MCP server — an MCP server that exposes website screenshot capture as a tool your agent can call from Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, or any other MCP client. The catch: the query surfaces a mess of desktop screen-grabbers, abandoned repos, and browser-automation servers that can't actually return a screenshot. We checked every option's source, npm/registry metadata, and live pricing pages so you don't have to. Here's what's real in 2026, and what to skip.

Disclosure: this comparison is published by Site-Shot, and our own MCP server is in it. We've kept the numbers accurate and the trade-offs honest — including where competitors beat us and where our own option is weakest. All facts were checked in early July 2026 against each project's source code, npm registry, and live pricing pages; always confirm before you rely on them.

What counts as a screenshot MCP server?

Three different things answer to this name, and only the first is usually what you want:

1. Website screenshot MCP servers — take a URL, render it in a browser (theirs or yours), return an image. This is the category compared below.
2. Desktop screen-capture MCP servers — photograph your own screen (pyautogui and friends). Useful for "look at my monitor" pairing, useless for capturing arbitrary URLs. Several of these rank for the query; we flag them below.
3. Browser-automation MCP servers — drive a full browser session (navigate, click, extract). Powerful, but at least one of the most popular ones no longer returns screenshots at all.

Quick comparison table

Entry price is the cheapest paid plan of the underlying service; "install" is the vendor-documented path.

The short version: if you want a one-line install backed by a hosted rendering API — with full-page capture, ads and cookie banners stripped by default, and country-level geo targeting — Site-Shot's official server is the cheapest way in at $5/mo. ScreenshotOne's server is solid but must be cloned and built by hand and hasn't seen a commit in about a year. SnapRender bundles the most tools but is a very young project. Cloudflare's is genuinely free to start but viewport-only. The OSS options are free and private, at the cost of running (and maintaining) headless Chromium yourself.

The servers, one by one

Site-Shot MCP — cheapest hosted option, cleanest defaults

Site-Shot's official server (site-shot-mcp on npm, registry id io.github.site-shot/site-shot-mcp, MIT) is a thin stdio wrapper over the hosted Site-Shot screenshot API — no bundled browser, just two dependencies. It exposes two tools: capture_screenshot and capture_full_page (scrolling capture up to 20,000 px). Ad blocking and cookie-banner removal are on by default, which matters for agents: vision models bill by image tokens, and stripped pages are smaller and cleaner to reason about. It's also the only server in this list with country proxies — pass a country code and the page renders from a local IP with matching language, time zone, and geolocation.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "site-shot": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "site-shot-mcp"],
      "env": { "SITESHOT_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

The underlying API starts at $5/mo for 2,000 screenshots — the lowest paid entry in this comparison — and you can sanity-check output quality first with the free, no-signup browser tool. Honest weaknesses: the server launched in June 2026, so it has no community track record yet, and it does screenshots only — no PDF, scraping, or content-extraction tools like some competitors bundle.

ScreenshotOne MCP — official and sensible, but clone-and-build

ScreenshotOne's official server (github.com/screenshotone/mcp, MIT) exposes a single render-website-screenshot tool with good defaults: ad blocking and cookie-banner removal on, full-page via a full_page flag, and a cache-URL response mode that avoids stuffing huge base64 images into the context. Two caveats we verified in the source and registry: there is no official npm package — you clone the repo, npm install && npm run build, and point your MCP config at the build output (the screenshotone-mcp packages on npm are third-party republishes, a real supply-chain confusion risk) — and the repo has had no commits in roughly a year. Output is JPEG-only through MCP, and the API's geolocation options aren't exposed. The underlying API has a generous free tier (100 shots/mo) and starts at $17/mo for 2,000 screenshots.

SnapRender MCP — most tools, youngest project

SnapRender's server (snaprender-mcp on npm, MIT) is the feature-count leader: 11 tools including take_screenshot (full-page, device emulation, dark mode, ad and cookie-banner blocking on by default), content extraction to markdown, batch capture up to 50 URLs, webhooks, and signed URLs. It installs with npx -y snaprender-mcp or connects remotely over Streamable HTTP. The free tier is real — 200 screenshots/mo with MCP access, no card — and paid starts at $9/mo for 2,000. The trade-off is maturity: the project is months old with near-zero adoption (single-digit GitHub stars), a single maintainer, and no published overage pricing, so weigh it accordingly for production agents.

Cloudflare Browser Rendering MCP — free to start, viewport-only

Cloudflare runs a first-party remote MCP server (https://browser.mcp.cloudflare.com/mcp, OAuth login, no local install) with 13 tools spanning screenshots, HTML/markdown extraction, PDF rendering, and site crawling. It's backed by Cloudflare's global network and is genuinely free to start (10 minutes of browser time per day). But for screenshots specifically it's the weakest real option: we verified in the source that get_url_screenshot accepts only a URL and viewport size — no full-page capture, PNG only, no ad or cookie handling — even though the underlying REST API supports full-page. Paid usage is metered per browser-hour on the $5/mo Workers Paid plan. Good if you're already deep in the Cloudflare ecosystem and need extraction + crawling more than pixel-perfect captures.

