What is the best truly free clipboard manager for Mac?

Maccy is the go-to free option — open source, lightweight, and focused on clipboard history. It does not include snippets, boards, or AI transforms.

No. ClipHistory is $19.99 as a one-time payment with a 12-month license and no auto-renewal. For a free option, Maccy is the better match.

Do free clipboard managers keep my data private?

Maccy and ClipHistory both keep clipboard data local on your Mac. ClipHistory only makes network calls when you trigger an AI transform to your own provider.

When is it worth paying for a clipboard manager?

When you want the tool to do more than store clips — snippets, boards, sequential pasting, or AI transforms like summarize and translate. ClipHistory adds all of these for a one-time price.

The Best Free Clipboard Manager for Mac

If you want a clipboard manager on the Mac without paying anything, you have genuinely good options. Let's be straight about which tools are actually free, what they do, and the point at which paying once starts to make sense.

The honest free option: Maccy

For a truly free, no-strings clipboard manager, Maccy is the answer most people land on. It is open source, lightweight, and does the core job well: it keeps a searchable history of what you copied and lets you recall items with a keyboard shortcut. There is no trial timer and no upsell wall — it is free, full stop.

What Maccy does not do is organize clips into boards, store reusable snippets, or transform text. It is a focused history list, and for many people that is exactly enough.

"Free trials" are not free apps

You will also find tools that advertise a free tier or trial and then move to a subscription. That is fine, but it is not the same as free. If your goal is zero ongoing cost, a trial that converts to a recurring charge does not meet it. Read the pricing page before you commit.

When free stops being enough

You outgrow a free clipboard manager when you start wanting the tool to do something with your clips rather than just store them. Common triggers:

You repeatedly paste the same canned text and want snippets.
You juggle clips across projects and want boards to keep them separate.
You copy messy text and wish you could clean, rewrite, summarize, or translate it on the spot.
You fill forms and want to queue several clips and paste them in order.

At that point you are choosing a paid tool, and the main decision is subscription vs. pay-once.

A one-time paid option: ClipHistory

If you decide free is no longer enough, ClipHistory is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription — $19.99 with a 12-month license and no auto-renewal.

What you get

Fast history opened with Cmd+Shift+V, keeping 150 unpinned clips plus unlimited pinned ones.
AI transforms — summarize, rewrite, translate, or clean up any clip via five providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint) with your own API key.
Snippets for reusable text.
Boards for grouping clips by project.
Paste stack for sequential pasting.

Privacy

Like Maccy, ClipHistory keeps everything local on your Mac — no account, no cloud sync. The only network traffic happens when you run an AI transform, and it goes straight to the provider whose key you entered. Because the key is yours, AI usage is billed by that provider, not by ClipHistory.

The recommendation

Want genuinely free and only need history? Use Maccy.
Want snippets, boards, and AI transforms and prefer to pay once instead of subscribing? ClipHistory at $19.99 one-time is the fit.

Both keep your clipboard data on your machine, so privacy is not the deciding factor — capability and pricing model are. ClipHistory is a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel, signed and notarized by Apple, running on macOS 12 or newer.

Ready to try it? Get ClipHistory for macOS ($19.99) — a one-time payment, 12-month license, no auto-renewal. Signed and notarized by Apple, runs on macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon and Intel).