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If you found Planck and liked the idea — clipboard that follows you across Mac, Windows, and Linux — but you want something more privacy-leaning, more open, and not tied to a vendor cloud account, this page is for you.
If you found Planck and liked the idea — clipboard that follows you across Mac, Windows, and Linux — but you want something more privacy-leaning, more open, and not tied to a vendor cloud account, this page is for you.
UniClipboard is built for the same problem (your clipboard should travel with you), but it makes a different bet on the trust model: open source, no cloud account, peer-to-peer first, end-to-end encrypted, with encrypted local history and search.
Planck looks like a polished, well-designed cloud clipboard product. UniClipboard is the alternative for users whose privacy bar specifically requires:
If those four things are not your bar, Planck might be the better fit. This page is honest about that.
A few common reasons, based on how this kind of search usually plays out:
If any of those match, UniClipboard is built for that use case.
It's worth saying this part out loud: Planck looks like a well-designed product. From its public messaging:
If your priority is "I want a clipboard product that just works, looks polished, and I don't mind the cloud-and-account model," Planck is a reasonable choice. UniClipboard is not trying to argue that out of you.
UniClipboard is the alternative if your priority list is shaped differently.
UniClipboard makes the same core promise — clipboard sync across Mac, Windows, and Linux — and then changes the trust model under it.
The full source is on GitHub: uniclipboard/uniclipboard. You can read it, build it, audit it, fork it.
The license is deliberate. AGPL-3.0 prevents anyone from quietly forking UniClipboard into a closed-source hosted service that weakens the privacy guarantees and keeps the changes private. For a product whose entire value proposition is "your clipboard is private," the license is what enforces the promise — without it, "we encrypt your data" becomes "until someone forks us and removes the encryption."
There is no UniClipboard account. There is no signup form. You don't tell us your email.
Devices pair directly with each other. Each device generates its own keypair locally, and pairing exchanges the keys you actually need. After that, the devices know each other.
This is a different operational model from Planck. Planck's cloud product needs an identity to attach your clipboard items to. UniClipboard intentionally does not.
The default sync path is direct device-to-device. UniClipboard uses iroh for NAT traversal — the same QUIC-over-NAT-holepunching family used in modern P2P stacks — so two devices can usually find each other across networks without anything in the middle.
When direct P2P doesn't work (some symmetric NATs, restrictive corporate networks), traffic falls back through an encrypted relay. The important detail:
Encryption happens at the source device with a key the relay does not have. The relay is treated as untrusted transport. That property is independent of who is paying and independent of who runs the relay.
Clipboard history isn't stored in cleartext on disk. The local database is encrypted, and full-text search runs against encrypted data. If your laptop is lost or stolen, the history isn't sitting there in a SQLite file anyone can SELECT * FROM after pulling the drive.
This is one of the main differentiators against most clipboard tools — not just Planck.
Mac, Windows, Linux desktop. Text, images, files.
UniClipboard now ships mobile: iOS is in public beta on TestFlight and there is a native Android app (signed APK). Planck still lists mobile as "coming soon" on its pricing page.
| UniClipboard | Planck (based on public messaging) | |
|---|---|---|
| Source availability | Open source (AGPL-3.0) | Not advertised as open source |
| Trust model | Peer-to-peer first; encrypted relay fallback | Cloud sync; data stored on AWS S3 (US) per pricing page |
| Cloud account required | No | Account model implied by pricing tiers |
| End-to-end encryption | Yes; relay only sees ciphertext | AES-GCM-256 claimed; "data is never exposed when it's not in use, even to our servers" |
| Desktop platforms | macOS, Windows, Linux | macOS, Windows, Linux |
| Mobile | iOS public beta (TestFlight) + native Android app | "Coming soon" per pricing page |
| Text sync | Yes | Yes |
| Image sync | Yes | Yes |
| File sync | Yes | Max tier only (paid) |
| Clipboard history | Encrypted local history | Yes; 100 items free tier, 10,000 items in Max |
| Search | Encrypted full-text search | Yes; OCR/image-to-text in Max tier |
| Pricing | Free, open source | Free Community tier (capped), USD $19.99/mo Max |
| Vendor cloud lock-in | None — it's just paired devices | Sync depends on the hosted service |
| Self-hosting | Not required (P2P first); LAN-only mode supported | Not advertised |
A note on this table: Planck details are based on its official site (planckapp.com) and pricing page as of the date on this draft. If those change, this table should be updated rather than left to drift.
