You have two tools that solve the same problem, and your team keeps arguing about which one onboards better from memory. Memory is a bad witness. Here is the concrete version: pick three screens that every tool has to get right, capture both tools on those same three screens, and pin the differences so anyone reading can check them. The three screens are signup, the empty state right after signup, and the first real task.
I ran this on two note-taking apps, call them Tool A and Tool B. Same browser tab, no install, six screenshots total. Below is what I actually captured and how I marked it.
Screen 1: the signup form
I opened Tool A's signup page, clicked Capture screen, and shared the browser window. The still landed as an item. Then I cropped it to just the form and dropped three numbered pins:
- Pin 1 on the email field: Tool A asks for email, password, company name, and team size before you see anything.
- Pin 2 on a greyed-out Continue button: it stays disabled until all four fields validate, with no inline hint about which one failed.
- Pin 3 on a "Sign up with Google" button buried below the fold.
I did the same for Tool B. Its form wanted only an email, and the Google button sat at the top. Two pins covered it. Because the pins and the crop are baked into the exported image, whoever reads the review sees Tool A's four-field wall next to Tool B's single field without me writing a paragraph about it.
The trick that makes a comparison hold up: keep the pin numbers consistent across both tools for the same point. Pin 1 is "fields required at signup" on both screenshots. When the reader jumps between items, the numbers carry the same meaning. If you number pins differently on each side, the reader has to re-learn your scheme every screen, and the comparison falls apart. That is the main difference between a three-screen comparison that reads cleanly and a pile of unrelated screenshots.
Screen 2: the empty state after signup
This is the screen most teardowns skip, and it is where tools win or lose a new user. I captured both apps the moment onboarding finished.
Tool A dropped me into a blank workspace with a tooltip pointing at a "+ New" button. I pinned the tooltip (does one thing, tells you what to click) and pinned the empty canvas (nothing else on the page, no sample content, no next step). On the comment for that item I dictated instead of typing, because I was reading the screen out loud anyway: "Empty canvas, single call to action, clear but cold." Dictation uses the browser's built-in speech recognition and works in Chrome and Edge, so the note took five seconds.
Tool B seeded the empty state with a sample document and a three-item checklist. I pinned the checklist and pinned the sample doc, then added a free-floating note item with no screenshot: "Tool B teaches by example, Tool A teaches by instruction. Different bets, both defensible." That note is the kind of judgment a feature list never captures, and it is exactly what a product manager wants to see.
Screen 3: the first real task
The first task was "create and format a document." I timed myself loosely and captured the end state of each.
Tool A's formatting toolbar hid behind a "/" command menu. I pinned the command menu and added a comment that a first-time user has no way to know the slash trigger exists without the docs. Tool B showed a visible toolbar. I pinned it and noted the tradeoff: visible is easier to discover, but it clutters the writing area. Honest comparison means marking the cost of each choice, not crowning a winner on every pin.
Six screenshots, consistent pin numbering, three paragraphs of dictated commentary. That is the whole artifact.
What the shared review does that a doc cannot
When I hit Publish, the review got a short link. I sent it to the two people who had to make the call. They opened it with no login and no app, read the six items top to bottom, and left comments on the specific items where they disagreed. One of them pushed back on my Tool A empty-state pin, I replied on that item, and I marked the thread resolved once we agreed. The whole decision lived on the review, not in a thread of forwarded screenshots.
This is the heart of a product comparison people can actually decide from: the evidence and the argument sit in one place, each claim is pinned to the pixel it came from, and anyone can check it. If you want a reviewer on their phone to add the other tool's screens, they take a normal screenshot and drag it in, since phone browsers cannot capture the screen directly.
The same three-screen method works for capturing onboarding feedback on your own product, not just comparing rivals. And if your team leans toward research rather than a head-to-head, a competitive analysis you can publish uses the identical capture-and-pin flow.
Cobalt Capture is free to try with unlimited reviews and no password. After seven days a review goes read-only for you while the shared link keeps working for everyone you sent it to; the $5 Pro plan keeps it editable. Pick your two tools, capture the first signup screen, and let the pins do the arguing.