Clipboard history for Mac: getting back what you copied an hour ago

A tracking number was on the clipboard. Then a Slack link went on top of it, then a colour code, then a line of shell. The tracking number is gone, the order page has been closed, and the only way back is to log in again and find it. That is the whole problem, and on a Mac it has had the same shape for twenty years: the system keeps one thing, and the one thing is whatever was copied last.

What has changed recently is that the Mac itself now keeps more than one. That does not make the question go away. It moves it. The question is no longer whether to have a clipboard history at all, it is how much history is worth paying for, and what the history still cannot rescue.

What the Mac keeps on its own

The standard pasteboard holds one item per type. Copy again and the previous item is overwritten, with no undo and no list. That is still true in every app, in every window.

The addition is in Spotlight. Apple's own Mac User Guide, in the page on finding things with Spotlight, lists clipboard history among the results Spotlight can return, described as a way to search text and files copied earlier and find something copied before. Spotlight opens with Command and the Space bar, so the recall path is one keystroke away from wherever the cursor already is.

Two things are worth being precise about. First, this is a search surface, not a stack: it is built for the case where the wanted item can be described, not for the case where six clips need pasting in order. Second, Apple does not publish how long that history is kept or how many items it holds, so anyone quoting a retention figure for it is quoting something other than Apple. Treat the built-in history as a safety net for the last little while, and check it on the Mac in question before building a habit on top of it.

For a lot of people that is genuinely enough, and the honest advice is to try it for a week before spending anything. The people it is not enough for tend to know within a day, because they hit one of the limits below.

What a paid clipboard history adds

The features that separate a dedicated app from a search box are boring and specific, which is a good sign. They are the ones that come up when the clipboard is part of a job rather than an accident.

Pinning is the feature that changes a day the most. A signature block, an SSH public key, a standard reply, an account number: these are not history, they are permanent fixtures that happen to live on the clipboard. CopyClip 2 keeps pinned clips at the top of the list and assigns them to Command and a number, so a pinned item pastes without reading anything. ClipBook and Paste both do their own version of the same idea.

Beyond pinning, the differences cluster into a few groups. Ordered pasting, where several items are selected once and then pasted one after another, matters to anyone filling forms or moving rows between two web apps. Plain text pasting, where formatting is stripped on the way out, matters to anyone who has pasted grey Google Docs text into a ticket. Text extraction from images matters to anyone working from screenshots. Type awareness, where colours, files, links and images are recognised rather than flattened to text, matters to designers.

And then there is reach. A clipboard history that only exists on one Mac is a different product from one that follows a phone as well. Paste is sold as a Mac, iPhone and iPad app on one licence and syncs through the user's own iCloud. ClipBook is a Mac licence, sold per machine. Neither approach is better in the abstract. It depends on whether the thing being copied was copied on a phone.

What the main options cost

Prices below were taken from each vendor's own page and from the Mac App Store listings on 28 September 2026. All figures are in US dollars before tax.

App	Price	Model	Requires
Spotlight clipboard history	Included	Part of macOS	A recent macOS
CopyClip	Free	Mac App Store	macOS 10.13 or later
CopyClip 2	$7.99	One-time, Mac App Store	macOS 11.5 or later
Maccy	Free from GitHub, $9.99 on the Mac App Store	Open source, MIT	macOS 14 or later
ClipBook	$9.99 one Mac, $14.99 two, $29.99 five	Lifetime licence	macOS 13 or later
Paste	$29.99 per year, about $2.49 per month	Subscription, lifetime plan also sold	Current macOS
PasteBar	Free	Open source, Mac and Windows	Published on their site

A few notes that the table flattens. Maccy is the same app either way: the GitHub build is free under an MIT licence, and the $9.99 App Store price buys the convenience of store updates and supports the author. ClipBook's licence is priced by the number of Macs, which is unusual and which makes it the cheapest option on a single machine and less obviously so on three. Paste is included in a Setapp subscription, so anyone already paying for Setapp has it already and should check before buying anything.

Trials differ more than prices do. ClipBook runs five days fully unlocked with no card and no account. Paste offers seven days, and from the website rather than the App Store there is no automatic charge at the end. CopyClip 2 has a trial build on the vendor's site and is sold through the App Store. The useful test during a trial is not whether the app is pleasant. It is whether the shortcut has become automatic by day three.

Where to download it from

This category has an unusual amount of impersonation, and the vendors say so themselves. The first line on Maccy's own site is a warning that fake sites are impersonating it and that maccy.app is the only official one. That warning exists because a clipboard manager is a perfect thing to counterfeit: it asks for permission to watch everything copied, and a user installing one expects to grant exactly that.

