The built-in clipboard in macOS is as basic as it gets. You can save one item to the clipboard, and you can paste that item. That’s it. Essentially, the macOS clipboard system hasn’t evolved beyond the original concept of a OS clipboard. In the real world, and especially for so-called computer power-users, we need something more than that. How about a clipboard that has some history to it, so that it can store tens or hundreds of items?
There are plenty of commercial (paid) clipboard managers. But here we’ll look at the best free options. In my opinion (as someone who has used clipboard managers extensively and for many years) the free options are totally adequate.
Clipy
Clipy is the clipboard manager I use on my various macOS computers. Although it’s not had a new release since 2018, it still works on the current latest version of macOS (Ventura, 13.3, as I write this). It works fine on Silicon (M1, M2) machines, and Intel machines.
It has an GitHub project here. You can install it via a prebuilt DMG package (the regular way of installing macOS apps) available here, or via HomeBrew (if you know what that is).
It has a great line-up of features and settings, accessible in its Preferences / Settings.
You can store hundreds of items, and organise them into folders.
CopyClip
CopyClip is available in the App Store. It’s free. It’s very basic, but does the trick. If you don’t need the extra bells and whistles in Clipy, then CopyClip is a suitable alternative. It has just a few basic Preferences / Settings.
Conclusion
For free options, those are the two I suggest checking out.
If you know of or find a better free macOS clipboard manager, let me know in the comments.
ClipMenu is still the best one.
I need to use other programs to sync with my other computers, but so far, even paid software cannot beat ClipMenu.
There are a few attempts, but non are any good.
Clipy is an attempt to continue or copy ClipMenu, but it falls very short. All they did was remove important features, making ClipMenu still much better.