A clipboard manager for Mac OS X and later: what to look for

The problem is always the same. Copy one thing, copy a second thing before pasting the first, and the first is gone with no way back. Anyone who has lost a paragraph or a long command that way starts looking for a clipboard manager within the hour.

The search term itself is worth a note. Apple renamed the operating system from Mac OS X to macOS in 2016, and the old name has stuck in the way people describe their Macs. It matters here for one practical reason: several tools that were well known in the Mac OS X years are no longer maintained, and most current ones require a recent release. Where a Mac really is running an old version, the list of options is short and the answer is often to use whatever still installs rather than the best-reviewed choice.

On a current Mac, the position has changed in a way that most comparison articles have not caught up with.

What macOS already keeps

Clipboard history is now built in, in Spotlight. Apple lists it alongside calculating and converting units as one of the things Spotlight does: search text and files previously copied to the clipboard, and find something copied earlier. It has a keyboard route rather than a menu. Command-Space bar opens Spotlight, and the search can then be narrowed with Command-1 for applications, Command-2 for files, Command-3 for actions and Command-4 for the clipboard.

That is worth trying before installing anything, because for a large share of people it is the whole requirement. The thing copied twenty minutes ago is searchable, files as well as text, without a new app, a new licence or a new icon in the menu bar.

Two older pieces of the system are often mistaken for history and are not. The Finder's Edit menu has a Show Clipboard command, which displays what is on the clipboard right now and nothing before it. And Universal Clipboard copies between Apple devices signed in to the same account, which moves the current clipboard sideways rather than backwards in time.

Where the built-in version stops

Apple documents what clipboard history finds. It does not document how long entries are kept, and there is no published way to pin an item, tag it, keep it permanently, or exclude a particular app from being recorded. It is a search field, not a list to browse, which suits recalling something specific and suits browsing much less. It also requires a macOS version new enough to include it, which rules it out on exactly the machines whose owners still call the system Mac OS X.

So the real question is not whether to have clipboard history. It is which of the following five things is needed badly enough to justify a separate app.

Retention and types. How long entries survive, and whether images, files, colours and rich text are kept as well as plain text.

Exclusions. Whether passwords are kept out. A manager that records everything will record a password manager's output unless it is told not to.

Paste behaviour. Whether the tool pastes into the app in front, whether it can strip formatting, and whether it can paste several items in sequence or merge them.

Devices. Whether history follows to an iPhone or iPad, and where it is stored if it does.

Payment shape. Free, one payment, or a subscription. This is usually the deciding factor and it deserves to be decided deliberately.

What each option costs today

Prices below were read from each vendor's own page. Free tools are marked as free.

Option	Price	Payment shape	Runs on	Stands out for
Spotlight clipboard history	Free, built in	None	Current macOS	Command-4 from Spotlight, no extra app
Maccy	Free from the source repository, or $9.99 on the Mac App Store	One payment, or none	macOS Sonoma 14 or higher	Open source under the MIT licence, 2.4 MB
CopyClip	Free	None	Mac only	2.6 MB, runs from the menu bar
ClipBook	$9.99 for one Mac, $14.99 for two, $29.99 for five	One payment, lifetime updates	macOS 13.0 or later	Paste behaviour and text transformation
Paste	$29.99 billed annually, with a lifetime option	Subscription or one payment	Mac, iPhone, iPad	Sync across devices through private iCloud
Alfred Powerpack	£34 single licence, £59 with free lifetime upgrades	One payment	Mac	Clipboard history bundled with snippets and workflows

The free end of the range

Maccy is deliberately narrow. Its own description is that it does one job, keeping copy history at hand, and that is the argument for it: one window, type to filter, press Return. It is keyboard-first by design, native rather than custom-drawn, and it handles the password case by following the password manager's lead, so that when a password manager clears a copied password from the clipboard, Maccy drops it too. The source is on GitHub under the MIT licence and the app is free from there; the App Store build is sold at $9.99 to fund development, which is a licensing choice rather than a feature difference. It requires macOS Sonoma 14 or higher and the download is about 2.4 MB.

CopyClip occupies the other free position: no source repository, no configuration to speak of, free on the Mac App Store from FIPLAB, around 2.6 MB, and a menu of recent clips hanging off a menu bar icon. For someone who wants the last few clips back and nothing else, it asks nothing and costs nothing. It is Mac only, so it is not a candidate for anyone who also wants history on a phone.

