Comparison · checked August 2026
Mochi vs Alfred
The launcher Mac power users have built their keyboards around since 2010, with a workflow system people run entire jobs on top of.
The short answer. Alfred is the more configurable launcher and you pay for it once. Mochi's launcher is in the same family and arrives with a screen recorder, a screenshot editor and writing tools on their own keys — but if workflows are why you use Alfred, nothing here replaces them.
Where Alfred is the better buy
- Workflows, and fifteen years of them: a visual editor for building your own, and a library of other people's doing things Mochi has never heard of. Mochi has no equivalent and is not building one.
- One payment. £34 and it is yours; the Mega Supporter tier never asks again.
- Clipboard history, snippets, file navigation and a calculator are all inside that same payment, all mature, and all faster than the equivalent in a newer app.
- If your launcher is the most customised thing on your Mac, this page is not going to argue you out of fifteen years of muscle memory. Keep Alfred.
Alfred costs £34 once for the Powerpack, or £59 for the tier that includes every future version. Priced in pounds — there is no official dollar price, so what you pay moves with the exchange rate.
Where Mochi is different
- A screen recorder with a real editor, and a screenshot editor whose marks stay editable, on the same keyboard as the launcher.
- Typo tolerance in the matcher: “chrmoe” and “chroome” both find Chrome, at a fixed penalty, so a typo match can never outrank a clean one.
- Maths, unit and currency conversion, time zones, hashes, base64, JWTs and QR codes answer in the search field with no workflow to install first.
- Correcting or translating the selected text in any app, on a keystroke.
Side by side
| Feature | Alfred | Mochi |
|---|---|---|
| Launcher, fuzzy search | Excellent | Yes — typo-tolerant matcher |
| Workflows / extensions | The reason people stay | Not available |
| Clipboard history | Powerpack | Free, unlimited |
| Snippets | Powerpack | 5 free, unlimited on Pro |
| Answers in the search field | Calculator, plus workflows | Maths, units, currency, time, encoding |
| Screen recording | Not available | Full recorder + editor with auto-zoom |
| Screenshot annotation | Not available | 9 tools free, 15 with Pro |
| Window snapping | Not available | ⌃⌥ chords, opt-in |
| Writing correction | Not available | ⌥⇧C in any app |
| How you pay | Once | Monthly or yearly, over a free tier |
The arithmetic
Buying the specialists separately, at August 2026 prices:
- Raycast Pro$96
- Screen Studio$108
- Grammarly Pro$144
- CleanShot X$54
- First year$402
That is four of the eight things Mochi does. Mochi Pro is $99 a year on 3 Macs, or $12 a month. Most of it — including a two-minute recorder with the editor and cutting — is free forever.
Questions
- Can Mochi run my Alfred workflows?
- No. There is no import, no compatibility layer and no plan for one — a workflow is a small program written against Alfred's own runtime. If you depend on more than one or two, that is the answer to this page, and it is worth more than anything below it.
- Alfred is a one-time payment. Why would I subscribe to anything?
- For the launcher and the screenshots, you would not — that half of Mochi is free and needs no key at all. The subscription is for the recorder and the writing tools, and it exists because a screen recorder needs repair every September when macOS changes how capture works.