An Alfred alternative for
snippets and clipboard
Is there an Alfred alternative for snippets and clipboard?
Alfred keeps snippets and clipboard history behind a paid Powerpack. TypeFire gives both away on the free tier, with abbreviations that expand in any Mac app and clips searchable by the text inside screenshots.
Pro is $18 once for three Macs. It is a dedicated tool for expansion and clipboard rather than a launcher with those bolted on.
Why people move from Alfred
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Both features you want are behind one paywall
Alfred's clipboard history and its snippet expansion are Powerpack features. The Powerpack starts around £34, roughly $45, with a Mega Supporter tier around £59. TypeFire's text expander is free and uncapped, and its clipboard manager is free at your 10 most recent clips.
You may be buying a launcher you did not want
The Powerpack is priced for workflows, file actions and automation. If you are only there for snippets and clipboard history, you are paying for a large app to get two features, and adopting a new launcher habit alongside it.
Snippets are plain text
Alfred snippets support placeholders, dates and clipboard insertion, but they are text. TypeFire snippets can be rich text with formatting and inline images, or Markdown that expands as styled HTML, or JavaScript and AppleScript that runs and pastes what it returns.
No OCR on your screenshots
Alfred's clipboard history stores text, images and file references. It does not read the words inside those images. TypeFire runs on-device text recognition over every image you copy, so a screenshot is findable by a word it contains.
No AI anywhere in the clipboard
TypeFire can summarize, rewrite or translate any clip, and can rewrite highlighted text in place anywhere on your Mac, using Apple Intelligence, a local model, or your own key. Alfred has no equivalent.
Clips and snippets stay separate
Alfred has both halves and no bridge. In TypeFire, right-click any clip and save it as a snippet with an abbreviation, turning something you copied once into three characters you type forever.
TypeFire compared with Alfred
Prices and capabilities as of September 2026.
| TypeFire | Alfred | |
|---|---|---|
| Text expander price | Free, unlimited | Powerpack, from about £34 |
| Clipboard history price | Free for 10 clips, $18 once for unlimited | Powerpack, from about £34 |
| Free tier | Yes, permanent | Launcher only, no snippets or clipboard |
| Rich text and Markdown snippets | Yes | Plain text |
| Script snippets | JavaScript and AppleScript | Via workflows |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| AI on clips or selection | Yes | No |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| Workflows and automation | No | Yes, extensive |
| File search and actions | No | Yes |
| Chrome extension for web apps | Yes, free | No |
Alfred pricing from alfredapp.com, August 2026, converted approximately from pounds. Both apps store clipboard history locally.
What Alfred does better
Three of them, named plainly, with what TypeFire does instead directly below.
Workflows are in a different league
Alfred's workflow system is one of the most capable automation environments on the Mac, and there is a large community building for it. TypeFire has script snippets and prompt chains, which is nowhere near the same thing. If workflows are why you use Alfred, keep Alfred.
It is a full launcher
File search, app launching, calculations, web searches, system commands. Alfred replaces and improves on Spotlight. TypeFire is not a launcher and does not want to be.
One purchase covers everything it does
The Powerpack is a single price for a very large surface area. Judged per feature it is good value, and the Mega Supporter tier includes lifetime upgrades. Our $18 buys a smaller, more focused thing.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Alfred at any price.
The two features, free or nearly free
The text expander costs nothing and is uncapped. The clipboard manager costs nothing at 10 clips, and $18 once removes the cap. Neither requires buying into a launcher.
Snippets that are more than text
Rich text with formatting and inline images, Markdown that expands as styled HTML, dynamic tokens, fill-in placeholders that stop and ask you for a value, and script snippets in JavaScript or AppleScript.
Screenshots you can search
On-device text recognition reads every image at capture. Search for a word you saw in a screenshot and the screenshot comes back. Offline, free, no AI provider involved.
AI in the places you type
Highlight text anywhere and rewrite, translate or shorten it in place. Chain several prompts onto one trigger. Runs on Apple Intelligence or a local model, so it can stay on your Mac.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Promote any clip to a permanent snippet in one click. This is the thing neither a launcher nor a clipboard manager can do on its own, and it is why TypeFire being a text expander first matters.
It runs alongside Alfred, not instead of it
TypeFire claims two hotkeys and nothing else. Keep Alfred for launching and workflows, and let TypeFire handle expansion and clipboard depth. Alfred snippet imports are supported directly.
Turn anything you copy into something you type
Right-click a clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes something you type three characters to get, forever. The same conversions run across all three surfaces: a clip becomes a note, and a note you keep rewriting becomes a snippet. Snippets, clips and notes live in one app, which is what makes each of those a single click rather than an export and an import.
- 01
Copy something
It lands in Clips alongside everything else you copied today.
- 02
Save as snippet
It leaves your rolling history and enters your permanent library.
- 03
Give it a trigger
Type
invfrom then on and never look it up again.
A clipboard manager you can tell what to ignore
A clipboard manager sees everything you copy. Until 4.0 the only control over that was a password-manager exclusion you could not see. There are three now, none of them gated, and the limits of the strongest one are stated rather than buried.
