Raycast vs Spotlight, after Tahoe changed the question.
Raycast vs Spotlight used to be an easy call. Spotlight found files and did arithmetic; Raycast did everything else. Then macOS 26 Tahoe gave Spotlight clipboard history, an actions list and a much better keyboard flow, and a lot of people quietly uninstalled their launcher. This page works out whether you are one of them. It compares what Spotlight actually gained, what Raycast still does that the system cannot, and where the specific gaps in Tahoe's Spotlight are — the ones the forum threads keep naming. Coco sits in the third column as the middle answer.
What Tahoe actually changed
For fifteen years Spotlight was a search field with a calculator bolted on. It launched apps, found documents, converted units, and stopped there. Everything a launcher does beyond that — clipboard history, quick links, extensions, chained actions — was the reason third-party launchers existed at all. macOS 26 Tahoe changed that in one release. Spotlight now keeps a clipboard history, exposes an actions list so you can run app commands without opening the app, and handles keyboard navigation in a way that feels designed rather than tolerated. It is free, it is already installed, and it launches faster than anything you could install over it.
Raycast's answer is depth. Its extension store holds 9,898 commands, none of which have an equivalent in Spotlight. Window management, snippets with placeholders, quicklinks and a real clipboard manager with pinning are all built in and all free. Its AI, cloud sync and cross-machine settings live behind a Pro subscription of about eight dollars a month, with five more for the larger models. The costs are the ones people write about: it never quits, users on r/macapps and V2EX report several hundred megabytes at idle, it wants an account for the syncing parts, and it is closed source with venture money behind it.
The honest read of Raycast vs Spotlight in 2026 is that Spotlight closed the gap for casual use and did not touch the gap for power use. If you used Raycast to launch, calculate, convert and paste, Tahoe covers you and you should stop paying attention to launchers. If you used it for window management, extensions or serious clipboard work, Spotlight is still not close. The interesting group is in the middle: people whose Spotlight is nearly enough but breaks on one specific thing. That is who the rest of this page is written for.
Where Spotlight is now enough, and where it still breaks
Spotlight wins on launching, and it always did
Raycast has never actually been faster at opening an app. Spotlight is a system service with indexes already warm, no extra process to keep resident, and no launcher to install. Tahoe tightened the keyboard flow — results settle sooner, the first hit is right more often, and the actions list means you can trigger an app command without going through the app. If launching is ninety percent of what you do with a launcher, that ninety percent is now free and lighter than anything you could add.
Clipboard history exists now, but you cannot pin
This is the single most-cited gap in the Tahoe threads. Spotlight's clipboard history is real and useful, and then you try to keep one entry — an address, a licence key, a snippet you paste twenty times a day — and there is nowhere to put it. Entries age out and sometimes go missing before they should. Raycast pins, searches and previews clipboard entries, and so does Coco, with image previews and pinned favourites. If your clipboard is a working set rather than a scroll-back, this one row decides the page for you.
Non-English app names and external drives
Two concrete failures keep coming up. Spotlight's matching on non-English app names is hit and miss. Chinese, Japanese and Korean names often do not respond to the transliteration you would type, so an app you can see in the Dock refuses to come up in search. External drives are the other: they index unreliably, and files on them can be effectively invisible. Raycast does not fix the phonetic problem either. Coco does, matching apps on pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo, so 微信 answers to wx and メモ answers to memo.
Extensions are the real dividing line
Spotlight has no extension model at all, and there is no sign of one coming. Raycast has 9,898 commands installable from inside the app. If two or three of those extensions are load-bearing in your day, this comparison is already over and Raycast wins it. Coco runs its own JavaScript plugins plus the subset of Raycast extensions its scanner can verify — 79 of the 3,232 it has scanned, a minority of the repository, with the reason published per extension. Anything needing network access, OAuth, native modules or a menu-bar presence will not run under Coco and never will.
Coco, for the middle case
Coco is a native Swift launcher, bought once — $49 during launch, $99 afterwards — with a seven-day trial that needs no card and no account. It exists for the person whose Spotlight is nearly enough. It adds pinnable clipboard history with image previews, a calculator with a running tape, and unit and live currency conversion with a rate chart. There is also emoji search, screenshot capture and annotation, live captions, phonetic matching, and the full-screen Launchpad grid macOS 26 removed. It has no window management, no snippet expansion runtime, and it is not open source. Against Raycast it is narrower; against Spotlight it is a purchase you have to justify.
Raycast, Spotlight and Coco, row by row
Read the top rows as terms. Spotlight is free and ships with the system, which no third-party app can beat and none of them tries to. Raycast is free at its base and a subscription for the full set, and it is the only one here that wants an account. Coco is a one-time purchase. None of the three is open source, Coco included; if that matters most, look at Vicinae or SuperCmd instead of anything on this page.
The rows below are capability, and they split three ways rather than ranking. Raycast owns extensions and window management outright. Spotlight owns being already there. Coco owns the small set neither of the others ships — the Launchpad grid, screenshot annotation, live captions and phonetic matching — and matches Raycast on the everyday things without the subscription. The pinning row is the one that moves the most people off Spotlight.
| Raycast | Spotlight | Coco | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free of charge | |||
| Every feature without a subscription | |||
| Every feature without an account | |||
| Ships with macOS, nothing to install | |||
| Open-source application | |||
| Clipboard history | |||
| Pin a clipboard entry so it never ages out | |||
| Image previews in clipboard history | |||
| Calculator in the search field | |||
| Calculation history you can scroll back | |||
| Live currency conversion built in | |||
| Emoji search built in | |||
| Third-party extensions or plugins | |||
| Window management built in | |||
| Snippet expansion as you type | |||
| Screenshot capture and annotation | |||
| Live captions (transcription) | |||
| Launchpad-style full-screen app grid | |||
| Pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo matching |
How to find out whether you still need a launcher
Quit your launcher for a week, do not uninstall it
Leave Raycast installed but disable its hotkey, so ⌘Space goes to Spotlight. A week is long enough for habit to stop being the reason you reach for one thing over another. Keep a note on your desk and write down every moment Spotlight leaves you stuck. Do not reason about it in advance — the list you predict and the list you get are rarely the same.
