Best Paste alternatives
for Mac in 2026
Paste is excellent, and it is a subscription — 29.99 € a year, every year. Plenty of people would rather pay once, or nothing at all, for something they use fifty times a day. Here are the 8 best alternatives — ranked, tested, honest.
How we ranked these
We weighed five things: feature parity with Paste, pricing fairness (one-time over subscription where possible), cross-device sync, active maintenance, and indie ownership. We use most of these apps regularly. MacPaste is ours — we tell you when one of the others is actually better for your use case.
The closest one-time-purchase equivalent to Paste. Unlimited history, 7 color tags, hover preview and pinned boards, free locally. Mac ↔ iPhone iCloud sync is in development and included in the 49 € Pro when it ships.
The leading open-source clipboard manager. Text only, no images, no sync, no labels — but rock-solid, audited code, and zero cost. Perfect for developers who only need URLs and snippets.
Not a standalone clipboard — it's a clipboard module inside the Raycast launcher. Excellent if you already use Raycast for everything. Free tier caps history at 3 months; Pro removes the cap but costs 120 €/year.
The mature Tapbots option. Excellent filters and regex transformations make it powerful for power users. No iCloud sync, no iPhone app — and no real plans for either since 2018. Solid but Mac-only, slightly aging UI.
Veteran Mac launcher with paid clipboard add-on inside Powerpack. Great if you already pay for Powerpack for workflows and snippets. No iCloud sync, no iPhone — but very mature and extensible.
Plain-text-only clipboard built for developers. Minimal, ultra-lightweight (~2 MB), been around forever. Doesn't handle images or rich content. Perfect if you only copy code and URLs.
The gentle free option from the Mac App Store. Tiny text history (max 25 in free, 999 in v2). Zero learning curve, but very limited — no images, no tags, no sync, sparse updates.
Genuinely the most polished clipboard manager on the Mac, with sync across Mac, iPhone and iPad. It ranks last here only because this list is about avoiding a recurring bill — on features alone it would be near the top. If the subscription doesn't bother you, buy it.
Frequently asked questions
Was Paste acquired by WeTransfer?
No — this is a common mix-up between two unrelated products. WeTransfer acquired FiftyThree in 2018, which made a presentation tool also called Paste, and Bending Spoons acquired WeTransfer in 2024. The clipboard manager at pasteapp.io is a different product: still independent, still actively developed. We explain the confusion in full here.
Is there a free Paste alternative?
Yes — MacPaste is free with unlimited local history. Maccy and Flycut are both fully free open-source options for text-only use. CopyClip is free with a small history cap.
Which alternative has iCloud sync with iPhone?
Today, only Paste itself. Every other app in this list is Mac-only. Raycast offers Mac ↔ Mac sync on its Pro tier but has no iPhone app, and MacPaste's iPhone sync is still in development.
Best one-time payment option?
Pastebot at 19.99 € if you don't need sync. MacPaste at 49 € lifetime if you want everything (color tags + pinned boards today, sync + iPhone app in development). Both are honest one-time deals — no subscription trap.
Try MacPaste free.
Unlimited local history. Pay 49 € once if you want iPhone sync — and that's it.
Download MacPaste