Maccy vs Paste: Which Mac Clipboard Manager?
Maccy vs Paste: Which Mac Clipboard Manager Fits You?
Maccy and Paste sit at two ends of the macOS clipboard spectrum. Maccy is a free, open-source, keyboard-first utility that does one thing: keep a searchable list of what you copied. Paste is a paid, visually rich manager with a horizontal "wall" of cards, snippets, and iCloud sync. Picking between them comes down to how visual you want the experience to be and whether you'll pay a subscription.
What Maccy does well
Maccy is deliberately small. It lives in your menu bar, opens with a shortcut, and shows a plain text list you filter by typing. There's no dashboard, no onboarding, no account. For developers and people who copy mostly text, that minimalism is the appeal.
- Free and open source. You can read the code and build it yourself.
- Fast fuzzy search. Start typing and the list narrows immediately.
- Lightweight. It uses very little memory and stays out of your way.
The trade-off is scope. Maccy focuses on plain-text history. It does not transform your clips, organize them into boards, or summarize long text.
What Paste does well
Paste is built around a visual timeline. Press its shortcut and a row of cards slides up, each showing a preview of what you copied — including images and rich snippets. It adds pinboards to group reusable items and iCloud sync so your history follows you across Macs.
The trade-off is the pricing model: Paste is a subscription, which means recurring payments for as long as you use it.
How ClipHistory compares
ClipHistory takes a middle path: the speed of a keyboard-first tool, plus features Maccy leaves out, without a subscription.
- One-time payment. ClipHistory is $19.99 for a 12-month license, with no auto-renewal.
- Generous history. It keeps your last 150 unpinned clips plus unlimited pinned clips, so the things you reuse stay forever while the noise rolls off.
- AI transforms built in. Summarize, rewrite, translate, or clean any clip using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint. Neither Maccy nor Paste runs text through an AI provider you control.
- Local by design. No cloud, no account — your clips stay on your Mac.
Feature snapshot
| Maccy | Paste | ClipHistory | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price model | Free | Subscription | One-time $19.99 |
| Visual cards | No | Yes | Yes |
| Snippets / boards | Limited | Yes | Yes |
| AI transforms | No | No | Yes (your API key) |
| Cloud sync | No | iCloud | Local only |
Which one should you pick?
- Choose Maccy if you copy almost exclusively text, want zero cost, and prefer a tool you never think about.
- Choose Paste if a visual, synced timeline is worth a recurring subscription to you.
- Choose ClipHistory if you want a polished, fast manager with AI cleanup and rewriting, kept local, paid once instead of monthly.
The global shortcut Cmd+Shift+V brings up ClipHistory's history anywhere, and the paste stack lets you queue several clips and drop them in order — handy when you're filling a form or assembling a document from scattered sources.
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, universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 12 or later. Everything stays on your Mac.