Paste and Pastea solve the same first problem: the Mac clipboard remembers one thing, while your work involves dozens. Both keep a searchable history of what you copy and let you bring an older item back without retracing your steps.

From there, they make different bets. Paste is a mature Apple-device clipboard system. Pastea is a focused Mac utility with inline shortcuts and local access for AI tools.

We make Pastea. The goal of this comparison is not to declare ourselves the winner; it is to make the decision obvious before you install either app.

Choose Paste if you need Mac, iPhone, and iPad

This is the cleanest dividing line.

Paste has apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Your history and Pinboards sync through iCloud, and its iOS keyboard puts saved items inside other apps. Paste also supports shared Pinboards for handing a collection of snippets or assets to other people.

Pastea is Mac-only today. Optional iCloud sync keeps history available across your Macs, but there is no iPhone or iPad app and no shared team library.

If mobile access or collaboration is a requirement, choose Paste. Nothing else in the comparison should override that.

Choose Pastea if you want your clips to become shortcuts

Clipboard history helps with things you copied recently. A text expander helps with things you type repeatedly. Pastea joins the two.

Right-click any clip, choose Add Inline Shortcut, and assign a name such as ;welcome or ;repro. Type that name in Mail, Slack, a browser, or an editor and Pastea replaces it with the saved clip. It works with more than plain text: formatting and images can come along too.

Paste has Pinboards and number shortcuts for recent items, but Pastea's named inline triggers are built for reusable replies, addresses, templates, and code blocks that should appear where you type.

Search and visual history

Both apps handle the core material well: text, links, images, screenshots, and files. Both offer visual previews, filters, organization, and text recognition inside images.

Paste has a decade of interface refinement, Pinboards, filters by date and device, and a command for jumping to an item's place in history. Paste Stack can queue several items and paste them one after another—a useful feature for forms and repetitive data entry.

Pastea organizes automatically by content type, source app, and time. You can search by content, type, app, or even character count; pin important items; rename them; and collect them into lists. Its panel appears at the right edge without replacing the app you are working in.

Pastea does not currently have a queue equivalent to Paste Stack. Paste does not center its interface on Pastea-style named inline triggers.

AI workflows: both use MCP, with a different emphasis

Paste's current Mac app can connect clipboard history to Claude, Cursor, and other AI assistants through MCP. Pastea can connect Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex, and any compatible custom client.

Pastea's implementation is deliberately local and narrow. The server listens only on 127.0.0.1; each tool gets its own revocable token; concealed clips are unavailable; and connected tools can search, list, read, or copy a clip, but cannot delete one or paste into another app.

This matters if your work is already happening in a coding agent. You can ask it to find the API response you copied yesterday or read the error text inside a screenshot, without manually moving that material into a new document first. The exact privacy of what happens after a tool reads a clip depends on that tool, which is why explicit connection and revocation controls matter.

Privacy

Both companies say clipboard data lives on your devices and in private iCloud rather than on their servers. Both can avoid sensitive content and pause capture.

Pastea exposes several controls individually: exclude specific apps, exclude content types, stop saving concealed items, disable screenshot text recognition, or turn off link previews. That last option matters because fetching a preview can reveal a copied URL to the site it belongs to. Pastea refuses to preview concealed and recognized one-time authentication links.

No clipboard manager can perfectly identify every secret. If a banking or password app matters, add it to the ignore list rather than relying on automatic detection alone.

Price as of September 2026

Paste's official page listed a seven-day trial, $29.99 annual subscription, and $89.99 lifetime personal purchase when we checked on September 3, 2026. The plan covers Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Paste also offers family and team options and is included in Setapp.

Pastea offers a seven-day, no-card trial and one lifetime purchase. The normal price is $49.99, with a $37.49 launch offer for the first 50 customers. The license covers use across your Macs and includes future Pro updates.

Pricing is the fastest detail to go stale. Verify Paste's current plans and Pastea's current offer when you read this.

The practical verdict

Choose Paste if you:

• need a full clipboard library on iPhone or iPad;
• share Pinboards with family, clients, or a team;
• use Paste Stack to paste several items in sequence;
• prefer a product with a long, established track record.

Choose Pastea if you:

• work primarily across Macs;
• want named inline shortcuts for any saved clip;
• want explicit, local MCP access for approved AI tools;
• prefer a lower one-time price and a trial that needs no card;
• want granular controls over apps, content types, OCR, and link previews.

The fairest test is a week with your own clipboard. Try Pastea free, or run Paste's trial, and use the app you forget is there until the exact moment you need it.