Paste App Alternatives for Mac in 2027: Free and One-Time

Short answer: The best Paste app alternatives in 2027 are Maccy (free, open source, local), Raycast (free clipboard history inside a launcher), Pastebot (the power-user pick with a one-time option), Alfred (if you already own the Powerpack), CopyClip (the simplest) and FavTray Clipboard (sorted, encrypted, $4.99 once). On macOS 26 or later, try Spotlight’s built-in ⌘4 history first.

TL;DR

• Paste costs $29.99 a year for Mac, iPhone and iPad, after a 7-day trial (Paste pricing).
• Free and local: Maccy, or Raycast’s free plan (3 months of history).
• Need iPhone sync without Paste: Pastebot 3 has iCloud Sync.
• Hate subscriptions: Pastebot’s direct licence, Alfred’s Powerpack, CopyClip 2 or FavTray Lifetime.
• Built in: macOS Tahoe 26 and macOS 27 Golden Gate keep up to 7 days of clipboard history in Spotlight.

Why look for a Paste alternative?

Paste is a good app. It shows your clipboard as a visual shelf, lets you pin snippets, links and templates, and keeps everything “always in sync” across Mac, iPhone and iPad through your private iCloud. Its site says your clipboard “never touches our servers,” and you can set rules so it ignores passwords and sensitive apps.

People still go looking for alternatives, usually for one of four reasons:

1. The subscription. $29.99 a year is fine for a tool you open fifty times a day. It adds up next to every other subscription.
2. Sync you don’t want. If your work clipboard holds customer data or keys, iCloud sync may be a policy problem, even when it’s private to your account.
3. A shelf you don’t need. Some people want a fast list, not a visual carousel.
4. macOS now has history. Since Tahoe 26, ⌘Space then ⌘4 shows recent copies, which covers part of what Paste does.

Which Paste alternatives are best in 2027?

App	Best for	Price	Free tier?
Spotlight (macOS 26+)	Recent copies, nothing to install	Free, built in	Yes
Maccy	Fast, free, keyboard-first history	Free (paid App Store version supports the developer)	Yes
Raycast	People who already use a launcher	Free; Pro $8/month billed yearly or $10 monthly	Yes, 3 months of history
Alfred	Existing Powerpack owners	Powerpack £34 (v5 licence) or £59 Mega Supporter	No, clipboard needs Powerpack
CopyClip	The simplest menu-bar list	Free; CopyClip 2 is $7.99	Yes
Pastebot 3	Power users who want sync and filters	$39 direct with a year of updates, or $24.99/year on the App Store	No, 14-day trial
FavTray Clipboard	Sorted, encrypted history with safe AI paste	Free tier; $4.99 once for Pro	Yes, 24 hours of history

Prices were checked on each vendor’s site on 14 October 2026.

We make FavTray, so weigh our take accordingly. We’ve ranked it where we think it honestly fits, not first.

1. Spotlight clipboard history: try this first

If you’re on macOS Tahoe 26 or macOS 27 Golden Gate, you already have a clipboard history. Press ⌘Space, then ⌘4. Apple’s guide, Search your Clipboard history in Spotlight on Mac, covers searching, copying an item back and clearing the history. Since macOS 26.1, System Settings › Spotlight lets you keep items for 30 minutes, 8 hours or 7 days.

• Good: free, built in, nothing to trust but Apple, searchable.
• Not great: no pins, 7 days at most, no plain-text paste, and it copies an item back rather than pasting it, so it’s always two steps. Not available on Sequoia or earlier.
• Price: free.

Our clipboard history on Mac guide walks through the settings.

2. Maccy: the free default

Maccy does one thing. ⇧⌘C opens a list of what you copied, you type to filter, Return copies the item and ⌥↩ pastes it straight into your app. It’s open source under the MIT licence, stores everything locally and runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later. The latest release on GitHub is 2.7.1 from August 2026, so it’s actively maintained.

