App Launchers: Raycast, Alfred and PowerToys Command Palette

A launcher is a small thing that changes how a computer feels. You press a key, type three letters, and the app opens, the file appears, the sum is done, the window snaps to the left half — without touching the mouse or looking at a dock. Once you have one, the built-in way of doing things starts to feel like walking to the shop for something you could have shouted for.

We have run all three of the current serious options for months each. The question is no longer whether they are good, because they are. It is what the free versions leave out, whether the paid tiers are worth it, and whether you need any of them now that the operating systems have copied the idea.

What a launcher does, and what it is not

The core job — open an app, find a file, do a calculation — is table stakes and all three do it well. What separates them is the second layer: clipboard history, text snippets, window management, and extensions that reach into other services so you can search your calendar or post to a channel without opening a browser. That second layer is where the money is, and where the built-ins still fall short.

It is not an automation tool. If you want to move data between services on a schedule, that is a different category; we compared those separately. A launcher is for the thing you are doing right now, by hand, faster.

Raycast: the biggest ecosystem, priced around AI

Raycast is what most Mac users install first now, and the free tier is the reason. Clipboard history, quicklinks, a calculator, snippets, window management and the whole extension store are free, along with the ability to write your own extensions. The limits on the free plan are three months of clipboard history and five Raycast Notes, neither of which most people hit.

The paid tiers are where it gets interesting, because they are not really launcher tiers. Pro is $10 a month, or $96 a year, and the headline is Raycast AI: quick AI, chat, agents and 500 monthly AI credits, plus unlimited clipboard history, cloud sync of your settings, custom themes and unlimited Notes. Plus at $20 and Max at $50 buy more credits and the top-tier models. If you want an AI assistant a keystroke away and you are already paying for one elsewhere, that overlaps with the subscription you may already have; if you do not, the launcher is still free.

The free tier of Raycast is the product. Pro is an AI subscription with a launcher attached, and it is fair to judge it as one.

Where Raycast wins outright is extensions. The store is large, the ones for common services are maintained, and building your own is a React project with good documentation. If there is a tool you use daily, there is probably an extension, and it probably works.

Alfred: pay once, build your own

Alfred is older, and its model is the old one: a free launcher with the good parts behind a one-off purchase. The Powerpack is £34 for a single licence or £59 for the Mega Supporter version with free lifetime upgrades. Alfred 5 is current, and a purchase now includes the upgrade to 6.

The free version is, honestly, thin — app launching, file search, web search and a calculator. Clipboard history, snippets and workflows all need the Powerpack. But once you have it, workflows are the feature Raycast's extensions are a friendlier version of: a visual editor where you chain triggers, scripts and actions, with no app store between you and the thing you want to build. People who have used Alfred for a decade have workflows they wrote in 2015 that still run.

Alfred's case is stability and ownership. It does not have an AI tier, it does not need a login, and your workflows are files on your disk. If that sounds better to you than a subscription and a store, it is the one.

Command Palette: Windows finally has one

Windows spent years without a proper answer. PowerToys Run was a decent one, and Command Palette is its replacement: open it with Win+Alt+Space and start typing. Microsoft's own list of what it does covers most of the Mac launchers' free tiers — launch apps, run commands with a leading >, search files, search the web with ??, calculate with the same functions Run had, jump to Settings pages with $, switch windows, browse clipboard history, install apps from WinGet, and manage services or Terminal profiles.

Two things in the new version matter more than the list. The first is the extension gallery, built into its settings, which gives it the community extensibility that made Raycast worth installing. The second is a dock — a persistent strip of pinned commands and system metrics on a screen edge — which is not something the Mac tools do. It is free, open source, and if you use PowerToys for anything else it is already on your machine, waiting to be enabled.

It is also younger, and that shows: it must be running in the background, the extension library is smaller, and the polish is a version or two behind. But on Windows the comparison is not with Raycast; it is with the Start menu, and against that it is not close.

Side by side

	Raycast	Alfred	Command Palette
Platform	macOS (Windows newer)	macOS	Windows
Free tier	Launcher, clipboard (3 months), snippets, windows, extensions	Launcher, file and web search, calculator	Everything
Paid	Pro $10/month or $96/year; Plus $20; Max $50	Powerpack £34 once, £59 lifetime upgrades	None
What paid adds	AI, sync, themes, unlimited history	Workflows, clipboard, snippets	—
Extensions	Store, largest	Workflows, community	Gallery, growing

Do you need one at all?

Less than you used to. Spotlight has picked up actions and a clipboard history in recent macOS releases, and Windows Search has improved. If your use is launching apps and finding files, the built-ins are fine now and there is nothing to install.

The launcher earns its place at the second layer. A clipboard history you can search back through, snippets that expand on a trigger, a window that goes to the left half on one shortcut, and an extension for the service you open forty times a day. If two of those four sound useful, install Raycast or enable Command Palette this afternoon. The snippet part in particular has a whole category of dedicated tools behind it — text expanders and clipboard managers — and a launcher does enough of that job that many people stop there.

Our setup, for what it is worth: Raycast free on the Macs, Command Palette on the Windows machine, and no AI tier on either. The keystroke is the feature. The rest we can decide about later.