Who is writing this. I make Cyanote. You should read everything below with that in mind, and I have tried to write it so that you do not have to discount it much — every price is dated, every claim about Paste is one you can check on their own site, and the section immediately after this one is about the things Paste does better.
The short version, for anyone who does not want the whole page: Cyanote is a macOS app that includes a system-wide clipboard manager alongside notes, to-dos, a board, a calendar, habit tracking and routines, for a single $10 payment with no subscription and no account. Paste is a dedicated clipboard manager that costs $2.49 a month, $29.99 a year, or $89.99 once, and it syncs across your Mac, iPhone and iPad. Cyanote does not sync at all.
If you want the best clipboard manager on the Mac and you want it on your phone too, that is Paste, and you can stop reading. If you are looking at a renewal notice and wondering why a clipboard costs what it costs, the rest of this is for you.
What Paste does better than Cyanote
Three things, and they are not small ones.
It syncs. Copy something on your Mac and it is on your iPhone. Paste covers every personal device you own with no device limit, and it works well enough that people build habits around it. Cyanote has no sync and will not get it — the whole app is built on there being no server, which is also why it costs $10, and you cannot have the second thing without the first. This is the single biggest reason to choose Paste and I am not going to argue you out of it.
Its history is deeper and smarter. Paste indexes images, searches your full history, and organises snippets into pinboards you can share with other people. Cyanote keeps an unlimited searchable history with pinned snippets, opened from any app with one global hotkey. That covers what most people actually do with a clipboard manager, but "most people" is doing real work in that sentence. If you are moving research around all day and want to find a screenshot you copied in March, Paste is built for that and Cyanote is not.
It has been doing this for years. Paste is a mature product with a team behind it. Cyanote is one person, and the clipboard is one of seven things that person maintains. That is a genuine argument for Paste and an honest reason to be cautious about Cyanote.
The prices, as they actually stand
Paste is often described as subscription-only. That is out of date — there is a one-time option, and any comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Paste monthly | $2.49 / month | Clipboard manager, all your Apple devices |
| Paste annual | $29.99 / year | Same, billed yearly |
| Paste lifetime | $89.99 once | Same, no renewals |
| Cyanote | $10 once | Clipboard manager, notes, to-dos, board, calendar, habits, routines — one Mac |
Paste also runs a 7-day free trial on every plan, has a family plan through the App Store, and is included in Setapp if you already pay for that. Prices are USD excluding tax and vary by region. All of this was checked on 13 August 2026; if you are reading this much later, check it again.
So the real comparison is not subscription against one-time purchase. Both apps will sell you a one-time purchase. The comparison is $89.99 for a clipboard manager that syncs, against $10 for a clipboard manager that does not — bundled with five other things.
When Cyanote is the better buy
Four situations, fairly specific, because "it depends" is not useful to anyone.
You only use one Mac. Sync is Paste's best feature and it is worth nothing to you. You are being asked to pay $89.99, or rent indefinitely, for a capability you will never open. This is the most common case and the one where the maths is least ambiguous.
Paste is one line on a longer bill. This is the case I built Cyanote for, having been in it myself. Paste for the clipboard, something for notes, something for tasks, something for the calendar, something for habits — five subscriptions, none of them individually expensive, which is exactly why nobody adds them up. I wrote about what happened when I finally did add mine up: about $260 a year, for software I had decided I wanted once, years earlier, and had been re-buying every month since without ever making the decision again.
You do not want your clipboard leaving the machine. Everything passes through a clipboard — passwords on their way out of a password manager, two-factor codes, card numbers, API keys, private links. Sync is the feature that makes that stream leave your computer. Cyanote's clipboard history never leaves your Mac, because there is nowhere for it to go: the whole app writes to a local database and there is no account to attach it to. That is a real security position, not a marketing one, and it is the direct cost of not having sync.
