Paste is lovely. If you have seen a clipboard manager with elegant visual pinboards and smooth animations, it was probably Paste. It runs on Mac and iPhone, syncs your history through iCloud across your Apple devices, and is clearly built by people who care about design. For someone who lives entirely inside Apple, it is one of the nicest experiences you can buy.
Relic is built for a wider and more private world. It works beyond Apple, it keeps everything you copy forever, and it encrypts every item on your device so only you can read it. The two apps look most different on two questions: do you use anything other than Apple gear, and how much do you care that your synced clipboard is unreadable to everyone but you.
At a glance
| Relic | Paste | |
|---|---|---|
| Keeps everything | ||
| Search | ||
| Syncs across devices | Apple only | |
| Works on Windows | ||
| Works on Mac | ||
| Works on Linux | X11 | |
| Works on phone | iPhone | |
| End-to-end encrypted | ||
| Open source | ||
| Free tier |
To be fair to Paste, its iCloud sync across Apple devices works beautifully, so the “Apple only” note is about reach, not quality. Relic covers the Apple side too now, with a Mac app for Apple Silicon and an iPhone app on the App Store, though on phones it is a browse-and-search lens rather than a background recorder. More on that below.
When Paste is the better pick
If your whole life is Apple and you value design, Paste makes a strong case.
- You are all-Apple. Mac plus iPhone plus iPad, all signed into the same iCloud account, is exactly the setup Paste was made for, and it shines there.
- You want the most polished experience.Paste’s pinboards and visual history are best in class. If you reuse a curated set of snippets and want them to look great, it is hard to top.
- You do not mind a subscription for craft. Paste is paid, but it earns it with consistent attention to detail and a mature, stable product.
- You only need Apple sync. If you never touch Windows or Android, the lack of those clients is not a downside for you.
When Relic is the better pick
Relic wins when your devices are not all Apple, or when encryption and a free tier matter to you.
- You use Windows, or a mix. Paste cannot help you on a PC or an Android phone. Relic is built to span platforms, with Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iPhone all out today.
- You want true end-to-end encryption. Relic encrypts each item on device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2id and stores only ciphertext. We genuinely cannot read your clipboard. Paste syncs through iCloud and is not marketed as end-to-end encrypted.
- You want a free option.Relic’s free tier keeps the last 500 copies inside 250 MB, and Pro keeps everything forever inside 25 GB. Paste requires a subscription to keep using it.
- You want to search screenshots. Relic runs OCR on device so you can find the text inside an image, not just typed snippets.
Being honest about how it behaves: Relic covers the Mac as a signed and notarized download for Apple Silicon, and the iPhone app is on the App Store, so an all-Apple user is covered. The real difference is the model. On phones, Relic is a browse-and-search lens rather than a background recorder, because phone operating systems block background clipboard capture, so you push items up with the share sheet or the Action Button instead. Paste leans on the tighter Apple integration it was designed around. And Relic never writes to your clipboard on its own. It only puts something back when you pick it.