LedgeComparison
Ledge vs Paste
Both keep your clipboard history on a Mac. They disagree about what else a clipboard app should be, and about how you should pay for it. Here is the honest version, written by the people who make one of them.
| Ledge | Paste | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $8.99 once | $2.49 / mo, billed yearly |
| Cost over 3 years | $8.99 | about $90 |
| Clipboard history + search | ✓ | ✓ |
| Drag-anything shelf | ✓ | — |
| Screenshots captured automatically | ✓ | — |
| Pinboards for organised snippets | — | ✓ |
| iPhone / iPad app | — | ✓ |
| Sync across your own devices | iCloud, Macs only | ✓ |
| Works without an account | ✓ | ✓ |
The money, first
This is the part most people are actually deciding on. Paste is a subscription at $2.49 a month billed annually — roughly $30 a year, every year, for as long as you want your clipboard history to keep working. Ledge is $8.99 once, and every future version is included.
Ledge costs less than four months of Paste. After that the gap only widens. That is the whole pitch, and it is a real one — but it is worth being clear about what a subscription buys on the other side: continuous development, server-backed sync across three platforms, and a company that has been shipping since 2015. A one-time price means we have to keep earning new customers rather than billing the old ones. Both models have failure modes.
What Paste does better
Three things, and we would rather say them plainly than pretend otherwise.
- iPhone and iPad. Paste has real iOS apps and your clipboard follows you onto your phone. Ledge is Mac-only today. If copying on your Mac and pasting on your iPhone is part of your day, that is not a small gap — it is the deciding factor, and Paste is the right buy.
- Pinboards. Paste lets you file snippets into named boards — email templates, brand colours, boilerplate replies — and keep them organised long-term. Ledge has pinning, but not a filing system. If you maintain a large, curated snippet library, Paste is built for that and Ledge is not.
- Maturity. Paste has had a decade of edge cases beaten out of it. Ledge is newer. Newer means fewer users have hit the weird bugs yet.
What Ledge does that Paste does not
Ledge is not trying to be a cheaper Paste. It is a different shape of tool: the clipboard is one half, and the shelf is the other.
The Shelf
Drag an image off a webpage, a file out of Finder, or a chunk of text from anywhere, and drop it on the panel. It stays there across restarts until you clear it. Later you drag it back out into Finder, Mail, Slack, Figma — anything that accepts a drop. Clipboard managers copy; a shelf carries. Collecting six reference images before you put them anywhere is a shelf job, and Paste has no answer for it.
The drop tray
Start dragging any file and a small tray slides in at the edge of the screen. You always have somewhere to put things down mid-drag, without arranging windows first. This solves the specific misery of dragging a file from a full-screen app into another full-screen app.
Screenshots, automatically
Press ⌘⇧4 and the shot lands in your history whether it went to the Desktop or to the clipboard. No more digging through a Desktop full of Screenshot 2026-08-16 at 11.04.23.png to find the one you took ninety seconds ago.
Privacy, on both sides
Neither app is a data-harvesting operation, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Paste keeps data on-device and in your private iCloud, and lets you exclude sensitive apps. Ledge does the same: password managers are skipped automatically, history older than 30 days deletes itself by default, iCloud sync is off until you turn it on, and there is no analytics of any kind. Ledge asks macOS for two optional permissions — Accessibility for auto-paste, and access to your screenshot folder — and nothing else.
One structural difference: Ledge has no accounts. Activation is a single online round-trip, after which your license is verified locally with public-key cryptography and the app works fully offline. There is no server that knows who you are, because there is no login.
Can you try before deciding?
Yes, both. Paste has a 7-day free trial. So does Ledge — the full app, no feature gates. When the Ledge trial ends, capturing pauses until you enter a license key, but everything you already saved stays browsable and draggable. Your data is never held hostage.