Best Clipboard Manager for Mac in 2026: 13 Options Compared

macOS Tahoe added a clipboard view in Spotlight, and before that macOS remembered exactly one thing you copied. Every clipboard manager goes further; the differences are what they keep, how well you can find it later, and what they cost.

This compares thirteen options honestly, including the free ones that beat paid apps on the thing you probably care about most.

The direct answer: the best free clipboard manager for Mac is Maccy, which is open source and unlimited. The best paid one depends on price shape: Paste at $29.99 a year if you also want iPhone and iPad, Pastebot at $39 for paste automation, TypeFire at $18 once if you want clipboard history, a text expander and markdown notes in one app. The only three that can find a screenshot by the words inside it are Paste, ClipBook and TypeFire.

The short answer

• Want free and unlimited, nothing else? Maccy or Clipy. Both are open source and cost nothing.
• Want the deepest paste automation? Pastebot, at $39 plus $19 a year for updates.
• Already live in a launcher? Raycast gives you three months free, or unlimited on Pro at $8 a month.
• Want to search inside your screenshots without paying? TypeFire, which is what this site is about, so weigh that accordingly.

What actually separates them

Most of these apps store what you copied and let you paste it again. Four things separate them in daily use.

Search. A clipboard history without search is a menu you scroll. That is fine for ten items and useless at five hundred. Clipy and CopyClip lean on menus; Maccy, Flycut, Paste, Pastebot and TypeFire search properly.

Images, and whether they are searchable. Most apps store screenshots. Almost none read the text inside them, which is what makes a screenshot findable three weeks later. This is the biggest capability gap in the category.

Price shape. One-time, subscription, or free. Over three years the difference between $18 once and $8 a month is roughly $280.

Whether anything becomes permanent. Clipboard history is a rolling window by design. If you paste the same paragraph weekly, the right answer is a text expander, not a longer history.

The comparison

Prices checked 24 September 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page. Store pricing changes, so confirm before buying.

The contenders

1. TypeFire: the free one that can read your screenshots

Price: Free for your 10 most recent clips, $18 once for unlimited. No subscription.

A native Mac app that keeps clipboard history, an uncapped text expander and a markdown notes app behind one hotkey. What separates it in this category is that the words inside an image are searchable: screenshots are read on device with Apple's text recognition at the moment you copy them, so a pricing table you grabbed three weeks ago comes back by a phrase that appears in it. That runs on the free tier rather than behind the paywall.

Strengths: OCR search inside screenshots at no cost, clip to snippet in one click, encrypted local storage, iCloud sync between Macs, one app instead of two. The trade: the free history is 10 clips, which is the smallest here. If you want a long free history and nothing else, Maccy is the better answer.

2. Maccy: the best free clipboard manager on the Mac

Price: Free, open source.

Does one job properly. Unlimited history, instant search, no account, no cost, actively maintained. If raw clip count and speed are your only requirements, this is the whole answer and you can stop reading.

Strengths: free forever, fast, auditable, tiny. The trade: images are handled thinly, there is no OCR, and nothing about it turns a repeated paste into something permanent.

3. Paste: the polished one, if you want a subscription

Price: $2.49 a month, $29.99 a year, or a lifetime purchase. Seven day trial.

The most designed app in the category, with pinboards, iCloud sync across Mac, iPhone and iPad, and text recognition inside images. It is the one most people mean when they say a clipboard manager should feel like an Apple app.

Strengths: sync across all three platforms, pinboards, OCR, genuine polish. The trade: it is a subscription for a utility, and over three years the lifetime option or a one time purchase elsewhere costs less.

4. Pastebot: the deepest paste automation

Price: $39 direct including a year of updates, then $19 a year if you want more. Also $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year on the Mac App Store.

Tapbots rebuilt it as Pastebot 3 in July 2026. Filters, sequential pastes and rules that transform text on the way out are the reason to choose it: it is the only app here that treats pasting as a small automation problem.