Read the list you wrote, not the feature comparison
Most lists come back with two or three lines on them, and they are usually the same lines. A clipboard entry you needed to keep. An app you could not summon by its Chinese or Japanese name. A file on an external drive Spotlight would not index. If your list is empty, you are done — delete the launcher and keep the memory. That is a real outcome and the most common one for casual users.
Match the gaps to the column that fixes them
Window management or extensions on the list means Raycast, and nothing else on this page substitutes. Pinned clipboard entries, phonetic app names, a calculator you can scroll back through, or the Launchpad grid means Coco — install it and give it a hotkey that is not ⌘Space, so Spotlight keeps doing what it already does well. If the list is only about speed, no launcher will help; Spotlight is the fastest of the three.
Keep Spotlight for what it is good at
Whatever you install, do not fight the system search. Spotlight is better at finding documents, mail and system settings than any third-party index, because it is the index. Give your launcher a separate hotkey and let it handle the launcher-shaped work — clipboard, conversions, commands, the app grid. People who try to replace Spotlight entirely usually come back within a month.
Questions people actually ask
- Is Raycast still worth it after macOS 26 Spotlight?
- For most casual users the answer is no, and that is a fair thing for us to say. Tahoe's Spotlight launches apps, calculates, converts currency and keeps a clipboard history, which is the whole of what many people used Raycast for. It costs nothing, installs nothing and holds no memory of its own. Raycast still earns its place if you rely on window management, snippets with placeholders, or extensions from a store of 9,898 commands — none of which Spotlight has any answer to, now or in any announced roadmap. The test that settles it is behavioural rather than theoretical: disable your Raycast hotkey for a week and write down each time Spotlight leaves you stuck. An empty list means you have your answer.
- Does Spotlight have clipboard history in macOS 26?
- Yes. Tahoe added a real clipboard history to Spotlight, and for many people it is the feature that made a third-party launcher unnecessary. What it does not have is pinning. There is no way to mark an entry so it survives — no keeping an address, a licence key or a snippet you paste twenty times a day at the top of the list. Users also report entries disappearing earlier than expected, and there are no image previews. Raycast pins, searches and previews. Coco does the same, with image previews and pinned favourites, and keeps the history in your own iCloud Drive or on this Mac only. If your clipboard is a working set rather than a scroll-back, this is the gap that will send you looking.
- Is Raycast heavier than Spotlight?
- Yes, necessarily. Spotlight is a system service that is running whether you use it or not, so its marginal cost to you is effectively zero. Raycast is an additional process that never quits; users on r/macapps and V2EX report several hundred megabytes at idle, and one long-time user gave up when it approached two gigabytes. Those are user measurements on user machines, which is why they are worth citing. We will not publish a Coco number beside them, because a figure we measured on our own hardware would not be comparable. Coco is Swift against AppKit with no web view. If weight is your concern, the only honest test is Activity Monitor on your Mac after a day of normal use.
- Why can Spotlight not find my app by its Chinese or Japanese name?
- Because Spotlight matches on the literal name string and on a limited set of aliases, not on how the name is pronounced or typed on a Latin keyboard. An app called 微信 or メモ is often unreachable unless you can produce the characters, which is exactly what you cannot do quickly while typing in a search field. External drives are the sibling problem: they index unreliably, so files on them can be effectively invisible. Raycast does not solve the phonetic side either. Coco matches on pinyin, romaji and Korean jamo, so wx finds 微信 and memo finds メモ, and it indexes external volumes rather than assuming everything lives on the boot disk.
- Can Spotlight run Raycast extensions?
- No, and there is no mechanism by which it could. Spotlight has no extension model — the actions list in Tahoe surfaces commands that apps themselves register with the system, not third-party code you install. Raycast extensions are TypeScript running against a sandboxed API inside Raycast's own runtime, and only Raycast runs all 9,898 of them. Coco is the middle case: it reads a local copy of the raycast/extensions repository, scans each command's source without executing it, and reports whether it will run before anything happens. Under Coco's rules 79 run out of the box and 815 once the declarative UI tier is enabled, out of 3,232 scanned. The rest are blocked on network access, OAuth, AppleScript, native modules, menu-bar commands or Grid views.
- Why would I pay for Coco when Spotlight is free?
- Often you should not, and we would rather say so than sell you something you will not open. Spotlight is free, already installed, faster to launch than anything you could add, and after Tahoe it covers launching, calculating, converting and pasting. The case for Coco is a specific list of gaps. Pinnable clipboard history with image previews, a calculator you can scroll back through, live currency with a rate chart. Emoji search, screenshot annotation, live captions, matching apps by pinyin or romaji, and the full-screen Launchpad grid Tahoe removed. If two or more of those are things you reach for weekly, a one-time $49 is easy arithmetic. If none of them are, stay on Spotlight. The seven-day trial needs no card and no account precisely so you can find out.
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 Spotlight, after Tahoe changed the question..