Clipster vs Ditto

Ditto is Windows-only. It can share clips between your Windows PCs, but only on the same local network: you type in each machine's IP address and a shared password, and both PCs need to be on. No Mac, no phone, no cloud.

Clipster runs on Windows, Mac and iPhone. With Pro, sync works over the internet: copy something on your office PC, find it on your iPhone on the train or on your Mac at home. No IP addresses to type, and your devices don't need to be on at the same time.

Ditto is local-first: no login, no cloud, no telemetry. When it syncs between your PCs, the data is encrypted in transit and never touches anyone's server. A strong model, within one network.

Clipster syncs through its server, so it encrypts every Clip on your device (AES-256-GCM) before it leaves, with a key only you hold. The server only stores ciphertext it can't read: zero-knowledge. You get sync from anywhere without giving anyone, including us, access to your clipboard.

Ditto is a power user's tool, with years of options behind it: search, groups, lots of content types, shortcuts for everything. If you love fine-tuning settings, it's a playground.

Clipster aims for fewer settings and more flow: full-text search, Pins to group the Clips you reuse, previews for text, links, images and files, and the same organization on every device. On iPhone, the Clipster keyboard pastes any Clip inside any app.

And the look, since we're being blunt: Ditto is a Win32 window whose design has barely changed in years — dense, fast, perfectly functional. Clipster is a modern app: cards with previews, code with syntax highlighting, the icon of the app each Clip came from, Pins with their own icons, drag and drop straight into another app, and a light or dark theme. If the app you open twenty times a day should also be good-looking, that's where the two part ways.

Ditto is free and open source (GPL-3.0), with an optional donation. Hard to argue with that.

Clipster is free to start (40 Clips, 1 Pin, full search, no account needed), and Pro adds sync across Windows, Mac and iPhone. If every machine you own is a Windows PC on one network, Ditto is excellent and free. If one of them is a Mac or an iPhone, that's exactly the gap Clipster fills.