Strengths: filters and transformations, sequential pastes, a decade of refinement. The trade: no OCR, and the update model means the real cost is higher than the sticker.

5. Raycast: already installed, already good enough

Price: Free with a three month rolling history, Pro at $8 a month billed annually for unlimited.

If you already live in Raycast, its clipboard history is one keystroke away and needs no second app, no second Accessibility prompt and no second update cycle.

Strengths: zero extra install, good search, part of a launcher you already use. The trade: the free history rolls off at three months and unlimited is a subscription to a much larger product.

6. CleanClip and ClipBook: the one time purchases

Price: CleanClip $19.99 once, Pro $29.99. ClipBook from $9.99 once for one Mac.

Both are recent, both are bought once, and both cover the core job well. ClipBook reads text inside images, which puts it in the small group that can find a screenshot by its contents.

Strengths: no subscription, modern, actively developed. The trade: smaller ecosystems, and neither does anything about the text you retype every week.

7. Clipy, Flycut and CopyQ: free, narrow, dependable

Price: Free, open source.

Clipy adds snippet folders but has no search. Flycut is text only by design, built as a paste buffer for developers. CopyQ is the cross platform power user option and looks it.

Strengths: free, auditable, light. The trade: each one is missing a piece most people eventually want, usually search or images.

If you only want free

Three genuinely good options, and none of them is us.

Maccy does one job and does it well: unlimited history, fast search, open source, no cost. If raw clip count is your only requirement, this is the answer.

Clipy is lighter still and has snippet folders, but no search, which becomes the limiting factor quickly.

Flycut is text-only by design, built for developers who want a paste buffer and nothing else. That restraint is a feature.

TypeFire's free tier keeps your 10 most recent clips, which is fewer than any of those. What it adds free is search inside screenshots, AI actions on clips, and an uncapped text expander. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on whether you copy screenshots.

The thing almost nobody does

Searching the text inside an image. You screenshot an error, a pricing table, a chart. Three weeks later you remember a phrase from it and nothing finds it, because to your clipboard manager it is a rectangle of pixels called [Image 900x560].

Paste, ClipBook and TypeFire read the words inside images. TypeFire does it on-device with Apple's built-in text recognition, at capture time, on the free tier. It is the single most useful thing a clipboard manager can do with an image and it remains rare.

Does macOS have a clipboard manager built in?

Not a real one. macOS 26 Tahoe added a clipboard view inside Spotlight, the first history Apple has ever shipped, and it holds a few recent copies. It does not search, pin, tag, filter by the app a clip came from, or keep anything beyond the last handful, and nothing before you upgraded exists at all. That is the gap every app on this page fills.

Which Mac clipboard managers are genuinely free?

Maccy, Clipy, Flycut, CopyQ and CopyClip are free, and Maccy is the one to start with. TypeFire is free at 10 clips with OCR search included, and Raycast is free with a rolling three month history. Everything else here is a trial.

The question nobody asks

If you are pasting the same block of text every week, a longer clipboard history is the wrong fix. Clipboard history is recency-biased by nature: it is for the thing you copied four minutes ago.

For the thing you paste every Tuesday, you want a text expander: give it an abbreviation, type three characters, get the paragraph. Most people need both, which normally means two apps, two Accessibility permissions and two update cycles.

TypeFire is one app with both, and it lets you promote a clip into a snippet in one click. That is the only genuinely structural difference in this list; everything else is a matter of degree.

How to choose

1. Do you copy screenshots? If yes, OCR search narrows the field to three apps immediately.
2. Do you also retype the same text? If yes, you need a text expander, and getting both in one app is worth something.
3. How deep does your history need to go? Most people genuinely need the last twenty minutes. Be honest before paying for unlimited.
4. What price shape suits you? Subscription only makes sense if you are getting continuous value from continuous development.

Try TypeFire

The text expander is free and uncapped. The clipboard manager is free at your 10 most recent clips, with OCR search and AI actions included rather than held back. $18 once removes the cap.

Download for Mac or read the full clipboard manager tour.