The best clipboard manager for Mac in 2026.

Best free: Maccy

Free and open source, or $9.99 on the Mac App Store if you’d rather buy it there. It does one job: a fast, keyboard-first list of what you copied, and since 2025 it also finds images by the words inside them. It keeps up to 999 copies, all on your Mac. There’s no iPhone app and no sync.

Best across Mac, iPhone and iPad: Paste

The most complete of the lot: a visual history on every Apple device through your own iCloud, pinboards for things you reuse, search inside screenshots, and since June 2026 a local MCP server for AI tools. It costs $3.99 a month, $29.99 a year or $89.99 once, after a 7-day trial. History keeps 30 days unless you choose forever.

If you want the same reach for one payment, PastePal is $14.99 once for Mac, iPhone and iPad, with iCloud sync. You can try it free, but it won’t paste until you buy it.

Best inside a launcher: Raycast or Alfred

If Raycast is already your launcher, its clipboard history is free and keeps three months; Pro, at $10 a month, keeps it longer. It can read the text in copied images, but the history never syncs between devices. Alfred’s clipboard history comes with the £34 Powerpack, keeps up to three months and is off until you turn it on.

Best one-time price for one Mac: ClipBook

$9.99 once for one Mac, $14.99 for two, $29.99 for five, after a 5-day trial. Unlimited history, images found by the text inside them, and plenty of text tools. Mac only, stored locally, no sync.

Also one payment: CopyClip 2 is $7.99 and keeps text only. Pastebot 3 is $39 with a year of updates, needs macOS 26, and is strong at transforming text before it pastes.

Best in the notch, and for AI tools: Just Copy

Ours. Everything you copy is kept as a card, sixteen kinds each drawn as what it is, in a tray that drops from the notch, or sits above the Dock on a Mac without one. Search reads the words inside screenshots, smart folders fill themselves by rule, and a local MCP server lets Claude, Cursor and Codex search what you’ve copied, off until you switch it on. $29.99 once at launch, then $49, with optional iCloud sync; the iPhone app is coming soon and included. There’s no trial, but a full refund within 14 days.

Built into macOS: Spotlight

Since macOS Tahoe, Spotlight can keep what you copied: turn it on in System Settings under Spotlight, then press Cmd-Space and Cmd-4. It keeps 30 minutes, 8 hours or 7 days of copies, with nothing to install and no sync. If a short list covers your day, that may be all you need.

Also around

Flycut is free and keeps text only; its last release was in December 2020. Clipy is free, came back in June 2026 after eight years, has no search yet and turns analytics on by default. PasteBar is free for Mac and Windows; its last release was in June 2025.

How we checked

Every fact about another app comes from its maker’s website, its App Store page or its public code, as they stood on 24 September 2026. Prices are in US dollars except Alfred’s, which is sold in pounds. Apps change; check their sites before you buy. If we got something wrong, tell us at [email protected] and we’ll fix it.