ZoomIt is a free presentation tool from Microsoft Sysinternals, and it's excellent at what it was built for: zooming into part of your screen during a demo. It also has a draw mode. Epic Pen is built around drawing: a live layer of ink over your screen that stays while you work. Here's how they differ, so you can pick the right one — or use both.

What ZoomIt does well

• Zoom. Magnify any part of the screen with a hotkey, which is ideal for showing small text or code.
• Free and lightweight. A single small program from Microsoft, with no installer.
• Quick drawing on a still. Draw on a snapshot of the screen, with text, shapes and a whiteboard or blackboard.
• Break timer. A countdown for breaks in training sessions.

Where Epic Pen is different

ZoomIt's standard draw mode freezes your screen into a snapshot while you draw. When you leave draw mode, your annotations are gone and you're back to the live desktop. That works for a quick point, but not when you want to draw and keep working at the same time.

Epic Pen is a live overlay. Your apps keep running underneath — videos play, charts update, and you can click, scroll and type — while your ink stays on screen until you clear it. As one reviewer on AlternativeTo put it: “ZoomIt… once you click away the annotation is gone. Epic Pen handles persistent annotation much better.”

Which should you use?

• Choose ZoomIt if you mainly need to zoom into the screen and only occasionally draw on a still.
• Choose Epic Pen if you draw while you teach, present, trade or stream, and need the app underneath to stay live.
• Use both. Plenty of presenters do: ZoomIt for zooming, Epic Pen for drawing. They run happily side by side — just give them different hotkeys.

Looking at other options too? See our honest comparison of screen annotation tools for Windows, or browse everything Epic Pen can do.