LedgeComparison
Ledge vs Maccy
Let us get the awkward part out of the way: Maccy is free, open source, genuinely excellent, and for a lot of people it is the correct answer. If you only want clipboard history, you can stop reading and go install it. This page is about the cases where you want something else too.
| Ledge | Maccy | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $8.99 once | Free |
| Source available | — | MIT, on GitHub |
| Clipboard history + search | ✓ | ✓ |
| Keyboard-first navigation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pin items | ✓ | ✓ |
| Drag-anything shelf | ✓ | — |
| Drop tray appears mid-drag | ✓ | — |
| Screenshots captured automatically | ✓ | — |
| Quick Look preview | ✓ | — |
| Works without an account | ✓ | ✓ |
What Maccy gets right
Maccy has a clear philosophy and sticks to it: clipboard history, search, pinning, app exclusions, one keyboard shortcut. No pinboards, no timelines, no AI features, no tiers. It is MIT-licensed, so you can read the code, build it yourself, and never wonder what it is doing with your clipboard. It is light, it is fast, and it has been quietly reliable for years.
If your entire complaint about macOS is "the clipboard only remembers one thing", Maccy fixes exactly that and charges you nothing. We are not going to construct an argument against that. Install it.
So what is the $8.99 for?
A second job that Maccy deliberately does not do. Ledge is a clipboard manager and a shelf, on one panel.
Things you are not done with yet
Copying is for things you are about to paste. A shelf is for things you are carrying. Drag images off a webpage, files out of Finder, or snippets of text from anywhere and drop them on the panel; they stay put across restarts until you clear them. Later you drag them back out into Finder, Mail, Slack, or Figma. Gathering eight reference images before you know where they are going is not a clipboard problem, and no amount of clipboard history solves it.
Somewhere to put things down mid-drag
Start dragging any file and a small tray slides in at the edge of the screen. No arranging two windows side by side before you begin. If you live in full-screen apps, this is the feature you will notice within an hour.
Screenshots stop disappearing
Shots saved to the Desktop and shots copied to the clipboard both land in history automatically. You stop hunting through a Desktop of timestamped PNGs for the one you took two minutes ago.
Space for a proper look
Press Space on any item for a full-size Quick Look preview, exactly like Finder. Useful when your history holds twelve near-identical screenshots.
The open-source question
This is a real trade-off and it deserves a straight answer. Maccy is MIT-licensed; Ledge is not open source. If auditable source is a requirement for anything that touches your clipboard, that requirement rules Ledge out, and no privacy policy we write changes it.
What Ledge offers instead is architecture you can verify from the outside: no account system at all, no analytics, no network calls after the one-time license activation, and a Permissions tab that shows exactly what macOS has granted with one-click reset. Password managers are skipped automatically, history older than 30 days deletes itself by default, and iCloud sync is off until you switch it on — and when you do, items travel through your own private iCloud database, not our servers. You can watch all of that with Little Snitch. It is not the same guarantee as reading the code, and we are not going to claim it is.
Can you run both?
Technically yes, but do not. Two clipboard managers watching the same pasteboard means duplicate entries and two competing shortcuts. Pick one. Ledge has a 7-day trial of the full app, so the comparison costs nothing but the uninstall.