Who is writing this. I make Cyanote, so treat these as arguments rather than reviews. What I can promise is that the prices are dated and checkable, and that every comparison says plainly where the other app is the better buy — because on most single features, it is.
The honest framing for all of this: Cyanote is not the best notes app, the best task manager, the best calendar or the best clipboard manager on the Mac. It is one app that does all of those adequately-to-well for $10 once, on your own machine, with no account. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on whether you are currently paying for one of those things or five of them.
The short version
| If you use | It costs | Choose it over Cyanote when |
|---|---|---|
| Paste | $29.99/yr or $89.99 once | You want clipboard sync to your iPhone and iPad, or deep image search |
| Notion | Free for one person; teams from about $96/yr | You collaborate, need databases, or write on a phone |
| NotePlan | $12/mo or $99/yr | You want markdown files, plugins, a phone app and calendar-first planning |
| Lunatask | Free tier; $6/mo annually; $300 lifetime | You want encrypted sync on every platform, or journaling and mood tracking |
| Obsidian | Free for personal use | You want to build your own system from plugins and own plain text files |
| Maccy | Free, open source | You only want clipboard history and nothing else at all |
| Things 3 | $49.99 once (Mac) | Tasks are the whole job and you want the best task app on the platform |
Prices are USD and were checked on 13 August 2026. They change; if you are reading this much later, check them before deciding anything.
Detailed comparisons
- Paste alternative — what Paste's clipboard manager does better, what $89.99 buys against $10, and when sync makes the whole argument moot.
- Notion alternative — Notion is free for one person, so this one is not about price. It is about the account, the loading spinner, and being handed a kit instead of a system.
- NotePlan alternative — the closest product to Cyanote that exists, at $99 a year with no one-time option and no clipboard manager.
- Lunatask alternative — privacy by encrypted sync everywhere at $300 for a lifetime licence, against privacy by the data never leaving the Mac at $10.
More of these are being written. Rather than publish a stub for each competitor, they go up when there is something substantial to say — the table above is the honest summary until then.
Why the comparison usually goes wrong
Comparing Cyanote to any single app on that list feature-for-feature will make Cyanote look worse, and correctly so. Paste has spent years on clipboards alone. Things has spent longer on tasks. A one-person app that does seven things will lose all seven of those fights.
The comparison that actually matters is against the set of apps you are currently running. That is where the case is: five subscriptions, none individually expensive, which is exactly why they never get added up. When I added mine up it came to about $260 a year, and things were still getting lost in the seams between them — not inside any one app, but between the note about a project, the task for it, and the hour set aside for it, none of which knew the others existed.
So the question is not "is this better than Paste". It is "is one adequate app worth more to me than five good ones I have to stitch together myself". For some people that is plainly no. This site is for the others.
There is one detail in that table worth pointing at, because it is the only thing here that is genuinely uncontested. Every app in the top half is a clipboard manager and nothing else. Every app in the bottom half bundles several tools and none of them has a clipboard manager — not NotePlan, not Notion, not Lunatask, not Agenda, not Brite. You can buy a very good clipboard manager, or you can buy an all-in-one app. Until this one, you could not buy something that was both.
What Cyanote will never do
Worth stating on this page in particular, because it rules out a lot of comparisons before they start:
- Sync between machines. There is no server, which is why there is no monthly cost. You cannot have the second without the first.
- Collaboration. No shared documents, no shared boards, no teams.
- Mobile. No iPhone or iPad app.
- Plugins. What ships is what there is.
If any of those is load-bearing for you, the app at the top of the relevant row is the better buy, and I would rather say so here than take $10 from someone who is about to ask for it back.