It's tempting to write this kind of page as "we are good, they are bad." That's not honest, and it's not interesting.
The real disagreement is one design choice: should clipboard sync depend on a hosted service?
Planck answers yes, and builds a polished cloud product around that — AES at rest, search, OCR, paid tiers, AWS infrastructure. That's a coherent design.
UniClipboard answers no, and builds the product around device pairing — open source, P2P first, no account, encrypted local history. That's also a coherent design.
Both encrypt your clipboard. The difference is in who has to be trustworthy for the encryption story to hold. With a cloud product, you trust the vendor's implementation, the vendor's infra, and the vendor's continued existence. With UniClipboard, you trust the source code (which is published) and the cryptographic primitives (which are well-known and used widely), and the relay is treated as untrusted by design.
If you read that last paragraph and went "yeah, that's the bar I want," you're in the UniClipboard target audience.
You don't really migrate clipboard history between these two — clipboard history is short-lived, ephemeral working memory, not data you'd export.
A reasonable switch looks more like this:
There's no rush to delete the other app on day one. Run them in parallel for a bit.
Use Planck if you want a polished, cloud-based clipboard product, you don't mind a vendor account, and OCR / image-to-text on a paid tier is useful to your workflow.
Use UniClipboard if your privacy bar specifically requires:
Mac, Windows, Linux. No cloud account. No self-hosting. End-to-end encrypted across the public internet. That's the specific gap UniClipboard is built for.
For the desktop sync use case across macOS, Windows, and Linux: yes, the core "copy on one machine, paste on another" flow is the same. For OCR-on-image and a polished freemium cloud experience: no — UniClipboard is open source and serverless by design and doesn't have an OCR feature today. Pick the one whose model matches your priorities.
Direct device-to-device is the default path; that path uses no server. When direct P2P fails (some restrictive NATs), traffic falls back through an encrypted relay. The relay can route encrypted bytes — it cannot read clipboard content, clipboard type, device names, or the pairing passphrase. You can also run UniClipboard in LAN-only mode if you want to avoid the relay entirely.
The relay sees ciphertext, peer IDs (for routing), and byte counts and timing. It does not see clipboard content, clipboard type (text/image/file), device names, or the pairing passphrase. Encryption happens at the source device with a key the relay does not have. This is independent of whether the relay is operated by us, by you, or by anyone else.
Both projects say payloads are encrypted before they leave the device. The structural difference is the trust model. Planck's encryption sits on top of a hosted cloud, so the privacy story depends on the vendor's implementation, infra, and continued operation. UniClipboard's source is published, the relay is treated as untrusted by design, and the local history is also encrypted on disk. If you want to verify any of that, you can read the code.
Yes. There is no UniClipboard account. There is no signup. Devices pair directly with each other and exchange the keys they need to talk. We don't have your email, because we never asked for it.
Yes. iOS is in public beta on TestFlight and there is a native Android app (signed APK); the SyncClipboard open protocol also works as a LAN-only fallback. Planck still lists mobile as "coming soon" per its pricing page.
Deliberate. AGPL prevents anyone from forking UniClipboard into a closed-source hosted SaaS that quietly weakens the encryption and keeps the changes private. For a privacy-claim product, the license is what enforces the privacy claim. The cost is that some companies won't touch AGPL — that's a trade-off we accept.
Honest answer: you don't have to trust us, you trust the primitives. UniClipboard uses well-known, widely reviewed crates — XChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2id, SQLCipher for at-rest encryption, OS keychains for key storage. None of it is hand-rolled. The protocol is documented publicly, and the source is on GitHub. A paid third-party audit isn't done yet (we're a small project); if anyone wants to fund or run one, we're open to it.
If "open source, no cloud account, peer-to-peer first, end-to-end encrypted clipboard sync across Mac/Win/Linux" is the shape of what you were looking for when you searched "Planck alternative":
Pair your devices once. Then forget the clipboard exists. That's the goal.