Maccy vs Pastebot (2026): Free vs a One-Time Purchase
Pastebot, by Tapbots, is a polished paid clipboard manager famous for its paste filters and sequential paste. Maccy is free and open source. Here is an honest comparison of what each does best — and which one you actually need.
What is Pastebot?
Pastebot is a paid clipboard manager from Tapbots, the studio behind Tweetbot and other well-regarded Mac and iOS apps. It is a one-time purchase of $12.99 (not a subscription), available on the Mac App Store and directly from Tapbots. Its signature features are powerful, live-preview paste filters (find-and-replace, case changes, and more applied as you paste) and sequential paste, plus organised pasteboards.
It is local, fast, and polished. It is also a closed-source paid app, and its real differentiator is the filter system rather than raw history-and-search.
What is Maccy?
Maccy is a free, open-source (MIT) clipboard manager built around speed and privacy. It records everything you copy and pastes any item back through a keyboard-driven fuzzy-search window. Everything stays on your Mac, there is no account, and it is actively maintained.
Maccy vs Pastebot at a glance
| Feature | Maccy | Pastebot |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $12.99 one-time |
| Open source | Yes (MIT) | No |
| Clipboard history | Unlimited, searchable | Up to 1,000 clips |
| Fuzzy search | Yes | Yes |
| Pinned items / pasteboards | Pins | Pasteboards |
| Paste filters (transform on paste) | No | Yes (signature feature) |
| Sequential paste | No | Yes |
| Images & files | Yes | Yes |
| Plain-text paste | Yes | Yes (and via filters) |
| Password-manager safety | Automatic | Yes |
| Local-only storage | Yes | Yes |
| Telemetry | None | None |
Price and licensing
Both are easy on the wallet. Pastebot is a fair one-time $12.99 — pay once, own it. Maccy is free and open source, so it costs nothing and you can inspect or build the code yourself. There is no subscription on either side, which makes this comparison about fit rather than ongoing cost. (Note: Pastebot is a one-time purchase, not a yearly subscription — a common misconception.)
The feature that defines Pastebot: filters
Pastebot's paste filters are its reason to exist. You can build rules — strip formatting, run find-and-replace, change case, trim whitespace — and apply them with a live preview as you paste, even saving filters to shortcuts. If you regularly clean up or reshape text on the way out of the clipboard, this is genuinely powerful and Maccy does not try to match it.
If you transform text every time you paste, Pastebot's filters are worth the price. If you mostly just need the thing you copied, that machinery is overkill.
History, search, and pinning
For the core job — keep a deep history, find an item fast, paste it — the two are close. Maccy keeps an unlimited, fuzzy-searchable history and lets you pin items so they never expire. Pastebot caps history around 1,000 clips and organises favourites into pasteboards. For everyday recall, Maccy's keyboard-first search is fast and frictionless; see the search and regex guide.
Images, files, and plain text
Both handle text, rich text, images, and files, and both can paste clean plain text. With Pastebot you can also do plain-text paste through a filter. With Maccy, plain-text paste is a single modifier on paste — see how to paste without formatting.
Privacy and security
Both store data locally and run no telemetry. Maccy automatically excludes entries marked concealed by password managers and lets you blocklist apps; Pastebot similarly avoids sensitive items. If open-source auditability matters to you, Maccy has the edge because the code is public.
Performance and footprint
Both are native and quick. Maccy is leaner because it does less; Pastebot carries the filter engine and pasteboard UI. In normal use you will not notice a difference, but the dedicated-versus-feature-rich trade-off is the same theme as the rest of this comparison.
Where Pastebot is the better choice
Pick Pastebot if paste filters or sequential paste are part of your workflow — for example, repeatedly reformatting copied text, or pasting a series of clips in order. That tooling is its real value, and $12.99 once is a reasonable ask for it.
Where Maccy wins
Pick Maccy if you want fast, private, unlimited clipboard history for free, with open-source transparency and automatic password safety — and you do not need filter pipelines. For most people, that is the everyday sweet spot.
How to switch to Maccy
- Install Maccy from the download page or with Homebrew:
brew install --cask maccy. - Grant Accessibility permission so it can paste into other apps.
- Recreate your most-used Pastebot pasteboards as Maccy pins.
- For any text you used filters to clean, use Maccy's plain-text paste shortcut, or keep Pastebot just for filtered pastes.
The bottom line
Pastebot is a quality app whose filters justify its one-time price for the right user. Maccy gives most people fast, private, unlimited clipboard history for free and open source. Compare the whole field in the best free clipboard manager round-up.