Alfred alternatives: decide what you can drop

A keyboard launcher has been sitting on the same hotkey for years, and now there is a reason to look at something else. Maybe the licence question came up. Maybe a macOS upgrade changed how results are ordered. Maybe every resident app is being audited because the menu bar has become unreadable.

Starting with a list of candidate names is the slow route. The faster route is to sort which of the installed features are genuinely in use, because that answer determines how wide the field is. Someone who types three letters to open an app has an enormous set of options, including one already installed as part of the operating system. Someone who lives inside custom workflows has a much smaller set, and a migration measured in hours rather than minutes.

Where the line between free and paid sits

The app itself is free. A separate purchase, sold as a feature pack layered on top, unlocks the rest. As checked on 10 September 2026, the published prices are £34 for a single licence and £59 for the higher tier, with the higher tier including free upgrades to future versions. The single licence is tied to version 5, and upgrade terms for a future major version are handled separately.

What stays free covers app launching, web searches, calculations and dictionary lookups. What sits behind the purchase is clipboard history, keyword expanded snippets, and the workflow system that chains hotkeys and actions into automations. Anyone looking for alternatives because of cost should check that line first, since the free tier alone covers a real amount of daily use.

One more distribution fact matters here. The developer states that the copy on the Mac App Store is an old version, 1.2, which is no longer updated, and that current versions have been distributed exclusively from the developer's own site since Apple changed App Store requirements in June 2012. Anyone who installed from the store and found the behaviour dated has been comparing against something several major versions behind.

Sort the four jobs before comparing anything

A launcher is not one feature. It is four, and they have different substitutes.

• Launching. Type two or three letters, press return, the app opens.
• Finding. Files on the Mac, contacts, browser bookmarks, web searches, all through one field.
• Pasting. Clipboard history and snippets that expand from a short keyword.
• Automating. Hotkeys wired to sequences of actions that would otherwise take several manual steps.

Comparisons stall because all four get called by one name. The first two have many substitutes, including a built in one. The third narrows the field. The fourth narrows it further and turns the switch into a rebuild rather than an install.

Opening the settings window and marking every panel that has ever been touched produces a surprisingly lopsided result for most people. Marks cluster in the first two groups. The automation section usually holds two or three workflows built during the first enthusiastic week and untouched since.

The marks also serve as a requirements list for whatever comes next. Marks in the first two groups mean the criteria are speed of invocation and whether the result ordering matches how the person thinks, not feature count. A mark in the third group means checking retention limits and whether images and files are stored, not just text. A mark in the fourth group means building one representative automation in the candidate before committing to anything.

What macOS now covers on its own

Any comparison needs the baseline established, because the baseline moved. Apple's user guide describes Spotlight in macOS Tahoe 26 like this:

Spotlight helps you quickly find things on your computer and shows suggestions from apps, files, actions, the internet, and the Clipboard.

The same page describes taking hundreds of actions without lifting hands from the keyboard, quick keys to reach those actions faster, and browsing clipboard history from the search field. Mapped onto the four groups above, that covers the first two outright and takes a bite out of the third.

What it does not cover is keyword triggered text expansion and user built automation chains. So the honest framing is this: for someone whose marks land in groups one and two, the strongest alternative is already installed and requires no purchase, no permissions dialog and no menu bar slot. For someone with marks in group four, the built in search is not a substitute at all, and the comparison has to happen among third party tools.

The field, priced

Comparing on feature checklists is a long exercise with an unclear finish. Comparing on how each one charges is short and decisive. All figures below were checked on the vendors' published pages on 10 September 2026.

Tool	How it charges	Vendor
The free tier of the launcher in question	Free	Running with Crayons
Its paid feature pack	£34 or £59, one time	Running with Crayons
Spotlight	Included with macOS	Apple
Raycast	Free for individuals. Pro at $10 per month, or $8 per month billed annually	Raycast
LaunchBar 6	Free to keep using after a 30 day trial, with paid licences sold separately	Objective Development
Quicksilver	Free, open source	Quicksilver

Some details behind the table. Raycast's free tier caps clipboard history retention at three months while the paid tier makes it unlimited, its AI features sit in the paid tier, and advanced models are an additional $8 per month on top. Team pricing is a separate table at $15 per user per month, or $12 billed annually. LaunchBar 6.24 states support for macOS Tahoe along with Sequoia, Sonoma, Ventura and Monterey, and its download page notes that after the 30 day trial the app continues to work without registration, occasionally inviting the user to take a short break.

