Clipster vs Paste

Paste runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad. That's the whole list: there's no Windows app. Its sync goes through your personal iCloud, which is elegant when everything you own is Apple, and a dead end the day a Windows PC shows up at work or at home.

Clipster runs on Mac, Windows and iPhone. With Pro, what you copy on your Mac or your PC shows up on your iPhone, and the other way around: one clipboard across up to 7 devices, whatever logo they wear.

Paste's promise is that it has no server. If you turn on iCloud sync, your clipboard lives in your own iCloud, and Paste says it never has access to it. What it doesn't mention is end-to-end or zero-knowledge encryption: your synced clipboard is exactly as protected as your iCloud is.

Clipster does sync through its own server, so it makes a stronger, explicit promise: every Clip is encrypted on your device (AES-256-GCM), with a key only you hold, before it syncs. The server only ever stores ciphertext it can't read. That's zero-knowledge: not even we can see your clipboard.

This is where the two are most alike. Paste has pinboards; Clipster has Pins, named boards for the Clips you reuse (code, prompts, addresses, canned replies). Both let you search your whole history and paste in a keystroke.

On iPhone, the Clipster keyboard pastes any Clip inside any app, and the Share menu saves anything to Clipster. And credit where it's due: Paste has spent over ten years polishing its interface, and it shows.

Paste is subscription-first: $29.99 a year after a 7-day free trial, with a lifetime option and a family plan. There's no free version to keep.

Clipster has a free tier that isn't a demo: 40 Clips, 1 Pin, full search, every content type, no account needed. You only pay for Pro when you want your clipboard synced across devices. Paste's real advantage here is maturity: a decade of refinement and a big, happy user base. Clipster is newer, and we'd rather you know that going in.