You want the clipboard next to the notes. The thing you copied and the thing you are writing are usually related. When they live in one app, the trip between them is short. This is the least measurable argument on the page and the one I notice most often in daily use, so I will state it once and not oversell it.
Feature by feature
| Paste | Cyanote | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29.99/yr or $89.99 once | $10 once |
| Clipboard history | Unlimited, full-text search, image indexing | Unlimited, searchable |
| Pinned snippets | Pinboards, shareable | Pinned snippets, local |
| Global hotkey | Yes | Yes |
| Sync across devices | Mac, iPhone, iPad — no device limit | None. One Mac. |
| iPhone / iPad app | Yes | No |
| Account required | Yes | No |
| Data location | Synced via your iCloud account | Local database on your Mac |
| Notes | — | Notes and code notes |
| To-dos and board | — | Yes |
| Calendar | — | Yes |
| Habits and routines | — | Yes, with a Pomodoro timer |
| Free trial | 7 days | None — 14-day refund instead |
| Windows | No | Not yet; same $10 will cover it |
Read that table honestly and it says two things at once. Cyanote wins most rows because it is doing more jobs. Paste wins the rows that are actually about clipboards. Both of those are true and which one decides it is a question about you, not about the apps.
The price math, over ten years
Ten years is a fair window for a tool you use every day, and it is long enough that the pricing model stops being an abstraction.
| What you pay for | Over ten years |
|---|---|
| Paste, annual plan | about $300 |
| Paste, lifetime | $89.99 |
| The five-app stack I was paying for (Notion, Todoist, Fantastical, Streaks, Paste) | about $2,600 |
| Cyanote | $10 |
Two honest caveats. The $2,600 is my stack at my prices, not a universal figure — yours will be different and might be smaller. And the $89.99 row is the fair comparison if all you want is a clipboard manager: Paste's lifetime option is a reasonable deal for a good app, and $89.99 spread over ten years is not the outrage the annual figure is.
What the table does show plainly is the shape of the thing. A subscription is a decision you make once and then stop making; the bank makes it for you every month afterwards. That is the argument, and it survives the fact that Paste now sells a lifetime licence, because most people are on the annual plan.
What you give up by switching
Stated plainly, so nobody buys this and feels misled:
- Sync, entirely. No iPhone, no iPad, no second Mac. Your clipboard history exists on one machine.
- Image indexing and deep search. Cyanote's history is searchable; it is not doing what Paste does with images.
- Shared pinboards. There is no collaboration in Cyanote at all.
- A team behind the product. Cyanote is one person. Fixes tend to be fast and the roadmap is short, but there is no support department.
- Maturity in the clipboard specifically. Paste has been refining one thing for years. Cyanote's clipboard is good; it is not that.
If more than one of those matters to you, buy Paste. That is a genuine recommendation and not a rhetorical move.
Moving over from Paste
There is no import, and I am not going to pretend there is a clever way around that. A clipboard history is mostly disposable by nature — the useful part is the handful of snippets you have pinned, and those are worth moving by hand.
- Open Paste and look at your pinboards. In practice this is usually five to fifteen things: an address, a bank reference, a boilerplate reply, a few code snippets.
- Copy each one and pin it in Cyanote. Ten minutes, once.
- Run both for a week. Paste's trial and Cyanote's 14-day refund overlap comfortably, so this costs nothing but attention.
- If the clipboard alone is what you need and you miss Paste, cancel Cyanote — the refund is fourteen days and needs no reason. I would rather that than a bad fit.
The week is the part that matters. The clipboard is a habit, and habits are not evaluated by feature table.
The honest summary
Paste is the better clipboard manager. Cyanote is the better buy if the clipboard is one of several things you are paying for, if you work on one Mac, or if you would rather your clipboard history stayed on it. $89.99 buys a very good clipboard manager. $10 buys a good one, plus notes, to-dos, a board, a calendar, habits and routines.
Which of those sentences describes your situation is the whole decision, and you are better placed to answer it than I am.