Free & open source
A free, open-source clipboard manager you can actually audit
Ortu is released under the MIT licence and costs nothing — no paid tier, no subscription, no account, and no features held back behind an upgrade. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and keeps your clipboard history in a local database on your own machine.
“Free” is easy to claim. What matters for something that watches everything you copy is whether you can check what it does — so here is exactly what you can verify.
What the MIT licence gives you
- Use Ortu for anything, including commercial work, at no cost.
- Read every line of the source, including how clips are captured, stored and encrypted.
- Modify it and run your own build — nothing checks a licence key.
- Redistribute it, as long as the copyright notice and licence text come along.
How to check the privacy claim
Ortu is local-first: clipboard history is written to a SQLite database on your device, there is no account or sync, and there is no analytics or telemetry dependency anywhere in the project. The only outbound request the app makes is an update check against the GitHub releases API.
You do not have to take that on trust. The clipboard listener, the database schema and the encryption used for detected secrets are all public, and every release is built by a GitHub Actions workflow you can read — so you can compare what ships against how it was made. Each artifact is also published with a minisign signature you can verify yourself.
Questions
Is Ortu really free and open source?
Yes. Ortu is released under the MIT licence and costs nothing. There is no paid tier, no subscription, no account, and no "pro" version withheld behind a paywall.
What does the MIT licence let me do?
Use Ortu for anything including commercial work, read and modify the source, and redistribute it — as long as the copyright notice and licence text travel with it. There is no warranty.
How do I know it is not sending my clipboard somewhere?
You can read the source. Clipboard capture, storage and the database schema are all in the public repository, and the only outbound request in the codebase is an update check against the GitHub releases API. There is no analytics or telemetry dependency to audit around.
Can I build Ortu myself instead of downloading a binary?
Yes. The repository documents the full development setup, and release builds are produced by a public GitHub Actions workflow, so you can compare what is published against how it is built.