CopyClip is a Mac menu-bar app by Fiplab that captures everything you copy and lets you paste any of it back in a keystroke, turning your clipboard into a searchable, always-available history.
What is CopyClip?
CopyClip is a lightweight clipboard manager that lives in your Mac's menu bar and silently records every piece of text you copy — URLs, code snippets, prose drafts, passwords you accidentally grabbed — so nothing you've ever clipped is truly gone. A single click on the menu-bar icon opens a scrollable history; press the item you want and it drops straight into your cursor position.
Fiplab built CopyClip around the idea that the native macOS clipboard is a single-slot buffer that erases itself every time you copy something new. CopyClip fixes that fundamental limitation without demanding a workflow change. You keep using ⌘C and ⌘V exactly as you always have; CopyClip just makes sure the past ten, fifty, or several hundred clips are still there when you need them.
What does CopyClip do best?
CopyClip's greatest strength is its near-zero footprint: it launches at login, uses negligible RAM, and gets out of your way until you need it. There's no elaborate setup, no plugin marketplace to curate, and no new mental model to learn.
The search bar at the top of the history list is where I spend most of my time with it. Start typing any word from a clip you vaguely remember copying and CopyClip narrows the list immediately — genuinely useful when you're juggling multiple browser tabs, reference docs, and a half-written email. You can also pin frequently needed clips so they don't scroll out of reach as history fills up.
- Persistent history — clips survive reboots and survive indefinitely up to your configured limit
- Instant search — fuzzy filtering across the full history, not just recent items
- Pinned favourites — lock any clip at the top of the list permanently
- Privacy mode — pause capture temporarily when you're working with sensitive data
- Keyboard-first access — a configurable global shortcut opens the popover without touching the mouse
How much does CopyClip cost?
CopyClip is available on the Mac App Store and is free to download in its standard form, with CopyClip 2 offered as a paid upgrade that adds richer features like snippets, themes, and expanded history counts.
For most power users the free tier is genuinely sufficient day-to-day; the upgrade is worth considering if you want custom snippets — pre-stored boilerplate you can paste without first copying — or if you work in environments where a longer history depth matters.
Who should use CopyClip?
CopyClip earns its keep with writers, developers, designers, and support engineers — anyone who spends their day moving text between applications. If you've ever lost a URL you copied before you finished the task at hand, or switched windows and realised your clipboard now holds something completely different, CopyClip removes that frustration permanently.
Developers in particular appreciate it during code reviews: copy a method name, a stack trace line, a commit hash — all of it stays accessible. Writers researching across tabs get the same benefit. It's less immediately useful if you rarely copy text or if you primarily move binary files around (CopyClip is text-focused and does not capture image or file clipboard contents in the same way some heavier alternatives do).
What are the best CopyClip alternatives?
CopyClip's main competition is Pasta, Pastebot, and the clipboard managers built into Raycast and Alfred. Raycast's clipboard history is arguably the most powerful free option today — it handles images, includes rich formatting, and integrates with the broader Raycast extension ecosystem — but it also pulls in a lot more than you might want if all you need is clipboard history. Alfred's Powerpack clipboard is similarly capable but requires the paid Powerpack licence.
Pastebot is the premium stand-alone choice: it transforms clips with built-in text filters, supports rules-based automation, and handles images well. CopyClip sits comfortably below that complexity level. If you want a frictionless, zero-configuration history that just works, CopyClip wins on simplicity. If you need automation or image support, look at Raycast or Pastebot.
How does CopyClip compare to Raycast's clipboard history?
Raycast's clipboard history captures images and files as well as text, offers richer keyboard navigation, and comes bundled with a whole launcher ecosystem at no extra cost — making it the more capable tool on paper. CopyClip's advantage is its independence and lightness: it adds nothing else to your environment, its menu-bar popover is faster to glance at than Raycast's full command palette, and it doesn't require you to adopt a new launcher just to fix your clipboard. For users already running Raycast daily, the built-in clipboard history is the pragmatic choice. For users who want a focused, minimal clipboard tool and prefer to keep their launcher separate, CopyClip remains a clean fit.
