A Clipy alternative
that can search
Is there a Clipy alternative with search and OCR?
Clipy is free and text first. TypeFire keeps images and files too, and reads the text inside every screenshot on your Mac, so a design or an invoice is findable by the words in it.
Free for your 10 most recent clips with every feature on. Pro is $18 once.
Why people move from Clipy
The specific reasons people give for switching.
There is no search
Clipy shows a menu of recent items. Once your history is more than a screen deep, finding something means scrolling and remembering roughly when you copied it. TypeFire searches across every clip, by content, by source app, by tag, and by the text inside images.
Development has been quiet
Clipy is a community project that has gone through long stretches without releases. It still works, but macOS moves, and a clipboard manager sits close enough to the system that this matters.
Images are second-class
Clipy is built around text. TypeFire keeps images, screenshots, files, links and colors, each with a preview that suits it, and reads the text inside every image so you can search it.
Snippets are a separate menu
Clipy has snippet folders you pick from a menu. TypeFire expands abbreviations as you type, anywhere on your Mac, so you never break flow to open a menu at all.
No AI on anything
Summarize a thread you copied, rewrite it, or translate it, using Apple Intelligence, a local model, or your own key. Included on the free tier.
TypeFire compared with Clipy
Prices and capabilities as of September 2026.
| TypeFire | Clipy | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0, then $18 once for unlimited | Free, open source |
| Clip limit on free | 10 most recent | Unlimited |
| Search across clips | Yes | No |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| Images, files, colors | Yes, with previews | Limited |
| Text expander | Yes, unlimited, free | Snippet menu only |
| AI actions on clips | Yes, free tier | No |
| Encrypted storage | Yes, on your Mac | No |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Active development | Yes | Intermittent |
Clipy details from its public repository, August 2026. Both apps keep clipboard history on your Mac.
What Clipy does better
Three of them, named plainly, with what TypeFire does instead directly below.
Free and unlimited
Clipy costs nothing and does not cap your history. On raw clip count the free version beats ours, which keeps your 10 most recent. If unlimited free history is your only requirement, Clipy or Maccy is the honest answer.
Open source
You can read exactly what it does with your clipboard rather than taking a privacy claim on trust. TypeFire answers that with what leaves the Mac instead: an encrypted local database, no account needed for clips, and sync that runs through your own iCloud.
Very light
Clipy is a small, focused menu bar utility with almost no surface area. TypeFire does more, and inevitably is a larger app.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Clipy at any price.
Search, including inside images
Find any clip by its content, its source app, a tag you gave it, or a word that appears inside a screenshot. On-device text recognition, offline, free.
A real text expander
Unlimited snippets and abbreviations that expand in every native Mac app and every website, with rich text, Markdown, dynamic tokens, fill-ins and script snippets.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Right-click a clip, save it as a snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes three characters you type forever.
Encrypted storage
Clips are encrypted on your Mac, and anything a password manager marks confidential is never captured at all.
AI on any clip
Summarize, rewrite or translate, with Apple Intelligence or a local model so it can stay on your machine.
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
Clipy is free and unlimited. TypeFire is free at 10 clips with search, OCR and a text expander, and $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 Clipy
Still not answered?
Partly. The text expander is free forever with no cap: unlimited snippets, abbreviations, collections, tags, tokens and iCloud sync.
The clipboard manager is free at your 10 most recent clips, and that free version includes OCR search and AI actions rather than being a stripped-down preview. Clipy is free and unlimited, so on clip count alone it wins. TypeFire Pro is $18 once to remove the cap.
Not directly. Clipy stores its snippets in its own format and TypeFire imports from TextExpander, aText, Alfred, Espanso, CSV and JSON.
Most Clipy users have a modest snippet menu, and re-creating those as abbreviations is usually a ten minute job that leaves you better off, because TypeFire expands them as you type instead of requiring a menu.
You would not, if unlimited free history is the only thing you want.
The reasons to pay are search that actually works at scale, screenshots you can find by their contents, a text expander in the same app, and encrypted storage. If none of those matter to you, Clipy is a fine choice and we would rather say so.
It is a community open-source project and releases have been intermittent.
It continues to work for many people. Whether that is a risk depends on how you feel about an app with Accessibility access to your system going long periods without a release.
Other comparisons
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Loved by people who type all day.
Unprompted reactions from users, in their own words.
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