Turn image capture off
One switch. Text keeps being captured and pictures stop. Images you have already saved are kept rather than deleted, which is not what most people expect a privacy toggle to do, so it is worth saying.
Name apps to skip
Add any application and TypeFire ignores what you copy in it. Choose from the apps it has already seen, with clip counts, or browse to any app on your Mac. Each app gets one of three settings: allow it, block images only, or block everything you copy there. The middle one is what most people want for a work tool, keeping the text and losing the screenshots.
The password managers, now visible
TypeFire has always ignored password managers. That list is in Settings now, twenty-three apps including 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Dashlane and Apple Passwords, blocked by bundle ID in code rather than by a setting you have to find. It shows which of them you have installed, and any one can be overridden.
Encrypted on your Mac
Clips are stored in an encrypted database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Images sit beside it, readable only by your own account.
Secrets expire in minutes
Card numbers and high-entropy strings are detected and deleted after five minutes by default, adjustable in Settings. Everything else follows the retention you choose.
An on-device AI option
Apple Intelligence and local models through Ollama or LM Studio run entirely on your machine. If you pick Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead, text goes to that provider directly; TypeFire operates no server in that path.
Where blocking by app stops being a guarantee
macOS does not tell an application which other application wrote to the clipboard. TypeFire matches on the app that was in front at the time, plus any app that identifies itself using the standard convention. That covers the overwhelming majority of real cases and it is not absolute. The protection that does not depend on a guess is the concealed-content marker: password managers mark what they copy, and TypeFire never stores it whatever else is set.
The app list also covers what you copy, not screenshots you save as a file. A PNG on your desktop records nothing about what was on screen, so TypeFire matches those to an app where it can and skips them when it does. It is right in the ordinary case and it is not a promise: to keep saved screenshots out entirely, turn off Save screenshots to Clips.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync, note version history and saving from AI apps through MCP. There is no subscription and no per-seat pricing.
Free tier, then one payment
No free tier at all
One time
No free tier
One time
Lifetime, or $3.99/mo
Five snippets free, then a subscription
Alfred puts snippets and clipboard history behind a Powerpack from about £34. TypeFire gives you the expander free and the clipboard free at 10 clips, with $18 once for unlimited.
The graph is free, and it needs nothing
Press ` and TypeFire draws every note, snippet and clip on one canvas, using the links, tags and folders already in your files. Nothing to download and nothing to switch on. A connection you made is drawn solid, one TypeFire worked out is drawn dashed.
Turn on Weave and search starts matching what you meant rather than the exact words you typed. It runs on your Mac, with no account and nothing uploaded.
Moving from Alfred
Still not answered?
Yes. Alfred is one of the supported import formats, alongside TextExpander, aText, Espanso, CSV and JSON.
Your abbreviations, snippet content and collection structure come across, and TypeFire never rewrites your existing Alfred files. Snippets land as plain Markdown files in a folder you choose, so you can read them in any editor afterwards.
Yes, and it is a sensible setup. Alfred keeps the launcher hotkey and its workflows; TypeFire uses ⌘⌃1 for snippet search and ⌘⌃2 for clips.
If you do this, turn Alfred's clipboard history off so two apps are not watching the same pasteboard, and decide which app owns expansion so an abbreviation does not fire twice.
For the two features in question, yes. Alfred's Powerpack starts around £34, roughly $45, and both snippets and clipboard history sit inside it.
TypeFire's text expander is free and uncapped, and the clipboard manager is free at your 10 most recent clips, with $18 once removing the cap. The comparison is not like for like: the Powerpack also buys workflows, file actions and the launcher, none of which TypeFire has.
No. Alfred's clipboard history keeps text, images and file references, and you can browse and search the text entries, but it does not read the words inside images.
TypeFire runs Apple's on-device text recognition over every image at capture, which makes screenshots searchable by their contents. It works offline and is available on the free tier.
Probably not, if you use workflows. Alfred's automation is genuinely excellent and TypeFire has nothing comparable.
The honest recommendation is to switch the snippet and clipboard half and keep Alfred for what it is best at. If you only ever used Alfred for snippets and clipboard history, then yes, TypeFire covers both for a fraction of the cost.
Four things. It reads the text inside screenshots so you can search them.
It runs AI on any clip or on highlighted text anywhere on your Mac. It turns a clip into a permanent snippet with an abbreviation.
And it expands rich text, Markdown and running scripts rather than plain text alone. There is also a free Chrome extension, so the same snippet library follows you onto Windows and ChromeOS.
Other comparisons
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Briskine alternativeBeyond the browser
Magical alternativeAI without the fee
Text Blaze alternativeMac native, not a tab
Auto Text Expander alternativeThe modern replacement
TextExpander for ChromeThe free browser option
Espanso alternativeNo YAML required
Typinator alternativeFree instead of $24.99
aText alternativeFree and still updated
Raycast Snippets alternativeThe other launcher
Raycast clipboard alternative$18 once, not monthly
TextExpander alternativeWithout the subscription
Both in one appWhy the loop closes
Clipboard manager for MacThe full feature tour
PricingPro is exactly six things
Loved by people who type all day.
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