So the download route matters as much as the app. The Mac App Store is the strictest path, because the app runs sandboxed and the listing is tied to a verified developer. CopyClip and CopyClip 2 are both sold there by FIPLAB Ltd, Maccy is there under its author's name, and Paste has a store listing as well. The trade-off is that sandboxed builds sometimes ship fewer features than the direct download of the same app.

Direct downloads are fine when the address is typed rather than followed from a search result, and when the app is signed and notarised by a named developer. Homebrew is the most reliable middle path for anyone comfortable with a terminal, because the cask names are fixed and public: ClipBook publishes its own one-line install command on its site for exactly that reason.

For the open source options, the repository is the source of truth. Maccy is MIT licensed and PasteBar publishes its code, which means the history format and the network behaviour can be read rather than trusted. That is worth something specific here, given what ends up in the file.

The part that deserves real care

A clipboard history is a log of everything typed into a copy command, which over a working week includes passwords, API tokens, recovery codes and at least one thing that should never have been written down. This is the one area where the differences between these apps matter more than the price.

Three mechanisms are worth looking for. Local storage, meaning the history file never leaves the Mac, which PasteBar, ClipBook and Paste all state on their own pages. A pause switch, so recording can be turned off before working in a password vault: CopyClip 2 calls this Private Mode. And automatic exclusion, where fields marked as concealed by the app that owns them are skipped entirely, and where an item is dropped from history if the password manager that put it there clears it. Maccy documents that last behaviour explicitly, and CopyClip 2 lists skipping concealed and sensitive fields.

Set up the exclusions on day one, not later. The apps that offer an exclusion list accept bundle identifiers or app names, and the list that matters is short: the password manager, the banking site, the terminal if secrets get pasted through it. Also decide whether history should survive a restart. Several of these apps can clear everything on quit, which is the right setting for a shared or travelling machine and the wrong one for a machine that is only ever used by its owner.

The thing a clipboard history cannot fix

Here is the case that sends people looking for a better clipboard manager when the clipboard is not actually the problem.

Two Gmail accounts are open, a work one and a client one. An address is copied from the client's thread, the wrong window comes forward, and the address lands in the wrong draft. Or a Figma link is copied out of Slack, the link opens in the browser that is signed in as the personal account, and the file is not there. Nothing was lost from the clipboard. The right text went into the wrong session.

No amount of clipboard history helps with that, because the history was never the weak link. What was missing was a boundary between the accounts. On a Mac the usual attempts are browser profiles, which work but require remembering which window is which, and one private window per extra account, which loses the session the moment it is closed.

The alternative is to stop treating the accounts as tabs. A browser that keeps each web app in its own window, with its own cookie container, lets three Gmail accounts stay signed in at the same time without any of them being aware of the others, and routes a link to the session that owns it rather than to whichever window was last in front. The two problems are then separate, which is the point: a clipboard manager is asked to remember, and the workspaces are asked to keep things apart. Trying to solve the second problem with the first is what makes people conclude that no clipboard app is good enough.

Deciding in ten minutes

Start from the failure that prompted the search, not from the feature lists.

If the failure was a single item lost once or twice a week, open Spotlight and check whether the built-in history already covers it. That takes a minute and costs nothing.

If the failure was the same few snippets being retyped every day, the feature needed is pinning with a number key, and the cheapest route to it is CopyClip 2 at $7.99 once.

If the failure was several items needing to move together, in order, between two apps, that is ordered pasting, and ClipBook and Paste both do it. Choose by machine count and platform: a lifetime licence per Mac against a yearly subscription that includes iPhone and iPad.

If the failure was something copied on a phone and wanted on the Mac, only a syncing app answers it, which narrows the list quickly.

If the failure was pasting into the wrong account, none of the above is the fix, and the money is better spent on separating the accounts.

One more piece of housekeeping regardless of choice: settle the global shortcut before anything else and do not change it again. A clipboard history that has to be found with the mouse gets used a tenth as often as one that answers a keystroke.

What to change first

Open Spotlight today and see how much of the last hour it can already give back, because that answer decides whether anything needs buying at all. If the answer is not enough, install one trial, pin the three snippets typed most often, and judge it on day three rather than on day one. And if what keeps going wrong is the account a paste lands in rather than the text itself, look at how the features of a browser built around separate app sessions handle it, or at what SpaceDeck leaves on its free plan.