Clypy vs Clipy
The names are one letter apart and the apps are unrelated. Clipy is a free, open-source clipboard manager for macOS, carrying on from ClipMenu. Clypy is a paid cross-platform one that syncs your clipboard between a Mac, a PC and a phone. If you came here looking for Clipy, its home is clipy-app.com and we are not it.
Clipy is free, open and genuinely useful
It is MIT licensed, costs nothing, and its snippet folders are the feature people stay for: a nested menu of boilerplate you can paste without ever opening another window. It inherited that from ClipMenu and it is still one of the cleanest implementations of the idea on macOS. It is volunteer-maintained on donations, which is worth respecting rather than holding against it.
Clypy vs Clipy, line by line
| Feature | Clypy | Clipy |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | ||
| Windows, Linux, iOS, Android | ||
| Open source | MIT | |
| Price | Free, or $29.99 once for Pro | Free |
| Cross-device sync | End-to-end encrypted, LAN or relay | |
| Reusable snippets | Templates with fill-in fields | Snippet folders |
| Search by meaning | Semantic, on-device | Text match |
| OCR on screenshots | ||
| Collections |
The three things worth deciding on
Clipy is a Mac app, and only a Mac app
Clipy runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later and there is no Windows, Linux, iOS or Android build, nor a plan for one. That is not a shortcoming, it is the scope the project chose. But it does mean that if the reason you are reading this is a Windows PC next to your Mac, no amount of configuration gets you there. Clypy runs on all five platforms and treats a Mac-to-Windows copy as the ordinary case.
Nothing leaves the machine that copied it
Clipy keeps its history in a local database with no cloud component, so your clips stay on that one Mac. If that is what you want, it is a feature, and a privacy-preserving one. Clypy's premise is the opposite: clips are encrypted on the device that copied them and show up on your other devices, with the servers only ever relaying ciphertext.
Snippet folders and fill-in templates
Clipy's snippets are static text in a nested menu, which is exactly right for signatures and boilerplate. Clypy's templates add fill-in fields, so a snippet can prompt for the parts that change each time, and they sync to your phone along with everything else. Whether that is worth anything depends entirely on whether you paste the same shapes repeatedly.
Two very different maintenance models
Clipy's 1.3.0 arrived in June 2024, its first release in roughly eight years, and the notes warn that its database migration can fail and that you should export your snippets first. Long quiet stretches are normal for a volunteer project and the source is public either way, so nobody can take it away from you. Clypy ships on a commercial cadence, which is a different promise, backed by a company rather than by a licence.
Which one should you use?
You work on a single Mac, you want snippet folders for free, and you would rather run MIT-licensed software you can audit than pay anyone.
Common questions
Is Clypy the same app as Clipy?
No. They are separate projects by different people that happen to have near-identical names. Clipy is an open-source macOS clipboard manager at clipy-app.com; Clypy is a cross-platform one at clypy.app. Neither is a fork or rebrand of the other.
Does Clipy work on Windows?
No. Clipy is macOS only, needs macOS 13 Ventura or later, and there is no Windows version. If you want the same idea on Windows, Clypy runs there natively, as do free options like Ditto and CopyQ.
Can Clipy sync my clipboard between devices?
No. Clipy stores history locally on one Mac with no sync feature. Cross-device sync is the specific gap Clypy is built to fill, and it does it with end-to-end encryption so we cannot read what passes through.
Is Clipy still maintained?
Yes, though slowly. Version 1.3.0 shipped in June 2024 after a gap of about eight years since 1.2.1. It is a volunteer project funded by donations, so releases come when contributors have time.
Can I import my Clipy snippets into Clypy?
Not automatically today. You can run both during a transition, though two clipboard managers watching the same clipboard tends to produce duplicate entries and shortcut conflicts, so it is worth picking one before long.