Useful third-party Clipboard apps

Copied $7.99 copiedapp.com

The basics of Copied more or less mirror what you find in Universal Clipboard, albeit with support for older versions of Apple’s operating systems (starting with iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite).

Once you enable Copied’s iCloud Sync feature, you can copy and paste things between your Macs and iOS devices. However, Copied goes beyond the capabilities of Apple’s system by providing access to a much richer range of features, such as a Clipboard history.

Paste $9.99 pasteapp.me

At its core, this app is a smart Clipboard history and clippings manager. It claims to store “everything you’ve ever copied,” and enables you to later search for and retrieve important clippings so you can reuse them. Paste enables you to define rules that exclude specific apps, and create pinboards for regularly required clippings. At the time of writing, clipboards can be shared and sent over AirDrop; cross-device support is in the works, with Paste for iOS coming soon.

Alfred + Powerpack £19 (around $25) alfredapp.com

Although it isn’t technically a Clipboard manager, this app, once its Powerpack add-on is installed and activated, has a Clipboard history feature. Alfred’s settings are usefully granular: you can define how long it should keep various kinds of clipping, such as plain text, images, and file lists, from 24 hours to three months. You can scroll through clippings, or filter the contents by typing a word or phrase. More advanced features include the ability to append the currently selected item.