• Good: free, fast, fully keyboard-driven. ⌥⇧↩ pastes plain text. It always ignores the concealed and transient pasteboard types that password managers set, and its default ignore list includes 1Password.
• Not great: no sync, no visual previews to speak of, no snippet folders. Plain by design.
• Price: free from the website or Homebrew (brew install maccy). A paid Mac App Store version exists to support the developer.

3. Raycast clipboard history: best if you live in a launcher

Raycast is a Spotlight replacement, and clipboard history is one of its core features. It handles text, images, colours and links, lets you pin entries, and pastes as plain text or rich text. Raycast says copied content “never leaves your computer and is encrypted on your local hard drive.”

• Good: free plan keeps history for 3 months. If Raycast is already open all day, you get a strong clipboard manager without another app.
• Not great: it lives behind the launcher, so there’s no persistent shelf. Unlimited history needs Pro.
• Price: free. Raycast Pro is $8 a month billed yearly ($96) or $10 monthly, and adds unlimited clipboard history among much else.

4. Pastebot 3: the closest like-for-like replacement

Pastebot from Tapbots is the Paste alternative for people who want more control, not less. Pastebot 3 requires macOS 26 Tahoe, which tells you it’s being kept current.

What it does: clipboard history with search and notes, custom and smart Pastebins for organising clippings, a Quick Paste menu on ⇧⌘V with number-key shortcuts, stackable filters you can bind to shortcuts (trim, change case and more), Stacks for pasting several clippings in order, an app blacklist, iCloud Sync, and Shortcuts and command-line access.

• Good: the deepest feature set here, iCloud Sync if you want it, and a licence you can own.
• Not great: needs macOS 26 or later. No free tier. More to learn than Maccy.
• Price: $39 direct with one year of updates; renewing updates is $19 a year, and you keep the last version you paid for. On the Mac App Store it’s $24.99 a year or $2.99 a month. Both come with a 14-day trial.

5. FavTray Clipboard: a history that sorts itself

FavTray Clipboard is one tool in FavTray, a menu-bar toolkit for macOS 14 Sonoma and later. It’s off until you turn it on. Then it sorts every copy into groups as it arrives (Links, Code, Data, Dev, Contacts, Money, IDs, Text, Images & files) and shows only the groups you have, with counts. Search covers the text, the kind of item and the app you copied from.

The differences from Paste:

• Local only, encrypted. History is encrypted with AES-256-GCM on your Mac, with the key in your login keychain. No sync, no account, no upload, and the sorting runs on your Mac with fixed rules, not an AI.

• Secrets handled for you. Copies from password-manager apps FavTray knows are never kept, and neither are API keys or private keys. Passwords, one-time codes and tokens it recognises are masked and forgotten after 10 minutes. It catches most secrets, not all.

• Safe Paste for AI chats. Before you paste into ChatGPT or Claude, it swaps keys, tokens, emails and card numbers for placeholders like [API_KEY_1], and Restore puts the real values back in the answer.

• Quick paste panel. No shortcut until you set one; one click sets ⇧⌘V. ↩ pastes into the app you were in, ⌘1 to ⌘9 paste a row, ⇧↩ pastes plain text.

• Good: sorting, secret handling and Safe Paste, which no other app here does. Cheap if you pay.

• Not great: no iPhone sync, no snippet collections or text expansion. Free keeps only 24 hours. It’s one tool among many, so if you only want a clipboard manager, the rest of FavTray is extra.

• Price: Free keeps 24 hours of history, 5 pins and 10 pastes into apps a day (copying back is never limited). Pro is $4.99 once for 1 Mac, keeps history from 1 day to forever (30 days by default), and removes the limits.

6. Alfred Clipboard History: if you already own the Powerpack

Alfred is a long-running launcher, and its Clipboard History is part of the paid Powerpack. You choose how long clips are kept: 24 hours, 7 days, 1 month or 3 months. By default it ignores apps like Keychain Access and 1Password and skips concealed clipboard data, and you can add apps to the ignore list.

• Good: solid, private, one-time purchase. If you already own the Powerpack, there’s no reason to pay for another clipboard app.
• Not great: not worth buying for clipboard history alone. Three months is the longest retention.
• Price: the Powerpack is £34 for a single-user v5 licence or £59 for Mega Supporter with free lifetime upgrades. Alfred’s site says buying now includes a free upgrade to Alfred 6.