One payment, and a lot of paste behaviour

ClipBook is the option for people whose complaint is about pasting rather than remembering. Pressing Return on an item pastes it straight into the app in front. Copying with a doubled Command-C appends the new text to the previous item instead of replacing it, which turns gathering material from five places into one clip. Control-V pastes items one after another without opening the window, advancing through the history each time. Several selected items can be pasted together with a chosen separator, merged into one item, or a multi-line item can be split so each line pastes separately. Text can be extracted from an image in the history, and there are 78 text transformations available on text items.

Retention is explicit rather than implied: each type of item can be kept for a day, a week, a month, a year or forever, and favourites and tagged items can be kept forever regardless. The licence is one payment with lifetime updates and support, at $9.99 for one Mac, $14.99 for two, and $29.99 for five, with a 14-day money-back guarantee. It requires macOS 13.0 or later and can be installed as a Homebrew cask.

A subscription, in exchange for devices

Paste is the one that leaves the Mac. The same history appears on Mac, iPhone and iPad at no extra cost, and the sync path is the point of the design: Paste states that the clipboard stays on the device and in a private iCloud account, and never touches its own servers. Rules can be set so that passwords and nominated sensitive apps are ignored, and pinboards hold the snippets, links, colours and templates that get reused.

The pricing is a subscription of $29.99 billed annually, which works out at $2.49 a month, with monthly and lifetime options also offered. The trial is seven days with every feature unlocked on every device, and a download from the website does not require a card and does not charge automatically when the trial ends. A family plan covering up to six people in a Family Sharing group exists on the App Store only, a team plan on the website only, students and educators get 30% off the first year of an annual plan, and the app is included in a Setapp subscription.

When it is already part of something else

Anyone who already owns an Alfred Powerpack licence has clipboard history without buying anything further. The Powerpack adds clipboard history for text clips, images and file paths, searchable or browsable, and pairs it with snippets and auto-expansion, so a clip can be promoted into a reusable snippet from the history viewer. The Powerpack is a one-time purchase at £34 for a single licence, or £59 for the version that includes free lifetime upgrades. The core Alfred app is free, so the clipboard feature is what part of that price is buying alongside workflows, file navigation and custom searches.

This is the cheapest option to evaluate, because the only question is whether a launcher window is an acceptable place to keep clipboard history. For keyboard-driven work it usually is.

Where the history is stored, and for how long

A clipboard history is a written record of everything copied on a Mac, and that includes the things copied without thinking: an address, a bank reference, a one-time code, a block of a client's contract. It is worth knowing where that record sits before it grows to a year's worth.

Three of the options above state their position plainly. Maccy keeps all data on the Mac and says it never leaves. Paste keeps the history on the device and in a private iCloud account, and states that it never reaches the vendor's own servers. ClipBook stores locally and makes retention an explicit setting per type of item, from a day up to forever, which is the only one of the group that offers a documented way to make the record short by default.

The questions worth asking of any candidate follow from that. Is retention configurable, or is the history unbounded until it is cleared by hand? Is there a way to exclude an app so that nothing from it is ever recorded? Can a single entry be deleted, and does deleting it remove it from any sync copy as well? An unbounded local history with no exclusions is the default behaviour of a surprising number of small utilities, and it is the setting most worth changing on the day the app is installed.

What it costs in permissions and in bar space

Any manager that pastes directly into the app in front has to synthesise a keystroke on behalf of the user, and macOS gates that behind Accessibility permission in Privacy and Security settings. That permission is broad, so it is worth granting only to software whose provenance is clear, which is part of why open source options and App Store builds are attractive here.

Then there is the smaller cost that nobody accounts for. Almost every one of these runs as a menu bar item, and so does the sync client, the password manager, the screenshot tool and the system monitor next to it. Menu Bar settings in System Settings only governs Apple's own controls, plus an Allow in the Menu Bar list of apps that supply items, and the only gestures for the rest are holding Command while dragging an icon to move it, or dragging it out of the bar to remove it altogether. Remove it and the app's menu goes with it.

A menu bar manager for macOS is the other way round: a clipboard manager's icon can sit behind a divider, out of sight, and still be opened when needed, which suits a tool that is driven by a keyboard shortcut and almost never clicked. The feature list covers how hidden items are reached without the bar expanding, and how it compares sets out the differences between the tools that do this.

What to change first

Press Command-Space bar, then Command-4, and search for something copied earlier today. If that answers the need, stop there and install nothing. If it does not, choose on payment shape rather than feature lists, and put whatever icon the winner adds behind a divider with Koffret.