Raycast vs Alfred, and the third option in the middle.
Raycast vs Alfred is a question about two business models more than two feature lists. Raycast is a free tier with a subscription over it, a store of nine and a half thousand commands, and an account. Alfred is a one-time Powerpack licence, twenty years of community workflows, and nothing that phones home. Both launch apps well. This page compares them on the four things that actually decide it — price, weight, extensibility and ownership — and adds Coco as a third column, because a lot of people arrive here wanting Alfred's terms with a modern interface.
The two launchers, and what the choice is really about
Alfred shipped in 2010 and has been the default answer for Mac power users ever since. It is a native app, it uses very little memory, and the Powerpack is a licence you buy once for around £34 rather than a subscription. That licence unlocks clipboard history, snippets with expansion, and workflows — the visual automation editor that made Alfred what it is. Twenty years of community workflows sit on GitHub and the Alfred forum, and most of them still work. Nothing needs an account. Nothing syncs anywhere you did not point it.
Raycast arrived in 2020 with a different bet: make the launcher a platform, and fund it with a subscription. It worked. The extension store now holds 9,898 commands, a scale Alfred's workflow scene never reached in one searchable place, and the built-in feature set is genuinely broad — window management, snippets, quicklinks, clipboard history, all included with no setup. The free tier is generous enough that many people never pay. Pro is about eight dollars a month, with five more for the larger AI models, and cloud sync of settings lives behind it. The app is closed source, the company is venture-backed, and it wants an account for the parts that sync.
So the honest framing of Raycast vs Alfred is not which one is better. It is which set of trade-offs you want to live with. Raycast is deeper out of the box and rents you the depth. Alfred is quieter, lighter and sold once, and asks you to build the depth yourself. The complaints follow from that. People leave Raycast over memory, the subscription and the account; people bounce off Alfred because the interface looks its age and the first hour is configuration. Coco exists in the gap: Alfred's terms, a modern interface, and a narrower feature set than either.
Four things that decide Raycast vs Alfred
Price: rented depth versus a licence you keep
Raycast's free tier covers launching, clipboard history, window management, snippets and the whole extension store. Pro is roughly eight dollars a month and adds cloud sync, unlimited AI and a few Pro-only features, plus five dollars for the bigger models. Over three years that is around three hundred dollars if you take AI. Alfred's Powerpack is about £34 once, with a paid upgrade every few major versions if you want it. Coco is one-time too — $49 during launch, $99 afterwards, with a seven-day trial that needs no card. If your objection is renting software, Alfred and Coco both answer it. If your objection is paying at all, Raycast's free tier is the only one of the three that never charges.
Memory: the complaint that starts most of these threads
Alfred wins this and nobody seriously argues. It is a small native app that sits at a few tens of megabytes. Raycast never quits, and users on r/macapps and V2EX report several hundred megabytes at idle; one long-time user gave up when it approached two gigabytes. We will not publish a Coco figure to sit beside those, because a number we measured ourselves on our own machine is not comparable to numbers strangers measured on theirs. Coco is Swift against AppKit with no web view, which is the architecture people asking this hope for. Open Activity Monitor after a day of normal use and judge it yourself.
Extensions: one store versus twenty years of workflows
Raycast wins on breadth and on discovery. 9,898 commands, installable from inside the app, written in TypeScript with a real API and reviewed before publication. Alfred's workflows are older, more varied in quality, and scattered across GitHub, the forum and Packal — but they run shell, Python, AppleScript and anything else on your Mac, which the Raycast sandbox will not. Coco is the smallest of the three here: it has its own JavaScript plugin store, and it can import Raycast extensions, running 79 of the 3,232 it has scanned out of the box, with a per-command report before anything executes.
Built-ins: what you get before you configure anything
Raycast is the most complete on day one — window management, snippets with placeholders, quicklinks, clipboard history and a calculator, all working before you open settings. Alfred gives you launching and search for free; clipboard history, snippets and workflows arrive with the Powerpack, and most people spend an evening tuning it. Coco covers clipboard history with image previews and pinning, a calculator with a running tape, unit and live currency conversion with a rate chart, emoji search, screenshot capture and annotation, live captions, and the full-screen Launchpad grid macOS 26 removed. It has no window management and no snippet expansion, which is a real gap against both of the others.
Ownership: accounts, clouds and source code
Alfred needs no account and has no cloud; sync is a folder you choose, usually in Dropbox or iCloud Drive. Coco is the same — no account, seven-day trial with no card, clipboard history in your own iCloud Drive or on this Mac only. Raycast wants an account for sync and for parts of AI, and some extensions call Raycast's own servers. None of the three is open source, Coco included. If open source is the line, the answer is not on this page — it is Vicinae or SuperCmd, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Raycast, Alfred and Coco, row by row
The top of the table is terms, because that is what the search is usually about. Raycast is the only one of the three where the full feature set is a subscription, and the only one that wants an account. Alfred and Coco are both bought once. None of the three is open source. Everything here is a native Mac app; none of them is an Electron shell.
