Stash vs Paste: Which Mac Clipboard Manager Should You Use?

Stash vs Paste is a common question for Mac developers choosing a clipboard manager in 2026. The short answer: they overlap on the basics and diverge fast the moment AI enters the picture. Paste is a refined, beautiful clipboard manager that syncs history across Mac, iPhone, and iPad via iCloud. Stash is a Mac-only clipboard manager that also captures annotated screenshots, records video with structured reports, embeds AI context into every capture, and ships a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so Claude Code and Cursor can query your captures directly. Two different products. Two different jobs.

This comparison walks through feature surface, pricing, sync model, and the specific scenarios where one beats the other — so you can pick the right tool for the way you actually work.

TL;DR — one-line answer

• Pick Paste if your clipboard history needs to follow you from Mac to iPhone to iPad, and you want a polished, refined clipboard experience with nothing else bundled in.
• Pick Stash if you work primarily on a Mac with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT Desktop) and you want clipboard + screenshot + video + AI context + MCP integration in a single app.
• You can run both — macOS allows multiple clipboard managers at once. A minority of power users do this; most pick one.

Who each app is for

Paste is built for

• Apple-ecosystem users who copy on Mac and paste on iPhone or iPad regularly
• Writers, designers, and knowledge workers who want pinboards to organize frequently used snippets
• Setapp subscribers who get Paste bundled with 250+ other apps at a flat rate
• People who've already standardized on iCloud for sync and trust Apple's privacy model

Stash is built for

• Mac-first developers using AI coding assistants — Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT Desktop, Codex CLI, Windsurf, Zed
• Engineers who debug visual bugs by screenshotting into their AI — and want the AI to read the screenshot's app, window, URL, and annotations as structured data
• Anyone who records screen video for a teammate or an AI and wants the recording to arrive as a structured report, not a binary MP4 the AI cannot read
• Privacy-minded users who want clipboard data to never leave the machine under any circumstances

Feature-by-feature comparison

The feature surface of the two apps only overlaps on the clipboard side. Paste owns the mobile paste experience. Stash owns the AI coding side. Here's the full split:

A useful lens for this table: the rows Paste wins are about where your clipboard lives (on your phone, your iPad, your Mac). The rows Stash wins are about what the clipboard holds (rich captures, structured metadata, an MCP surface AI tools can query).

Pricing breakdown

Paste has been on the market longer and has a mature pricing ladder. Stash is newer and currently free in public beta.

If you already pay for Setapp, Paste is effectively free. If you don't, the raw comparison is $29.99/yr (Paste) vs. a planned $39.99/yr (Stash) — a ~$10/year difference for roughly 4× the feature surface once AI, screenshot, and video are factored in. That math only matters, of course, if you use those features. If you only need clipboard history, Paste is the cheaper tool.

Sync philosophy — iCloud vs. local-only

Paste and Stash take opposite stances on where clipboard data lives, and that stance drives most of the product's downstream design decisions.

Paste — cross-device by design

Paste syncs your clipboard history to iCloud and replicates it to every Apple device signed into the same Apple ID. Copy something on your MacBook in a coffee shop, pick up your iPhone on the walk home, and the snippet is in your Paste iOS app. This is the killer feature that nothing else offers as fluidly on Apple hardware, and it's the main reason Paste has stayed popular for more than a decade.

Paste is careful about this — the company states that clipboard data stays on-device or in your private iCloud (not on Paste's own servers), and offers a per-app exclusion list so password managers and banking apps never have their pasteboards captured.

Stash — local only, nothing leaves the Mac

Stash takes the opposite stance. Clipboard history, screenshots, and bookmarks live in a SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/Stash/ and do not sync to any cloud, including iCloud. There is no mobile app. There is no cross-device replication. Videos are the one exception — they upload to Stash's servers only when you explicitly share them via a public link, with a 30-day auto-expiration.

For privacy-conscious engineers who work with sensitive source code, API keys, or customer data on a daily basis, this is the point. Copy a JWT into your clipboard by accident and with Stash it's stored on one machine. With Paste and iCloud sync, the same event replicates to your phone.

This is also why Stash ships a local MCP server rather than a cloud one: captures that never leave your machine can be queried from MCP clients over a Unix domain socket with zero network round-trip.

