Copychest Download free Buy Pro

Ditto alternative for Windows: an honest look at what to use instead

Last updated

Ditto is free, it holds thousands of clips, they survive a restart, and its code is still being worked on. It is also, by common consent and ours, properly dated to look at. If that doesn’t bother you, stay where you are: this page won’t try to talk you out of it.

If it does bother you, or if what you actually want is your saved replies rather than a longer list of things you copied, here’s the comparison with Copychest, our paid Windows app, with the gaps on our side named as plainly as the ones on theirs. Dates and prices checked on 6 August 2026.

Is Ditto still being updated?

Two dates, and they answer differently. The most recent code change in Ditto’s GitHub repository is 7 July 2026. The most recent build you can actually download, 3.25.113.0, is from 27 September 2025. So it’s still being worked on, and there’s been no new release since September 2025.

Neither of those is alarming for a mature tool that already does its job. It’s just worth knowing before you build your day around it.

What Ditto gets right

Before any comparison, the genuine list.

And the caveat, so it isn’t only us saying it: How-To Geek’s July 2026 write-up is a fan of Ditto and still calls the interface “basic by 2026 standards”.

Copychest and Ditto, side by side

What Copychest Ditto
Price Free tier, or $17 once for Pro Free, including at work
Open source No Yes, GPL-3.0
How much history 2 hours on the free tier, your full clipboard history on Pro Thousands of items, as many as you set it to keep
Survives a restart Yes Yes
Saved replies and templates Yes. The replies you send every week, filed in projects and searchable It keeps what you copied. There’s no library of replies you write yourself
Auto-fill Yes. It asks for the name, the date, the order number, then hands you the finished message No
Images Text only Yes, it stores images as well as text
Look and feel Built this year, and it follows your light or dark theme Dated. How-To Geek: “basic by 2026 standards”
Where your data lives On your computer. No account, no cloud On your computer. No login, no cloud, no telemetry
Support Email a person at [email protected] Open an issue on GitHub, answered by the maintainer and other users

Ditto’s release dates, licence and stored formats come from its own GitHub repository, checked on 6 August 2026.

When to stay with Ditto

You want a free clipboard history with no limits, and that’s all you want. Take Ditto. Our free tier is deliberately small, so it is not the answer to that question and we’re not going to pretend it is. Ditto and CopyQ both are.

You copy images as much as text. Ditto keeps them. Copychest handles text only, so moving would cost you something you currently have.

You like open source, or you need something you can put on a work machine without buying anything.

The way it looks genuinely doesn’t bother you. It’s quick, it works, and if you barely look at it, how it looks costs you nothing.

When to try Copychest

It isn’t the clipboard history you want, it’s your replies. Copychest is built around the messages you send every week rather than the last hundred things you copied: filed in projects, searchable, and it fills in the name and the date for you before you send.

You look at it all day and you’d like that to be pleasant. A key combination opens a small window over whatever you’re working on, whether that’s an email, a chat window or a form, and it looks like it was made this decade.

You’d rather pay once than wish for more. $17 once, every 1.x update included, one license covering one person on up to 3 of their own computers, and a 7-day free trial, no card needed.

What you’d be giving up in the swap, plainly: images, because Copychest handles text only; free, because our free tier keeps 2 projects, 25 snippets and 2 hours of clipboard history rather than everything; open source, because Copychest isn’t; and anything to do with scripting or automating your clipboard, which is CopyQ’s territory and never ours.

The other free ones

Fair warning before this section: we make a paid Windows app that competes with everything in it, so read it with that in mind. None of the links below are affiliate links and we get nothing if you download any of them.

CopyQ is the capable one. Free, open source, actively updated, and it will script, filter and transform what you copy in ways nothing else here comes near. It’s also the most technical of the lot, so if Ditto already felt like a lot of settings, CopyQ is more of them.

ClipClip is free for personal use and the most modern-looking of the free three. One thing to know before it goes on a work laptop: using it for work counts as commercial use, and their own pricing page puts that at $49 per person, once.

Is Ditto free?

Yes, completely, including at work. It’s open source under the GPL-3.0 licence, there’s no paid tier and there’s no commercial licence to buy later.

Does Ditto work on Windows 11?

Yes. Ditto is a Windows app and runs on Windows 11, and its September 2025 release added 64-bit and ARM64 installers. It sits alongside Windows’ own Win+V rather than replacing it, so you can keep both.

What’s the difference between Ditto and Win+V?

Win+V is built into Windows and keeps your last 25 items, up to 4 MB each, and clears the lot when you restart apart from anything you’ve pinned. Ditto keeps thousands and they’re still there tomorrow, which is most of the reason people install it. We’ve written up the Windows clipboard history limits in full if you want the numbers and the Microsoft pages that document each one.

Sources

Copychest has a free tier that never expires and a 7-day free trial, no card needed, so you can put it next to Ditto on your own computer and keep whichever one you actually open.

Download free for Windows