Flycut keeps things deliberately simple. It descends from Jumpcut, lives in your menu bar, and gives you a fast, plain-text clipboard history that is perfect for copying code and commands. It is free, open source, and keyboard-driven, which is exactly why so many developers keep it running. If plain text on one Mac is your world, Flycut is a great, lightweight pick.
Relic is built for the parts Flycut leaves out: keeping everything forever, encrypting it so only you can read it, handling more than plain text, and syncing across your devices. On a single Mac there is overlap. The difference shows up once you add another device or care who can read your history.
At a glance
| Relic | Flycut | |
|---|---|---|
| Keeps everything | ||
| Search | ||
| Syncs across devices | ||
| Works on Windows | ||
| Works on Mac | ||
| Works on Linux | X11 | |
| Works on phone | ||
| End-to-end encrypted | ||
| Open source | ||
| Free tier |
A couple of fair notes. Flycut keeps a configurable buffer of recent plain-text clips rather than a permanent, deeply searchable archive. And Relic’s Mac app is a direct download, signed and notarized, for Apple Silicon rather than a Mac App Store install. On phones, Relic is browse-and-search rather than a background recorder. More below.
When Flycut is the better pick
For a lot of developers on a Mac, Flycut is the right tool, and here is when.
- You only use a Mac.If one Mac is your whole setup, Relic’s cross-device sync is not something you need, and Flycut covers the basics cleanly.
- You live in plain text. Copying code, commands, and snippets all day is exactly what Flycut is tuned for, with no rich-content clutter.
- You want free, open source, and minimal. Flycut is all three, with a tiny footprint and a simple keyboard flow.
- You prefer strictly local. Flycut keeps everything on your machine and never syncs, which some developers specifically want.
When Relic is the better pick
Relic pulls ahead when you work across devices, want stronger privacy, or need more than a plain-text buffer.
- You use more than one device. Flycut stays on one Mac. Relic syncs your history so a snippet copied on one device is there on the others.
- You want end-to-end encryption. Relic encrypts every item on device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2id and stores only ciphertext we cannot read. Flycut is local and unencrypted by design.
- You want a permanent, searchable history. The free tier keeps the last 500 copies inside 250 MB and Pro keeps everything forever inside 25 GB, with fast local search.
- You copy more than text. Relic handles richer content and runs OCR on screenshots, so the text inside an image is searchable too.
To be clear: Flycut has been doing this on the Mac for a long time and does it well, while the Relic Mac app is recent. Relic runs from your menu bar on Apple Silicon, captures in the background, and pastes on select once you grant the Accessibility permission, and it syncs with the Windows and Android apps. On phones, Relic is a browse-and-search lens rather than a background recorder, because phone operating systems block background clipboard capture. And like Flycut, Relic never writes to your clipboard on its own. It only puts something back when you pick it.