Comparison · checked 24/08/26
Looking for an OffShoot alternative
OffShoot — formerly Hedge — is the tool most DITs reach for, and it is good. The reason people compare it with us is almost always the same word: activation.
The per-activation problem
OffShoot is priced per activation: $169 for the standard edition and $249 for Pro (hedge.co, read 24/08/26). Licences include a year of free updates plus support for the forthcoming macOS release; the renewal price is not stated on the product page, so we are not going to quote one.
If you work on one machine, that is simply the price. If you have a laptop on set and a workstation in the edit suite — which describes most freelancers in this business — you are buying the software twice.
| OffShoot | OffShoot Pro | Card Offloader Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $169 | $249 | €89/yr |
| Licensing | per activation | per activation | every Mac on one Apple Account |
| Updates | 1 year included | 1 year included | always current while subscribed |
| Try before buying | Project rental, $49 for 30 days (Pro) | Free tier, no expiry | |
That licensing difference is not a promotion we could withdraw. It follows from selling through the Mac App Store, where one purchase belongs to an Apple Account rather than to a computer — and it is not something a vendor selling directly can easily match without changing their business model.
What is the same
Verified copying to multiple destinations, ASC MHL output, reports for handover. Both take integrity seriously. If someone tells you the difference between these products is that one verifies and the other does not, they are selling something.
Where we are different
- One subscription, every Mac you own.
- Full verification in the free tier, with no expiry — so you can test the integrity behaviour on real cards before deciding anything.
- The method is published, including the part that costs time: every device is flushed before any file is read back, and the read-back bypasses the OS cache. The measurements are on the site.
- Independent validation of our MHL. The ASC reference implementation verified 520 files out of 520 in our manifest and then wrote generation 0002 on top of it. Repeat it yourself.
- We publish a destructive test — card physically pulled mid-copy, 937 files, zero partial files, checked with an outside tool. Conditions included.
Where OffShoot is the better choice
- Report quality at the top end. OffShoot Pro generates colour-aware thumbnails, mapping log footage to Rec.709. Card Offloader 1.0 extracts thumbnails as they are, with no colour management. Put a washed-out log thumbnail next to a correctly mapped one and we lose that comparison — we would rather tell you than have you find out.
- It is part of an ecosystem. FoolCat for camera reports, EditReady for transcoding, Canister for LTO. If you already run that stack, staying inside it has real value.
- Years in production, on major shows. We do not have that history yet, and no amount of published testing substitutes for it.
- A 30-day project rental at $49 is a genuinely good option for a one-off job. Our answer to short-term use is a free tier, which is not the same thing.
One more thing we do not promise
Camera RAW formats — BRAW, R3D, ARRIRAW, X-OCN, CinemaDNG, ProRes RAW — are on our roadmap for metadata and thumbnail extraction, not in version 1.0. Version 1.0 handles what AVFoundation supports natively plus EXIF for stills. If your report has to show R3D thumbnails today, we are not your tool today.
Free tier included, with full read-back verification and no time limit. Pro is €9.99 a month or €89 a year, covering every Mac on your Apple Account.