In Operation
Type some search words in the search bar and you’re presented with videos.

Click a video and you can download the video in the format and quality of your choice.

There are various settings available including configuring where downloaded videos are saved, adding metadata to MP3 files, clipboard integration, notifications, and proxy support. The final Settings tab is shown below.

Summary
We like ClipGrab. It makes it easy to find videos and download them in the desired format and quality setting. The software also lets you download audio only in formats like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
ClipGrab’s interface isn’t designed with any flair. The huge ClipGrab logo makes poor use of screen estate. And it appears development has stalled with the last release back in December 2021.
We actually did most of the testing of ClipGrab in Manjaro. Under Ubuntu, the search functionality wasn’t working. While ClipGrab can automatically detect compatible URLs when they are copied to the clipboard, this feature wasn’t working as intended on our test systems. We’ll investigate this further.
We’ve seen negative reports about ClipGrab under Windows with some users describing ClipGrab as “loaded with crapware”. We haven’t verified if that has any validity. Under Linux, this definitely isn’t the case.
On balance, we still believe Media Downloader is a finer downloader.
Website: clipgrab.org
Support:
Developer: The ClipGrab Project
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
ClipGrab is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Related Software
| YouTube Tools | |
|---|---|
| FreeTube | Privacy-based YouTube app |
| Media Downloader | Frontend for youtube-dl, gallery-dl, Lux, you-get, svtplay-dl, aria2c, ... |
| pipe-viewer | Lightweight YouTube client without requiring an API key |
| Piped | Uses NewPipe Extractor, a library for extracting |
| OmniGet | Download media and other files from a broad range of online sources |
| AudioTube | Qt-based music streamer |
| ClipGrab | Downloader for YouTube and other sites |
| Minitube | Application for watching YouTube without using Flash |
| Materialious | Fontend for YouTube and Invidious |
| youtube-local | Browser-based YouTube client |
| SMTube | Search, play and download YouTube videos |
| Pipeline | Watch YouTube and PeerTube videos |
| MellowPlayer | Multi-platform cloud music integration |
| ytdl-gui | Graphical interface for yt-dlp |
| Youwee | Built with Tauri and React |
| PlasmaTube | Designed to be integrated with KDE Plasma |
| PsTube | Flutter-based video client |
| Video Downloader | Tool which lets you download videos from YouTube and other websites |
| VacuumTube | Unofficial wrapper of YouTube Leanback |
| NeoDLP | Feature-rich video/audio downloader based on yt-dlp |
| Mixtapes | Modern, Linux-first YouTube Music player |
| Sunder | Built with Tauri v2 and Rust |
| SpMp | YouTube music client with a focus on customization |
| Pulsar | yt-dlp GUI |
| NouTube | YouTube and YouTube Music in a single app |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