Where Paste is still better

A fair comparison names the other tool's strengths honestly. Paste wins in several real ways.

1. Cross-device clipboard sync. If your workflow involves copying on Mac and pasting on iPhone or iPad, nothing else does it this cleanly. Stash doesn't even try.
2. Lower price floor. $29.99/year vs. a planned $39.99/year for Stash. Or free on Setapp if you already subscribe.
3. Maturity and polish. Paste has been refined over many years. The card-based timeline UI is widely considered the gold standard for Mac clipboard managers.
4. Pinboards for collaboration. Paste lets you share pinboards with teammates — useful for design asset collections or shared snippet libraries. Stash's bookmarks are private and hotkey-driven.
5. Siri Shortcuts and iOS keyboard. Paste plugs into Apple's automation and input frameworks on iOS. Stash has no iOS presence at all.
6. Older macOS support. Paste supports macOS 12 onward; Stash requires macOS 14 (Sonoma).
7. Lifetime license option. One-time purchase is available for Paste. Stash does not currently offer one.

Where Stash is better

Stash's wins cluster around everything a Mac-based AI coding workflow does besides pure clipboard paste.

1. AI context banners on screenshots. Every Stash screenshot carries its app name, window title, URL, OS version, display info, and capture ID composited into the image pixels plus XMP metadata inside the PNG. When you paste into Claude Code or Cursor, the AI reads structured context instead of guessing from raw pixels. Paste cannot do this — it captures no metadata when you copy a screenshot.
2. Native screenshot capture and annotation. ⌘⌃S starts a region/window/full capture. Inline annotation with arrows, rectangles, ellipses, blur, text, and a 9-tool editor. Paste stores screenshots only if you copy them from another tool.
3. Video capture and Instant Replay. ⌘⌃R records screen video on demand; a rolling 60-second buffer means you can save "the thing that just happened" without starting a recording in advance. Paste does not record video.
4. Structured video reports for AI. Every Stash recording generates a markdown report with per-click timestamps, interaction coordinates, aggregated scroll bursts, voice transcript, detected visual events (toasts, stuck spinners), and a bounded set of labeled key-frame images. LLMs cannot read MP4 files; they can read a Stash capture bundle. See Video Capture for Developer Feedback for the full treatment.
5. Local MCP server. Stash exposes five MCP tools — list_recent, search, get_capture, get_bundle, render_plain — over a Unix domain socket. Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and Cursor can query your capture history without drag-and-drop, file dialogs, or re-uploads. See Stash MCP Server for Claude Code and Cursor.
6. Copy file path with context (⌘⌃P). In Finder or any Open/Save dialog, press the hotkey and Stash copies the path plus the enclosing app, window title, URL, and timestamp as a single plain-text string. Paste into a terminal AI and the model has everything it needs to act. Paste has no equivalent.
7. Secret redaction at capture time. Stash scans copied text for common secret patterns — OpenAI sk-, AWS AKIA, JWT eyJ, GitHub ghp_, bearer tokens, PEM blocks — and replaces matches with [redacted] before the clip enters history. Paste offers per-app exclusion rules; Stash adds automatic pattern-based redaction on top of that.
8. Public video share links. One click copies a yourstash.ai/v/{id} URL to your clipboard. Viewers watch instantly without an account. Paste has no video product.

If you build software with AI tools on a daily basis, most of these rows are the difference between "paste a picture and describe what you see" and "paste a picture the AI can read directly." More context means fewer turns per bug, which is the point of adding structured context in the first place.

Which one should you use?

Use this decision table to triangulate:

Can you run both?

Yes — multiple clipboard managers on macOS is a supported configuration. A few things to watch for:

• Hotkey collision. Stash and Paste both default to ⌘⇧V to open the history panel. Remap one. Stash's other core hotkeys (⌘⌃S, ⌘⌃R, ⌘⌃P) don't conflict with Paste.
• Duplicate entries. Both apps will observe every clipboard write, so a copy event appears in both histories. Not a bug, just redundancy.
• Memory overhead. Minor — two menu-bar processes instead of one. Neither is heavy.

The combined setup that makes the most sense: Paste for cross-device sync, Stash for screenshots and AI. Use Paste's ⌘⇧V for text history that you want on your phone; use Stash's ⌘⌃S, ⌘⌃R, ⌘⌃P for capture workflows that target an AI agent.