7. CopyClip: the simplest option

CopyClip by FIPLAB sits in the menu bar and keeps a list of what you copied. Click an item to use it. It supports the concealed pasteboard type, so well-behaved password managers are skipped. The free version was last updated in May 2026.

CopyClip 2 is the paid sibling: up to 9,999 text clippings, pinning and keyboard shortcuts, updated as recently as October 2026.

• Good: almost nothing to learn. Free.
• Not great: basic search and organisation. Text-focused.
• Price: CopyClip is free; CopyClip 2 is $7.99 on the Mac App Store.

Maccy vs Paste: which should you pick?

This is the comparison most people are really making.

	Maccy	Paste
Price	Free	$29.99 a year
Interface	Compact searchable list	Visual shelf of cards
Sync to iPhone and iPad	No	Yes, via your iCloud
Pins and collections	Pin items (⌥P)	Pinned snippets, links, templates
Plain-text paste	⌥⇧↩	Not covered on Paste’s site
Ignores password managers	Concealed types, 1Password by default	Rules for passwords and sensitive apps
Open source	Yes, MIT	No

Pick Maccy if you want speed, zero cost and nothing leaving your Mac. Pick Paste if you copy on your iPhone and paste on your Mac, or if a visual shelf is how you think.

Which Paste alternative syncs with iPhone?

Of the apps here, Pastebot 3 is the one with iCloud Sync. Maccy, Raycast’s clipboard history, Alfred, CopyClip and FavTray keep history on the Mac.

There’s also Apple’s Universal Clipboard: copy on your iPhone, paste on your Mac, as long as both have Handoff, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on and use the same Apple Account. It shares only your latest copy, not a history, but for “send this link to my Mac” it’s often all you need. Any Mac clipboard manager will record what arrives that way.

Which one has the best privacy?

All of them can see everything you copy, so it’s worth being specific:

App	Where history lives	Sync	Skips password managers
Spotlight	On the Mac	No	Not documented
Maccy	On the Mac	No	Yes, concealed types
Raycast	On the Mac, encrypted	No	Yes, password-manager copies ignored by default
Alfred	On the Mac	No	Yes, by default
CopyClip	On the Mac	No	Yes, concealed type
Pastebot 3	On the Mac	Optional iCloud Sync	App blacklist
Paste	On the Mac and your iCloud	Yes	Rules you set
FavTray	On the Mac, encrypted	No	Yes, plus masking of recognised secrets

For a wider look at apps that keep data on your machine, see privacy-first Mac apps.

How do I move from Paste to another app?

There’s no standard export format between clipboard managers, so plan on starting fresh. The things worth carrying over are your pins:

1. Open Paste and go through your pinned items.
2. Copy each snippet you actually reuse into a plain note, or straight into the new app’s pins.
3. Install the new app and let it run for a day before you cancel Paste, so its history fills up.
4. Cancel Paste’s subscription. If you bought it through the App Store, Apple’s guide to cancelling a subscription shows where; if you bought it on Paste’s website, cancel from your Paste account.

Most people find they reused fewer than ten pins. That’s a short list to rebuild.

Which Paste alternative should you choose?

• You’re on macOS 26 or 27 and only need today’s copies: Spotlight’s ⌘4.
• Free, local and fast: Maccy.
• You already run Raycast: use its clipboard history and skip a separate app.
• You want everything Paste does, including sync, without a subscription: Pastebot’s direct licence.
• You own the Alfred Powerpack: turn on Clipboard History.
• You want copies sorted, secrets handled and a safe way to paste into AI chats, on your Mac only: FavTray Clipboard. The free tier keeps 24 hours; Lifetime is $4.99 once with a 7-day full trial, no card, no sign-up. See pricing.

If you want the wider field, including PastePal and Clipy, our roundup of the best clipboard managers for Mac covers them. And if you’re trimming subscriptions across the board, developer subscription fatigue is worth a read.