The software was designed with the audience of clinical and basic science researchers in mind, and emphasis has been placed on having a user-friendly interface and maintaining a limited feature set to prevent feature creep.

The purpose of the tool is to make it easy for researchers to delineate anatomical structures and regions of interest in imaging data.

The main features of the program are ITK-SNAP is open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

It is written in C++ and it leverages the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) library.

ITK-SNAP can read and write a variety of medical image formats, including DICOM, NIfTI, and Mayo Analyze.