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

Last updated 7 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.

It’s just worth knowing before you build your day around it.

What Ditto gets right

Before any comparison, the genuine list.

• It’s free with no asterisk. No paid tier, no upgrade, no commercial licence to buy later. It’s open source under GPL-3.0, including at work.
• It holds thousands of items and they survive a restart. That’s exactly the pair of things Windows’ own clipboard history won’t do.
• It’s fast, light and mature. It’s been around long enough that the rough edges are gone.
• Nothing leaves your computer. Its own repository says no login, no cloud, no telemetry, which is the same position we take.
• It captures images as well as text, and has done for years, quietly and reliably.

Copychest and Ditto, side by side

What	Copychest	Ditto
Price	Free tier, or $29 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	Yes. Capture part of your screen and mark it up, free	Yes, it stores images as well as text
Marking up a screenshot	Free the first time; Pro to reopen a saved one and change the marks	No
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 support@copychest.com	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 want image handling that’s been proven for years. Ditto has stored images for a very long time. Ours is newer, and newer is newer.
• 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. How-To Geek likes Ditto and still says anyone who cares about a polished, modern look might find it underwhelming next to newer apps. MakeUseOf tested five and picked the modern-looking one.
• You’d rather pay once than wish for more. $29 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: 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

• Ditto releases. 3.25.113.0, 27 September 2025, 64-bit and ARM64 installers. Checked 6 August 2026.
• Ditto repository. Latest commit 7 July 2026, GPL-3.0 licence, text/images/HTML, no login, cloud or telemetry. Checked 6 August 2026.
• How-To Geek, 5 July 2026. The “basic by 2026 standards” interface quote, and “anyone who cares about a polished, modern look might find it underwhelming compared to newer apps”. Checked 7 August 2026.
• MakeUseOf, 4 January 2026. Tested five Windows clipboard managers and picked Pasteboard for its “modern interface and ease of use”. Checked 7 August 2026.
• CopyQ. GPL-3.0, scripting API, actively updated. Checked 6 August 2026.
• ClipClip pricing. $49 one-time per person for commercial use. Checked 6 August 2026.