Two of the entries deserve a note on how they are funded, since that shapes what to expect over time. Quicksilver is an open source project with no commercial model behind it, which means no subscription and also no support commitment. LaunchBar comes from a company whose better known product is a network monitor, so the launcher sits alongside a sustained commercial line rather than carrying the business alone. Neither observation is a recommendation. They are simply the sort of context that a price column alone does not show.

The shape of the charge changes what a comparison means. A one time £34 and a $10 monthly subscription diverge sharply over three years and converge over six months. Anyone evaluating for a machine that will be replaced next year is answering a different question than someone setting up a tool for the next decade.

What transfers and what gets rebuilt

Migration effort is where estimates go wrong, so it helps to separate the portable from the rebuildable.

• Snippets are text, so the content moves. The keyword syntax and expansion conditions differ between tools, which means the list arrives but does not necessarily fire correctly on arrival.
• Clipboard history does not move. Anyone who regularly reaches back for something copied last Tuesday will hit a discontinuity on switching day.
• Workflows are stored in each tool's own format. An equivalent capability usually exists on the other side, but the automations get rebuilt rather than imported.
• Hotkeys transfer. Muscle memory does not. The first few days after a switch are spent relearning result ordering, which feels like the new tool being slower even when it is not.

The asymmetry is worth stating plainly. Someone in groups one and two can switch during a coffee break. Someone in group four is looking at an afternoon, and the real cost of the move is measured in time rather than money.

Before removing the old one

A few housekeeping items are easy to skip and annoying to discover later.

Licence details arrive by email at purchase, and the developer runs a recovery process for anyone who can no longer find them. If preference syncing was enabled, the actual settings live in the sync folder rather than only in the user library, so deleting the app leaves them behind on the sync service. The developer's uninstall guidance is to quit from the menu bar item, then drag the app from Applications to the trash, and it explicitly advises against app cleaner utilities on the grounds that they can be overzealous and remove files that are still needed.

Permissions deserve one last pass. A launcher that handled clipboard and text expansion holds Accessibility, and often Input Monitoring, in System Settings under Privacy and Security. Removing the app does not always remove the entry. Clearing out stale entries there is a small piece of hygiene that also makes the next tool's permission prompts easier to reason about.

There is also a case for not switching at all. If the reason for looking is odd behaviour rather than cost or features, the developer publishes a reset procedure: quit the app, then delete the application support folder, the two preference plists and the cache folder from the user library. A reset costs ten minutes. A migration costs an afternoon.

The menu bar slot is a separate question

For anyone whose search started with menu bar crowding rather than launcher features, there is a fact worth knowing before shopping at all. This particular launcher can hide its own menu bar icon. The setting is in the Appearance tab, under Options, as a checkbox for hiding the menu bar icon. The developer's own troubleshooting page covers the predictable consequence: with the icon hidden and the hotkey forgotten, the way back in is to launch the app from the Applications folder and press Cmd and comma.

So one icon can already be removed without changing tools at all. The limitation is that this only works for apps that ship such a setting, and most do not. Counting what is actually up there usually turns up cloud storage, a password manager, a backup agent, chat clients, a meeting app and an input switcher, few of which offer a hide option. Hunting through six settings windows is slower than collapsing the whole row at once.

The deciding factor for a collapsing tool is whether a hidden icon can still be clicked and its menu opened without expanding the bar first. Where that is not possible, every hidden item becomes a two step operation and drifts back into the visible row within a week. The features page covers how hidden items get reached, and how it compares lines up the options by supported macOS versions and licensing model.

What to change first

Open the settings window of the launcher currently installed and mark every panel that has ever been used. If the marks sit in the launching and finding groups, run on the built in search for two weeks before paying for anything. If they reach automation, budget an afternoon for the rebuild and choose on licensing shape rather than feature count. Either way, handle the crowded menu bar as its own problem with its own fix, which is what Koffret is for.