Clop Alternatives for Mac: A Fair Look at a Very Good App

Five situations where Clop is the better buy, and one of them applies to most people reading this.

Your problem is screenshots, not a folder. This is the big one. If the thing that actually costs you time is taking a screenshot, pasting it into Slack or Notion or a ticket, and watching a multi-megabyte PNG crawl up a hotel Wi-Fi connection, Clop solves that completely and Smol does not. Clop watches the pasteboard. You copy, it optimises, you paste something smaller. There is no app to open, no file to find, no step to remember. Smol has clipboard compression but you have to ask for it, and a step you have to remember is a step you will skip.

You record your screen every day. Clop shrinks the recording as soon as you stop recording, using Apple Silicon’s Media Engine, and hands you a floating thumbnail you can drag straight into the next app. It will also crop it, mute it, speed it up or turn it into a GIF. We do none of those four.

You will not pay before you try. Clop gives you 14 days of Pro features with no credit card, then keeps working forever on the free tier, and refunds within 14 days of purchase if you change your mind. We have no trial build, no free mode, and our terms say all sales are final. That is a worse deal and we are not going to hide it three sections down.

Open source matters to you. Clop is GPLv3 with the full source on GitHub. You can read exactly what it does to your files, fork it, or build it yourself. Smol is closed source. If that is a principle rather than a preference, there is no argument we can make.

You live in macOS Shortcuts. Clop’s preset drop zones are Shortcuts, which means a dropped file can be downscaled, watermarked, renamed, uploaded and linked in one gesture. Smol has a Finder Quick Action, watched folders and an MCP server, which is a different automation surface and does not help you inside Shortcuts.

The honest summary: Clop is the better app for files that are about to exist. Smol is the better app for files that already do.

lowtechguys.com/clop states it in five words: “Lifetime license costs €15”. There is one tier, it is perpetual, and payment runs through Paddle. Smol is $29 once.

The free version is not a crippled demo. Clop’s own table, identical on the site and in the GitHub README, reads:

Read the first two rows again. Automatic clipboard optimisation is uncapped in the free version. For a large number of people, that is the entire reason they wanted the app, and it costs nothing forever. The site is explicit: “Free version features are free forever. After the 14-day trial, the app will continue to work with the free features.” It also promises “Refunds accepted within 14 days of purchase, no questions asked”.

Smol has none of that. No free tier, no downloadable trial, and our terms state all sales are final. Against Clop specifically, that is our weakest point, and if the thing stopping you buying is that you cannot try it, Clop is the safer $0 and you should take it.

Clop publishes its toolchain, which makes this answerable without guessing. Under Technical details on both the site and the README:

• pngquant for PNG
• jpegoptim for JPEG
• gifsicle for GIF
• ffmpeg for videos
• libvips for resizing images
• gifski for converting videos to GIFs
• ghostscript for optimising PDFs

That is a well-chosen, decades-proven set, and it explains both the strengths and the boundaries. There is no AVIF encoder in it. There is no WebP encoder either: the site’s “convert to webp” example is listed as a preset zone, and preset zones work by “running a Shortcut on the dropped file”. So WebP is something you can get out of Clop by wiring up macOS, not something Clop encodes itself. If your pipeline needs AVIF for Largest Contentful Paint, that is a hard stop.

Three other gaps follow from the same list. No audio. There is no standalone audio path at all, so an M4A or a WAV is not a file Clop has an opinion about. No documents. No DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, JSON or font conversion. No rasterising. Ghostscript optimises a PDF and the crop-pdf command reflows its margins, but neither turns page one into a PNG.

There is also a behaviour worth knowing rather than criticising. Clop “automatically converts less compatible formats like HEIC, tiff, mov to formats understood by most devices”, with the originals kept in a backup folder. For sharing, that is exactly right. If you want a HEIC to stay a HEIC and just get smaller, it is the wrong default, and it is configurable rather than fixed.

Smol’s compression outputs are JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC and GIF for images, five presets for PDF, MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV for video, and AAC, M4A, MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG and Opus for audio. Conversion adds TIFF, BMP and PDF, PDF to PNG or JPG, the Office formats, tables and web fonts. That is the difference in one paragraph: Clop optimises what you hand it; Smol also changes what it is.

The clearest way to choose between these two is not the feature table. It is the shape of your problem.

Clop is built around a stream. Files come into existence one at a time, all day, and each one should be smaller than it would otherwise have been. The interface follows from that: a clipboard watcher, a floating drop zone, hotkeys, a thumbnail that appears and then goes away. Even the free tier is metered “per session”, which is a unit that only makes sense if you think in terms of a working day rather than a job. Nothing in Clop assumes you have a folder.

Smol is built around a corpus. There is a pile of files that already exists, it has more than one type in it, and it needs to come out the other side smaller and in the right formats. Drop the folder, get the folder back. That model is worse at the screenshot problem and better at the client-delivery problem.

Two concrete cases make the line obvious. A designer who screenshots forty times a day and pastes into Figma comments should buy Clop and will barely notice Smol exists. An agency putting together a handover archive with 300 photographs, a dozen PDFs, two screen recordings and a font folder should buy Smol, because four of those file types are outside Clop’s encoder list entirely.

There is a third case, and it is the most common one: both. They do not conflict. Clop handles the pasteboard, Smol handles the folder, and neither one is watching the other’s files. The €15 and the $29 are not really competing for the same slot.

For batch work driven from a terminal or an agent rather than a window, Smol exposes its operations through an MCP server, so Claude Code or Codex can compress a build’s assets as a step inside a task. Clop’s equivalent surface is macOS Shortcuts and its clop CLI, which is a better fit if your automation already lives in the Shortcuts app.

Sorted by what is missing rather than by price.

That last row is not a joke. A good share of “clop alternative” searches are people checking whether an app they already like has been quietly abandoned. It has not: v3.4.3 landed on 19 September 2026 and there was a commit six days later.

The others have their own pages here. PDF Squeezer alternatives covers the PDF specialist. Squoosh alternatives covers the free browser tool Google stopped maintaining. Caesium alternatives covers the free cross-platform option, and JPEGmini alternatives covers the JPEG specialist at the other end of the price range.

If the answer is the generalist, Smol is a one-time $29 purchase for one Mac, with free updates forever. There is no trial and all sales are final, which Clop does better, so read the format list before you buy.