Copycat vs Paste, Maccy, and Raycast

Paste is a polished, well-established Mac clipboard manager. It’s local-first, with iCloud sync available as an opt-in (off by default) if you want history to follow you across Macs — something Copycat deliberately doesn’t offer, since Copycat never leaves your Mac at all, by design. Paste also has ⌘1–⌘9 shortcuts for its most recent items, as does Copycat, where they're quick-copy shortcuts: the clip is copied, then you press ⌘V.

The two differ most on price and privacy documentation: Paste is a subscription ($2.49/mo or $29.99/yr) with an $89.99 lifetime option, while Copycat is a single $3.99purchase with all future updates included. Paste’s privacy policy describes storing clipboard data in “human-readable formats,” so we couldn’t confirm local at-rest encryption the way we can for Copycat’s own AES-GCM implementation.

Maccy is a free, open-source clipboard manager for Mac, and a great option if you want to see the code you’re running. It supports ⌘+n to select an item and ⌥+n to select and paste, similar in spirit to Copycat’s ⌘1–⌘9 quick-copy shortcuts.

Two things set them apart. Maccy stores history in a plain SQLite database with no at-rest encryption (requested in Maccy’s issue #151, which was closed as won’t-implement), where Copycat’s history is AES-GCM encrypted with a Keychain-held key. And Maccy’s fuzzy search exists but ships off by default (substring search is the out-of-the-box behavior), while Copycat’s fuzzy search is on from the first launch.

Raycast is a broad productivity launcher with clipboard history as one of many built-in features. Its free tier keeps a 3-month clipboard lookback; Raycast Pro ($10/mo, or $96/yr billed annually) removes that limit. Raycast documents local encryption for clipboard history, and doesn’t sync clipboard data to the cloud even on Pro.

If you only want a clipboard manager, Copycat is a smaller, dedicated tool for it: a one-time $3.99 versus an ongoing Raycast Pro subscription, with ⌘1–⌘9 quick-copy shortcuts that Raycast’s clipboard history doesn’t offer.