Maccy is excellent at what it sets out to do. It is a tiny, open-source clipboard manager for the Mac that opens with a keystroke, lets you search your recent copies, and gets out of your way. There is no clutter and no learning curve. If you want a no-nonsense history on a single Mac, Maccy is one of the best choices going, and we are happy to say so.
Relic is aimed at the people Maccy does not quite serve: those who use more than one device, who want their history kept forever, and who care that a clipboard is full of passwords, codes, and private text. Relic keeps everything, encrypts it on your device, and syncs it. That extra reach is the whole point of the comparison.
At a glance
| Relic | Maccy | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
Two honest notes. Maccy keeps a configurable history, but it is tuned for recent items rather than holding everything forever. And Relic’s Mac app is a direct download rather than a Mac App Store install: a signed, notarized build for Apple Silicon. On phones, Relic is browse-and-search rather than a background recorder. We get into that below.
When Maccy is the better pick
For a single Mac, Maccy is a genuinely great answer, and here is when it is the right call.
- You only use a Mac. If one Mac is your whole world, the cross-device features Relic is built around simply do not matter to you, and Maccy gives you exactly what you need.
- You want minimal and fast. Maccy is light, quick, and keyboard-first. It does one thing and does it cleanly, with almost no settings to think about.
- You want free and open source. Maccy is open source and free to build and run, with an optional paid App Store version to support the developer.
- You prefer strictly local. Maccy never sends your history anywhere. If you want a clipboard history that physically cannot leave the machine, that is a feature, not a limitation.
When Relic is the better pick
Relic pulls ahead the moment you have more than one device, or you want stronger guarantees about who can read your history.
- You use more than one device. Maccy stops at the edge of your Mac. Relic syncs your history so a copy from your laptop shows up on your other devices.
- You want end-to-end encryption. Relic encrypts every item on device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2id. We store ciphertext we cannot read. Maccy is local and unencrypted by design.
- You want a permanent memory. The free tier keeps the last 500 copies inside 250 MB and Pro keeps everything forever inside 25 GB.
- You search screenshots too. Relic runs OCR on device, so the text inside an image is searchable, not just plain text snippets.
To be straight with you: Relic on the Mac is new, and Maccy has years of polish behind it. The Relic Mac app lives in your menu bar, 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 apps from capturing the clipboard in the background. And like Maccy, Relic never writes to your clipboard on its own. It only does so when you choose an item.