Below that is capability, and the picture flips around. Raycast has the most built in and the deepest store. Alfred is the only one with a mature snippet expansion engine and shell-level workflows. Coco has the things neither of the others bothered with — the Launchpad grid, screenshot annotation, live captions, and matching apps by pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo, so 微信 answers to wx. Read the bottom half as three different products rather than three grades of the same one.
| Raycast | Alfred | Coco | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native Mac app, no web view | |||
| Every feature without a subscription | |||
| Every feature without an account | |||
| Free tier that never expires | |||
| Open-source application | |||
| Window management built in | |||
| Snippet expansion as you type | |||
| Clipboard history | |||
| Live currency conversion built in | |||
| Emoji search built in | |||
| Screenshot capture and annotation | |||
| Live captions (transcription) | |||
| Launchpad-style full-screen app grid | |||
| Runs Raycast Store extensions unmodified | |||
| Imports Raycast extensions with a per-command report | |||
| Pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo matching |
How to decide in a week, without guessing
Write down what you actually use
Open your current launcher's settings and note every feature and extension you touched in the last month. For most people the list is launching, clipboard history, the calculator, and two or three extensions. That list is your requirement, and it is almost always shorter than the feature comparison suggests. Anything not on it is not a tie-breaker.
Check the two disqualifiers first
Snippet expansion and window management are the two features that end the argument early. If you expand text as you type, Alfred and Raycast can do it and Coco cannot. If you tile windows with a keyboard shortcut, Raycast has it built in and neither of the other two does. Settle those before you compare anything else, because no amount of polish elsewhere replaces them.
Install the trials side by side
Alfred is free to install and the Powerpack has a demo. Raycast's free tier needs no card. Coco unlocks for seven days with no card and no account. Give each one a different hotkey and run them together. Do not migrate settings yet — the point of this week is to find out which search field your hand goes to without thinking.
Migrate once, then quit the other two
When you have picked one, move your data. Alfred imports nothing from Raycast but its workflows are easy to rebuild. Coco's Settings has a Raycast Import that takes an encrypted Raycast export and merges hotkeys, clipboard text, quicklinks and aliases without overwriting what you set, plus a separate scan that installs only the extension commands it can prove will run. Then uninstall the losers, because two launchers on one hotkey is worse than either.
Questions people actually ask
- Is Raycast or Alfred better in 2026?
- Neither, in the abstract. Raycast is better if you want the most capability with the least configuration: window management, snippets, quicklinks and clipboard history all work before you open settings, and the store has 9,898 commands one keystroke away. Alfred is better if you want a light native app you buy once and keep, and you are willing to spend an evening building the workflows you need. The tie-breaker is usually temperament rather than features. People who enjoy configuring things end up on Alfred and stay for years. People who want it to already be configured end up on Raycast and mostly do not mind the subscription. If neither model appeals, that is what the third column on this page is for.
- Is Alfred lighter on memory than Raycast?
- Yes, clearly. This is the least disputed part of the comparison. Alfred is a small native app that idles at a few tens of megabytes. Raycast is a persistent process that users on r/macapps and V2EX report at several hundred megabytes idle, with one long-time user reporting close to two gigabytes before he gave up. Those are user measurements on user machines, which is exactly why they are worth citing and why we will not put a figure of our own next to them. If memory is your complaint, Alfred is the safe answer. Coco is native Swift with no web view, but the only measurement that should convince you is the one you take in Activity Monitor after a day of your own use.
- Can Alfred run Raycast extensions?
- No. Alfred workflows and Raycast extensions are different formats with different runtimes — Alfred runs shell, Python, AppleScript and compiled actions through its own workflow graph, while Raycast extensions are TypeScript against a sandboxed React-style API. There is no converter that meaningfully bridges them, and the community attempts cover a handful of trivial cases. Coco is the only one of the three that reads the raycast/extensions repository directly: it scans each command's source without executing it and reports whether it will run. Under Coco's rules 79 run out of the box and 815 once the declarative UI tier is enabled, out of 3,232 scanned. Only Raycast runs the whole store.
- How much does each one cost over three years?
- Raycast can be free forever if the free tier covers you, and it covers a lot. If you take Pro at about eight dollars a month it is roughly $288 over three years, and $468 with the five-dollar AI add-on. Alfred's Powerpack is around £34 once, with an optional paid upgrade at major versions, so call it £34 to £70 across the same period. Coco is $49 during launch and $99 afterwards, one time, with a 14-day refund and a seven-day trial that needs no card. The honest read is that Raycast is the cheapest option if you never pay and the most expensive if you do, and the two one-time products sit in between with no decision to revisit.
- What does Alfred do that Coco does not?
- Three things, and they are not small. Workflows are the big one: Alfred's visual editor chains shell scripts, AppleScript, Python and native actions into automations that run anything on your Mac, and Coco has nothing at that level — its plugin store is JavaScript and much narrower. Snippet expansion is the second: Alfred expands text as you type with placeholders and dynamic content, and Coco can import Raycast snippets but has no expansion runtime, so they sit there as data. The third is maturity. Alfred has twenty years of edge cases handled and a community that has already solved your problem. Coco is younger and does less. What it adds back is the Launchpad grid, screenshots, live captions, currency with a rate chart and phonetic matching.
- What does Raycast do that Coco does not?
- Window management is the first and the most common reason to stay. Raycast tiles, halves and moves windows from the keyboard, Coco does not, and nothing on this site pretends otherwise. The second is the full extension store: Raycast runs all 9,898 commands, and Coco runs only the subset its scanner can verify, with anything needing network access, OAuth, native modules or a menu-bar presence permanently out of reach. The third is everything Pro buys — hosted AI models, cloud sync across machines, and a Windows version. Coco has none of those and is not planning them. What Coco offers instead is a one-time price, no account, and a handful of features neither Raycast nor Alfred ships.
Copy the prompt, or send it straight to the AI you already use — it drives Coco through the same commands you would type yourself.
Install the Coco skill (npx skills add butterflydream-ai/Coco --skill coco -g -y), then use coco to help me with Raycast vs Alfred, and the third option in the middle..