I have tested every popular Mac clipboard manager over the past year. Some are great. Some are fine. Some looked good in screenshots but turned out to be frustrating in daily use. Here is what I found, with honest opinions about each one.
Quick comparison
Before the details, here is the summary:
| App | Price | iCloud sync | Image support | iOS app | Open source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| reClip | Free / $2.99 mo | Yes | Yes | Coming soon | No |
| Paste | $29.99/yr | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Maccy | Free | No | No | No | Yes |
| CleanClip | $12.99 | No | Yes | No | No |
| PastePal | Free / $15 | No | Yes | No | No |
| CopyClip | Free | No | No | No | No |
reClip
Price: Free (20 clips) / Pro $2.99/mo or $17.99/yr
Full disclosure: I made this one. I built reClip because I wanted a clipboard manager that stored everything locally, synced through iCloud (not some third-party server), and opened fast enough that I would actually use it instead of reaching for Cmd+Z.
The overlay opens with Shift+Cmd+V and shows your clipboard history as a horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen. Arrow keys navigate, Enter pastes, number keys (1-9) quick-select. The whole interaction takes under a second once you are used to it.
reClip handles text, rich text, HTML, images, files, URLs, and hex colors. It auto-detects sensitive content like passwords and API keys and skips them. You can organize clips into pinboards, pin frequently used items, and search your history.
What I like: Speed. The overlay is genuinely fast because I rewrote the rendering to bypass SwiftUI for the selection and scrolling. Privacy is built in, not bolted on. The free tier works without nagging.
What could be better: No iOS app yet (it is in development). The pinboard management could be more intuitive. The app is newer than competitors, so it has fewer integrations.
Paste
Price: $29.99/year (no free tier)
Paste has been around the longest and it shows. The interface is polished, the iCloud sync is reliable, and it has both a Mac and an iOS app. If you want something that works across all your Apple devices right now, Paste is a strong choice.
The UI is a horizontal timeline that slides up from the bottom of your screen. You can search, organize into pinboards, and paste with rich formatting or as plain text.
What I like: The iOS app is solid. Sync is fast and reliable. The UI feels native and well-designed.
What bothers me: $30 per year for a clipboard manager feels steep. There is no free tier to try it properly (just a short trial). No direct download option outside the App Store.
Maccy
Price: Free (open source)
Maccy is the go-to recommendation on Reddit and Hacker News, and I understand why. It is free, open source, lightweight, and does one thing well: it keeps a history of your text copies.
You press a keyboard shortcut, a list drops down, you pick an item. No overlay, no thumbnails, no rich previews. Just a list of text strings.
What I like: Zero cost, minimal resource usage, and the code is on GitHub so you can audit it yourself.
What bothers me: Text only. No images, no files, no rich text. No sync between devices. No search beyond basic substring matching. If you copy anything other than plain text, Maccy ignores it.
CleanClip
Price: $12.99 one-time purchase
CleanClip is a solid option if you want a one-time purchase instead of a subscription. It handles text and images, has a nice popup interface, and is reasonably fast.
What I like: One-time pricing is refreshing. The interface is clean and native-feeling. Image support works well.
What bothers me: No iCloud sync. No iOS companion app. The feature set is smaller than Paste or reClip. The company's blog is clearly AI-generated, which does not inspire confidence in the product direction.
PastePal
Price: Free with limits / $14.99 one-time
PastePal has a nice feature that lets you organize clips into color-coded spaces (like folders). The interface uses a grid layout instead of a horizontal strip, which some people prefer.
What I like: The organization system is thoughtful. Supports multiple content types. The free version is usable.
What bothers me: No iCloud sync. Performance can lag with large histories. Development seems to have slowed down.
CopyClip
Price: Free
CopyClip is a menu bar clipboard manager that is about as simple as they come. It shows a dropdown list of your recent text copies. That is basically it.
What I like: It is free and dead simple.
What bothers me: Text only, no search, no images, no sync, no pinning. It feels like a proof of concept rather than a finished product.
macOS Tahoe built-in clipboard
Apple added clipboard history to Spotlight in macOS Tahoe. I wanted to love it, but the implementation is rough. Image handling is unreliable, there is no cross-device sync, and enabling it requires digging into settings. It is better than nothing, but not by a huge margin.
I expect Apple will improve this over the next few releases. For now, a dedicated clipboard manager is still the better experience.
My recommendation
If you want the cheapest option and only copy text, use Maccy. It is free and does the job.
If you want a polished experience with iOS sync today, use Paste. It costs $30/year but it works well.
If you want privacy, a good free tier, iCloud sync, and image/file support, try reClip. I am biased here, but I think the combination of local-first storage, sensitive content detection, and speed sets it apart. The iOS app is coming, which will close the gap with Paste.
Whatever you pick, using any clipboard manager is a massive improvement over the macOS default. The one-slot clipboard is a 42-year-old design limitation that should have been fixed decades ago. Do yourself a favor and install something.