The self-hosted OSS route — free, private, and all yours to maintain

Two projects are worth knowing. universal-screenshot-mcp (Apache-2.0) installs with npx -y universal-screenshot-mcp, runs Puppeteer-driven Chromium locally, supports full-page and element capture, and is actively maintained with unusually serious security hardening (SSRF/DNS-rebinding protection, concurrency caps) for a small project. ScreenshotMCP by Up North Media (MIT) has nice capture ergonomics — device presets, element capture, wait conditions — but has no npm package and its entire commit history is a single day in mid-2025, so treat it as unmaintained.

The shared trade-offs of self-hosting: nothing leaves your machine (great for internal tools), zero subscription cost — but you run and update Chromium yourself, and bare headless Chrome has no proxies, no ad or cookie-banner removal, and is readily blocked by bot-protected sites.

Two things that look like screenshot MCP servers but aren't

Browserbase MCP. A popular, very actively maintained browser-automation server — but as of v3.0.0 the screenshot tool has been removed entirely (the repo's own test suite asserts no screenshot tool is registered). Agents can navigate, act on, and extract from pages, but can't capture an image. Even the legacy v2.x screenshot was viewport-only and downscaled for LLM vision limits. Choose it for agentic browsing, not for screenshots.

Desktop screen-grabbers. Several servers ranking for "screenshot MCP server" — m-mcp/screenshot-server, @kazuph/mcp-screenshot, and similar — capture your local desktop via OS APIs. They take no URL and render nothing: they photograph whatever is on your monitor. Useful for screen-sharing with an assistant; not a website screenshot tool.

How to choose

• One-line install, hosted rendering, cleanest images for vision models, lowest paid entry: Site-Shot MCP — npx -y site-shot-mcp, $5/mo for 2,000, ad/cookie removal and full-page by default, country proxies when you need geo-specific rendering.
• Already a ScreenshotOne customer, or want their free 100/mo tier: their official MCP server — just budget the clone-and-build setup and pin the repo yourself.
• Want batch capture, webhooks, and markdown extraction in one server, and accept a young project: SnapRender.
• All-Cloudflare stack, screenshots are secondary to extraction/crawling: Cloudflare Browser Rendering.
• Internal tools, privacy-first, no budget: universal-screenshot-mcp self-hosted.

For the underlying APIs behind these servers, see our 8-tool screenshot API comparison and the broader guide to giving AI agents website screenshots with MCP. Everything Site-Shot ships for agents — MCP config, llms.txt, OpenAPI — lives on the AI agents page.

FAQ

What is the best screenshot MCP server in 2026? For most agents: Site-Shot MCP if you want a one-line hosted install with full-page capture, default ad/cookie removal, and the lowest paid entry ($5/mo · 2,000 shots); ScreenshotOne's official server if you're on their free tier and don't mind cloning and building it; universal-screenshot-mcp if you'd rather self-host Chromium and keep everything local.

Is there a free screenshot MCP server? Yes, three kinds. Fully free: the OSS self-hosted servers (your compute, no ad/cookie removal or proxies). Free tiers of hosted servers: ScreenshotOne (100 shots/mo) and SnapRender (200/mo including MCP). Cloudflare's remote server is free for 10 browser-minutes/day but is viewport-only. Site-Shot's free option is its no-signup browser tool; the MCP server itself needs an API key from a paid plan.

Do screenshot MCP servers need an API key? Hosted ones do — the server authenticates to the rendering API with a key you put in the MCP config (SITESHOT_API_KEY for Site-Shot, SCREENSHOTONE_API_KEY for ScreenshotOne, SNAPRENDER_API_KEY for SnapRender). Cloudflare uses an OAuth login instead. Self-hosted OSS servers need no key at all — they run a local browser.

Can MCP screenshot tools capture the full page, not just the viewport? Site-Shot (capture_full_page, up to 20,000 px), ScreenshotOne (full_page flag), SnapRender, and both OSS servers support full-page capture. Cloudflare's MCP tool is the exception — viewport-only, even though the underlying REST API can do full-page. Browserbase currently exposes no screenshot tool at all.

Why do ad blocking and cookie-banner removal matter for AI agents? Vision models bill by image tokens. Ads, consent overlays, and modals add pixels you pay to encode and can cover the content the agent needs. Servers that strip them at capture time (Site-Shot, ScreenshotOne, and SnapRender do this by default) return smaller, cleaner images — cheaper calls and more accurate answers.

Test capture quality free in your browser — no signup — at site-shot.com. Building an agent? Start at the AI agents page and grab an API key on the pricing page.