Clipboard category
Clipboard menu bar apps
Clipboard menu bar apps for macOS. 3 listed: 2 free and 1 free with a paid upgrade. Of those, 1 with a free trial. Prices and trials as the developers state them.
3 apps
- About Stash
Stash, opens the developer's site in a new tab Mac screenshot & screen recording for AI. Every capture exports as structured context your AI can read, not pixels it guesses at.
Stash is a Mac menu bar app for screenshots, screen recordings, and clipboard history. Capture app, window, and accessibility context for AI coding agents, annotate screenshots with automatic copying after edits, and share video demos by link. Free during public beta. Requires macOS 14 or later.
Free - About Clipboard Router
Clipboard Router, opens the developer's site in a new tab Search captured clips, run reviewed clipboard workflows, and encrypt selected clips in Vault on your Mac.
Search and organize clipboard history, transform copied text, paste multiple clips in order, run reviewed actions, and protect sensitive clips in an encrypted Vault.
Free - About Klipto
Klipto, opens the developer's site in a new tab A fast, native clipboard manager for macOS. Hold-to-paste, Stack, transforms, OCR. Local, one-time, no subscription.
A fast, private Mac clipboard manager with ordered multi-paste, local OCR and translation, notes, and custom on-device AI text transformations
$19.99
What clipboard menu bar apps do
A clipboard manager keeps what you copied. macOS holds one thing at a time, so copying anything loses the last thing, and the gap between those two moments is where most of the day's small losses happen: the address you had, the code you pasted once, the sentence you cut and meant to put back.
It has to be there in the second you realise, which is a second after you copied over it. Something you open from the Dock to look up a clip you lost is a thing you will not open.
3 listed: 2 free and 1 free with a paid upgrade. Of those, 1 with a free trial.
What to compare
- How much it keeps, and for how long. A dozen items, a week, or everything forever. All three are choices somebody made on purpose, and the one you want depends on whether you are recovering mistakes or searching last month.
- What happens to passwords. A password manager puts a password on the clipboard, and a tool that records everything records that. Most of these skip what a password manager marks as secret; whether this one does is worth reading before installing it.
- Where the history is stored. On the Mac, in iCloud, or on a server. A clipboard is the most sensitive thing on a computer after the keychain, and where it lives is the whole question.
- Search, or scrolling. Under twenty items a list is fine. Over that, whether you can type a few letters and find the clip is the difference between a tool and a drawer.
Questions
- Is keeping a clipboard history safe?
- It is a record of things you copied, which is as sensitive as whatever you copy. The two things to check are whether it skips what password managers mark as secret, and whether it leaves the machine. Many of these never send anything anywhere, and the listings say so where the developer does.
- Does macOS already do this?
- macOS keeps one clipboard item, and shares it between your Apple devices through Universal Clipboard. It keeps no history, so there is nothing built in to go back to.
- What is a menu bar app?
- An app that lives in the strip along the top of the screen instead of the Dock. It has an icon there, and clicking it drops down a small window. Most have no main window at all, so they stay out of the way until you want them and never appear when you switch apps.
- Do menu bar apps slow a Mac down?
- Each one is a running process, so a dozen of them is a dozen processes. Most sit idle and cost close to nothing. The ones worth watching are those doing work when you are not looking: reading the screen, polling a server, or watching every file you save. Activity Monitor will tell you which is which on your own machine.
- My menu bar is full. What then?
- macOS drops icons that no longer fit, and on a Mac with a notch there is less room than there looks. Holding Command and dragging rearranges them, so the ones you use can be kept to the left of the crowd. There are also apps whose whole job is hiding and grouping the rest, listed here under Utilities.