Paritok vs StepShot: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Paritok and StepShot — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Paritok

Freemium

Non-destructive compression gateway that drops between coding agents and LLMs to cut input tokens by up to 85% without changing the agent.

Drop-In Gateway: One environment variable (ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL) reroutes your agent through Paritok — no agent, prompt, or tool changes.
Tool Schema Compression: 46-schema tool blocks (~29K tokens) drop to ~8K per turn by keeping relevant tools and stubbing the rest, frozen per conversation for cache stability.
Code-Native 4B Model: A 4B compression model trained on 45K real agent trajectories keeps identifiers, paths, and errors while shrinking file reads and outputs to ~26% of original.
read_original Recall: Every compressed segment is tagged; the agent asks read_original(ref) and gets the exact bytes locally without spending an extra turn.
Stale History Summarization: Turns beyond a configurable recent window get summarized once when your context budget fills, so recent turns stay pristine and overflows drop to zero.
Multi-Agent Compatibility: Works today with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenHands, and any OpenAI-compatible upstream — Anthropic and OpenAI both supported.
Compounding Savings: Saved share grows across a session — 25% at 1 turn, 54% at 10 turns, 63% at 20 turns — against a 96,500-token baseline.
Open Weights and Benchmark: SWE-bench Lite floor of 86.5% quality retained at 25.7% compression rate, with weights and training pipeline published.

MCP-Heavy Workflows: Cut input bills for agents that ship 70+ MCP tool schemas on every turn.
Long Coding Sessions: Run 3× longer coding-agent sessions before context saturation forces a hard compact.
Bill Reduction: Estimate 54% off input tokens on a 5-developer team at 20-turn Claude Sonnet sessions (~$6,550/year).
Self-Hosted Privacy: Route agent traffic through your own hardware with no data leaving your network — 8GB GPU is enough.
Enterprise Cost Governance: Add compression at the gateway layer so all coding agents on the team benefit without engineering per-agent.
Cursor/Codex/Claude Code Fleet: Standardize compression across a mixed toolchain of coding agents behind one gateway.

Freemium

Mac app that records real workflows and uses AI to turn them into polished step-by-step guides, SOPs and training docs.

Automatic Step Capture: Watches each click and text input, capturing screenshots with element labels, roles and coordinates.
AI Cleanup and Narration: Uses AI to write meaningful step titles and descriptions from real system semantics, not the raw click log.
Two Capture Modes: Action-driven (one screenshot per click) or continuous H.264 recording with intelligent frame sampling for dynamic UIs.
Precision Editing: Merge, split, skip, and reorder steps; add arrows, highlights, blurs, numbering and callouts in a visual editor.
Multi-Format Export: One-click export to PDF (cover, footer, Letter/A4, tight or one-step-per-page), Markdown, or self-contained HTML.
Privacy by Default: Runs entirely on-device with no account required; export files contain no recoverable original pixels.
Enterprise-Ready Docs: Custom logo, theme color, page footer/watermark and secret-string redaction for compliant internal SOPs.

Employee Onboarding: Turn a manager's real task walk-through into a numbered SOP new hires can follow without shoulder-surfing.
Customer Support Answers: Produce annotated step-by-step replies with screenshots for tickets and help center articles.
System Migration Guides: Document a data or system migration path with proof-of-work screenshots for auditors.
Software Handoff Docs: Package internal software handoffs — approval flows, financial reconciliation, device provisioning — as sharable guides.
Course & Lesson Prep: Capture app walkthroughs for online courses or training material without a separate video editor.
Remote Assistance: Record a step sequence once and send a formatted PDF or HTML instead of scheduling a screen-share.