Paste, but free — and part of it is already on your Mac

the clipboard history already built into macOS 26

before comparing anything paid — ours included — it is worth ten seconds to check whether macOS already covers you. open Spotlight with ⌘Space and press ⌘4: what you copied recently is there, searchable, free, and installed already.

why you have not seen it

it does not greet you. the clipboard section is off until you allow it, and the first time you open it macOS shows a consent screen warning that personal and sensitive information may end up in search results. nothing on screen suggests ⌘4 exists until you have been through that once, which is why plenty of people on Tahoe still believe the Mac has no clipboard history. Apple documents the shortcut and the switch in the mac-help guide

the switch lives in System Settings → Spotlight, in a section named «Results from Clipboard», with a «Clear Clipboard History» button beside it. turning it on, moving the shortcut if ⌘4 is taken, and working out why something you copied is missing are a procedure of their own, kept on the page about finding something you copied earlier

where the built-in one stops

it is a recent window, not an archive. things age out of it, and that is the design rather than a bug — the point is recall over the last stretch of work. what you copied on Monday is not waiting there on Thursday.

and nothing can be held back. there is no pinning, no favourites, no folders: the signature you paste eleven times a day ages out on exactly the same schedule as the tracking link you pasted once by accident. it is one flat list, and you do not curate it.

what Paste gets right, and it is not nothing

sync. history that appears on your iPhone and iPad is a real feature with real infrastructure behind it, and charging every month is an honest way to pay for something that costs money to run every month. hop has nothing like it and is not going to.

and it is a specialist. pinboards, organisation into sets, pinning, a memory measured in months rather than a window — that is a clipboard app built by people who thought about the clipboard for years. the asymmetry matters: the clipboard is the whole of Paste, and one module of eighteen in hop. on depth of that one job the specialist wins, and no comparison table changes that.

what our side actually is — how the history is stored, what enters it, what never does — is set out on the feature page for clipboard history in hop

so who should still pay for a Paste alternative

the short version, before the details. if you want the thing you copied a few items back, Spotlight has you covered and you should stop reading and go use it. the simple case ends at two points: when you need something from further back than the window reaches, and when you need a particular snippet to survive no matter how much you copy over it.

at that point you are choosing between paying a specialist and adding a local history that goes deeper. what Paste costs today, checked at both its own pricing page and its Mac App Store card on 10 september 2026: $2.49 a month billed direct, $3.99 a month through the App Store, $29.99 a year, or $89.99 once for a lifetime licence. that last one matters more than the difference between the monthly figures — «you must subscribe forever» is not true of Paste, and any comparison built on it is built on sand.

there is also a route that costs nothing and is not us. clipboard history ships inside several launchers people already have open all day, and we compare one of them on the page about Alfred and its clipboard

where hop is different from Paste

hop answers the horizon problem and not much else about the clipboard. it keeps the last hundred things you copied, up to three hundred if you raise it — text, images and files. a count of entries behaves differently from a stretch of time: a quiet afternoon does not eat it. click an entry to bring it back, or paste it straight into the app you were just in.

copied files are kept by name, several at once showing as «name +N», and pasting puts the actual file back rather than a path. the built-in history handles files too, so this is a description of the module and not a point scored against anyone.

and it is not a clipboard app

that cuts both ways, and it is the honest frame for this page. hop is one menu bar icon holding eighteen small tools, and the clipboard is one of them — the same icon converts files, lays out windows, reads text off the screen and fourteen more things. if you would not have installed a clipboard manager but would use one that came along with a file converter and the rest

then hop makes sense in a way a dedicated purchase does not. if the clipboard is the centre of your work, the specialist is the better buy and this is the wrong page for you.

what you would be giving up

sync, first and most obviously: one Mac is where hop's history begins and ends. then the organisation — pinboards, sets, the curated side of a dedicated app — which hop does not have either. a hundred searchable entries is a different answer to the same problem, not the same answer for less money.

we have not compared Paste feature by feature and will not claim anything is missing from it. the table above lists what we know about our own side; check yours against it.

one thing that does carry across: concealed input never enters the history. when a password manager marks a field as confidential, macOS flags what it puts on the pasteboard, and hop leaves it alone. the flag is part of NSPasteboard

and if what you want is a clipboard manager and nothing else — no eighteen tools, no subscription — the free specialist worth naming is open source and well liked, and we compare ourselves to it honestly on the page about Maccy

trying a free Paste alternative without deciding anything

hop is about 6 mb, needs no account and runs on macOS 14 or later. if you are on Tahoe, a few things changed around menu bar apps before you add another one, and we wrote them up in what macOS 26 changed for menu bar apps

1. turn on the Spotlight clipboard first and give it a week — you may need nothing else
2. if you keep reaching past the end of it, install hop and leave your current manager running; two clipboards do not conflict
3. the moment worth testing is wanting something from the day before yesterday
4. if it does not stick, drag it to the trash

frequently asked questions

does macOS 26 have clipboard history now?

yes — inside Spotlight. ⌘Space, then ⌘4. it is off until you allow it, and the first time you open it macOS shows a consent screen about personal information appearing in results. on Sequoia and earlier there is nothing built in at all.

do I still need a clipboard manager on Tahoe?

for anything you copied today, no. the reasons to add one are reach and control: history that goes back further than a recent window, and the ability to keep a particular snippet from ageing out with everything else.

does hop sync my clipboard to other devices?

no. history stays on this Mac. if sync is what you need, Paste does it and we do not.

how far back does hop go?

the last hundred entries, or up to three hundred if you raise it. it counts entries rather than hours, so a quiet day does not use it up.

is Paste subscription-only?

no, and a free alternative chosen on that basis alone is chosen on a wrong premise. checked on 10 september 2026: $2.49 a month direct or $3.99 through the App Store, $29.99 a year, or $89.99 once for a lifetime licence.

are passwords stored in the history?

no. anything a password manager marks as concealed never enters it.

is there a subscription for hop later?

no. hop is free and open source, and there is no paid tier planned.

the hop side of this

clipboard history — everything you copied — text, links, screenshots and whole files.