Paste App Alternatives for Mac and iPhone in 2026
Paste is a good clipboard manager with a subscription attached. Here is an honest look at the alternatives, what each one costs, and which problem each actually solves.
Most people who go looking for a Paste alternative are not unhappy with the app. Paste is well made and has been for years. They are looking because of the subscription, or because they want their clipboard data to stay somewhere simpler, or because they only ever use a fraction of what they are paying for.
That is worth separating out before comparing anything, because “cheaper than Paste” and “better than Paste” are different searches with different answers.
What Paste gets right
Being fair about the incumbent makes the comparison useful.
Paste keeps a searchable, durable history of what you copy and syncs it across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, which almost nothing else in this category does end to end. It has pinboards for organizing clips you keep coming back to, a genuinely good full-screen browser for scrolling back through history, and it added Apple Intelligence powered OCR search so you can find text inside screenshots you copied.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Anyone who copies images regularly knows the pain of scrolling a visual history looking for the right screenshot. Searching the text inside them is a real advantage.
If you want all of that, Paste is still the most complete option and nothing below is a straight upgrade.
What it costs now
At the time of writing, Paste runs a 7-day trial, then $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year, with a one-time lifetime purchase around $89.99. It is also included in Setapp at $9.99 per month alongside a large bundle of other apps.
Pricing in this category moves, so treat those as a starting point rather than gospel. The structural point is the one that drives most switching: at $29.99 a year, five years of Paste costs roughly $150, which is the kind of math that makes people reconsider what a clipboard app should actually cost over time.
The alternatives, honestly
Pastebot 3
Tapbots shipped Pastebot 3 in July 2026, the first major release in about a decade, and it is the most direct like-for-like competitor. Rule-based organization, powerful paste filters for transforming text as you paste it, and deep automation.
Pricing is unusual and worth understanding: roughly $39 buys a direct license that includes a year of updates, and you keep that version permanently. Another year of updates costs about $19 whenever you want it. There is also a Mac App Store subscription at around $24.99 a year or $2.99 a month, and a 14-day trial. Existing Pastebot 2 owners get an upgrade discount.
Mac only, with no iPhone companion. If you are on one Mac and want the most powerful paste transformation available, this is the pick.
Maccy
Free, open source, tiny, and fast. Maccy does clipboard history with a keyboard-first popup and stays out of the way. Low memory, no account, no telemetry, nothing to pay.
The limits are exactly what you would expect: Mac only, no sync, no phone access, and a deliberately narrow feature set. For a developer who lives on one machine and wants scrollback with a hotkey, it is hard to argue against free and open source.
Raycast and Alfred
If you already run either launcher, you may already own a clipboard manager. Raycast includes clipboard history in its free tier. Alfred includes it with the Powerpack, a one-time license in the neighborhood of $40 that also unlocks workflows and snippets.
The pitch here is consolidation rather than capability. You are not adding an app, you are using a feature of one you already have. Both are Mac only, which is the recurring theme in this category.
The built-in macOS clipboard history
Recent macOS releases added clipboard history through Spotlight, which changed the calculation for casual users. It is free, it is already there, and it handles the common case of grabbing something you copied a few minutes ago.
It is also deliberately short-lived and not built to be a library. Worth knowing where the ceiling is before paying for anything, which is the whole point of the rundown of Mac clipboard history options.
CopyAgain
Different model, and the difference matters more than the price.
CopyAgain is a $9.99 one-time unlock covering iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android, with sync through your own private iCloud and no account to create. But it does not record your clipboard automatically. It saves what you deliberately choose to keep, which means it is a snippet library rather than a history recorder.
That is a real limitation if scrollback is what you want, and it should rule CopyAgain out for that use. It is the point of the design if what you actually reuse is a stable set of things: canned replies, addresses, commit templates, links, payment details. There is a genuine tradeoff between automatic capture and a curated library, and neither answer is universally right.
Side by side
| Paste | Pastebot 3 | Maccy | Raycast/Alfred | CopyAgain | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price model | Subscription, lifetime option | One-time + paid update years, or sub | Free | Free / one-time license | One-time |
| Automatic history | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No, save on demand |
| Mac | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| iPhone / iPad | Yes | No | No | No | Yes |
| Android | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Sync | iCloud | No | No | Raycast Pro only | Your own iCloud |
| Account required | Yes | No | No | Depends on tier | No |
The question that actually decides it
Everything above collapses into one question: do you want a record of everything you copied, or a library of things you reuse?
If you want scrollback, the answer is Paste, Pastebot, Maccy, or your launcher. You want the app watching the clipboard so that the thing you forgot to save is still retrievable. Pick on price and platform: Maccy if free and Mac-only works, Pastebot if you want power and a license you own, Paste if you need it on your phone too.
If you want a reusable library, automatic history is mostly noise. The forty URLs and stray snippets you copied today are not things you will ever want again, and burying your six actual templates inside them makes them harder to find, not easier. What you want is categories, a most-used sort, and access from wherever you are typing.
Plenty of people want both, and running a free Mac history tool alongside a curated cross-device library is a perfectly reasonable setup. They are not really competitors.
It is also worth checking that a clipboard manager is the right category at all. If what you want is a short trigger that expands into a block of text as you type, that is a text expander, a related but distinct tool, and buying the wrong one is a common mistake.
Before you switch
Two practical notes.
Check what happens to your existing data. Most clipboard managers do not import from each other, so anything pinned in Paste needs to be moved by hand. Do that before you cancel anything, while you still have access.
And check the privacy posture of whatever you move to, since it varies more than the feature lists suggest. Whether the app requires an account, whether sync runs through the maker’s servers or your own iCloud, and whether it captures automatically all determine what ends up stored and where. Those questions matter more on the phone than the Mac, which is a large part of what separates the iPhone options from the Mac ones.
FAQ
How much does Paste cost in 2026? At the time of writing Paste offers a 7-day trial, then $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year, with a one-time lifetime option around $89.99. It is also bundled in Setapp at $9.99 per month alongside other apps. Check their site before buying, since pricing changes.
What is the best free alternative to Paste? Maccy is the strongest free option on Mac. It is open source, lightweight, keyboard-first, and does clipboard history well. The tradeoffs are that it is Mac only with no iPhone or iPad companion, and it has no sync, so your history stays on the machine that recorded it.
Is there a one-time-purchase alternative to Paste? Yes, several. Pastebot 3 sells a direct license around $39 that includes a year of updates and never expires. Alfred’s Powerpack is a one-time license. CopyAgain is a $9.99 one-time unlock, though it is a save-on-demand library rather than an automatic history recorder.
Do I still need a clipboard manager now that macOS has clipboard history? It depends how far back you need to go. The built-in history in recent macOS releases is deliberately short-lived and lives in Spotlight, which covers the common case of retrieving something you copied minutes ago. Dedicated managers add durable history, pinned items, search, and organization.
Which alternative syncs between Mac and iPhone? Fewer than you would expect. Maccy, Pastebot, Raycast, and Alfred are Mac only. Paste syncs its history across Mac, iPhone, and iPad through iCloud. CopyAgain syncs across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android through your own iCloud, but it syncs saved snippets rather than an automatic history.
CopyAgain is $9.99 once for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android, with no account and no subscription. It is a library for the things you reuse rather than a recorder of everything you copy, which is the right trade for some people and the wrong one for others.