Pastery vs. Paste: Two Visual Clipboard Managers for Mac Compared (2026)

Feature comparison

Paste pricing is in USD and varies by region. Check pasteapp.io/pricing for current figures.

Paste: a visual clipboard for recent history

Paste has been around since 2016. You hit a keyboard shortcut, a panel slides up from the bottom of your screen, and you see a horizontal row of clipboard cards — text, images, links, colors. Recent items on the left, older ones to the right. For the last dozen items, this is fast and looks good.

Paste also offers Pinboards — named collections where clips live permanently outside of normal history. And it syncs across Mac, iPhone, and iPad via private iCloud, which means your clipboard data travels through Apple's infrastructure. For people who genuinely move content between devices regularly, that's useful. It does mean your clipboard is no longer fully local.

Pastery: a clipboard you can actually search

Pastery starts from the same visual premise and goes in a different direction. Every clip is stored as a typed card: screenshots render as thumbnails, links pull rich previews, hex colors show as swatches, text shows a formatted excerpt. The moment you copy a screenshot, Apple Vision OCR runs in the background and indexes every piece of visible text.

There's also a text transform toolbar: hover over any text clip before pasting and you can convert case, trim whitespace, format JSON, decode a URL, and about a dozen other operations. The transformed version is pasted; the original stays in history unchanged.

Overview Mode vs. the horizontal carousel

This is the difference that matters most in practice, and it's easy to miss from screenshots alone.

Paste's history is a horizontal scroll. Newest clip far left, oldest far right. For the last dozen items — things from the past few minutes — this is fast. For anything from this morning, you're scrolling. For something from yesterday, you're scrolling considerably further. There are no date filters, no app filters, no way to jump to a specific timeframe. Once your history is deep, older items are effectively out of reach without a direct-text search.

Pastery's Overview Mode is a full-window grid. Every clipboard item laid out chronologically, with a sidebar that filters by content type (image, text, link, color, file), source application, and date range. The search bar runs across the entire filtered set — including text visible inside images. Finding something you copied four days ago from Figma takes about five seconds.

Paste's Pinboards partially solve this: pin something before it drifts away. But that requires anticipating what you'll want later. Overview Mode assumes you won't — and that a fast filter is better than a manual habit.

Image OCR search

Copy a screenshot in Pastery and Apple Vision reads every piece of text in it — immediately, in the background. Days later, you can type "404 error" or "border-radius" or "TypeError undefined" and find the screenshot where those words appeared. No scrolling, no visual browsing. Read our full guide on searching inside screenshots on Mac.

Paste shows thumbnails. You can scroll through them visually. But you cannot search their contents. For anyone who copies a lot of error screenshots, design references, or documentation grabs, OCR search changes what your clipboard is actually useful for.

Text transforms

Hover over any text clip in Pastery and a toolbar appears: uppercase, lowercase, title case, trim whitespace, format JSON, minify JSON, decode URL encoding, strip HTML. Click one; Pastery pastes the modified version. The original clip stays unchanged in history.

If you regularly copy API responses, URL-encoded strings, or content that needs case adjustment before you can use it — this replaces a trip to a browser tab or terminal every single time. Paste has nothing like it. See how to format JSON before pasting on Mac for a common example.

Pinboards

Pinboards are permanent named collections in Paste — a board for email templates, one for design tokens, one for client numbers. Clips pinned there never expire. In theory this turns Paste into a snippet manager on top of a clipboard.

In practice, most people don't maintain boards. You have to proactively pin things before they drift away, which requires anticipating what you'll want later. It's a manual habit, and habits slip. Pastery takes the opposite approach: don't require users to organize anything. Just make retrieval fast enough that you don't need to.

Pricing

Annual rates are roughly similar in real terms. Paste's higher nominal price reflects its iPhone and iPad support — if you're Mac-only, you're paying for platforms you don't use. Pastery's $59.99 lifetime option is fixed and transparent; Paste's lifetime price varies by region.

The bottom line

Paste is fine for keeping tabs on very recent copies and — if you're disciplined enough — a curated Pinboard library. For anything older than a few hours, or any clipboard item you didn't think to pin, the horizontal carousel becomes a wall you scroll through hoping you'll recognize it.

Pastery is built around the assumption that you won't always remember to organize, but you will need to find something later. Overview Mode, OCR search, and app filters make retrieval fast without requiring any upfront discipline. For Mac-only users, see also our Pastery vs. Maccy and Paste app review.

The 14-day trial has no credit card requirement. If you're currently on Paste, it's a direct comparison you can make yourself.

Frequently asked questions