Keyboard Maestro vs TextExpander: Which Mac Tool Do You Need?

Keyboard Maestro is a Mac-only automation app that lets you build macros for controlling apps, managing winows, running scripts, and automating repetitive workflows. It includes a typed string trigger that works as basic text expansion. TextExpander is a cross-platform text expansion tool for individuals and teams, with fill-in fields, shared Snippet libraries, and compliance certifications for regulated industries.

People compare these two because Keyboard Maestro’s typed string triggers look like TextExpander’s core functionality from the outside. They’re different categories of software. Keyboard Maestro is an automation suite that happens to include text expansion. TextExpander is a text expansion tool that goes deeper on that one capability than any automation suite can.

Primary purpose: Keyboard Maestro is a full Mac automation suite with hundreds of actions; TextExpander is a text expansion tool built for that single job

Platform support: Keyboard Maestro runs on macOS only; TextExpander runs on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, and Android

Team features: Keyboard Maestro has no team sharing; TextExpander offers shared Snippet libraries with permission controls and admin dashboards

Pricing model: Keyboard Maestro is a one-time purchase of $36; TextExpander is a subscription starting at $4.16/month billed annually

Text expansion depth: Keyboard Maestro handles typed string triggers; TextExpander Snippets support fill-in-the-blank forms, nested Snippets, scripting, and inline search

I run both on my Mac. They serve different roles, and this comparison covers where they overlap, where they don’t, and which one fits your workflow. Want to try TextExpander first? Start a free 30-day trial with no credit card required.

What is Keyboard Maestro?

Keyboard Maestro is a macOS automation app from Stairways Software. It covers more ground than any other Mac automation tool I’ve used. You build macros that combine triggers, conditions, and actions into automated sequences, and those macros can control nearly anything on your system.

The trigger system runs deep. Fire a macro from a hot key, a typed string, a USB device connection, an app launch, a time of day, a folder change, a remote trigger from another Mac, or a cron-style schedule. From there, you chain together actions from a library of hundreds:

Application control: Launch, quit, hide, or switch between apps. Activate specific menu items. Click buttons in dialogs. Navigate interface elements that have no keyboard shortcut.

Window management: Move, resize, tile, or cascade windows across displays. The Window Switcher gives you visual window selection within or across apps.

Clipboard history: A built-in clipboard manager saves everything you copy. Search past clipboard entries, mark favorites, and paste from history.

Scripting: Run AppleScript, JavaScript for Automation, shell scripts, and Swift scripts inside any macro. Pass variables between actions and scripts.

Conditional logic: If/then/else branching, loops, variable manipulation, and regular expression matching. Build macros that make decisions based on the frontmost app, screen contents, clipboard data, or time of day.

Web automation: Fill forms, click links, extract data from web pages, and download files through Safari or Chrome integration.

Keyboard Maestro 11 is the current major version. It runs on macOS 10.13 High Sierra or later, with native Apple Silicon support. A license costs $36 for one user on up to five Macs. One-time purchase, not a subscription. Upgrades from earlier versions cost $25, and anyone who purchased version 10 after March 2023 got the version 11 upgrade free.

The trade-off is the learning curve. The macro editor presents a blank canvas with hundreds of possible actions. If you like tinkering with automations, that’s exciting. If you want something that works in five minutes, it’s a wall. There’s no iOS app, no Windows version, and no way to share macros with a team through a managed system. Leave macOS, and your macros stay behind.

What is TextExpander?

TextExpander does one thing and goes deep: text expansion. You create Snippets containing the text, formatted content, or code you type repeatedly, assign an abbreviation, and TextExpander inserts the full content whenever you type it.

Where it pulls away from any automation tool’s built-in text expansion: fill-in fields. A Snippet with fill-in fields presents a form before expansion. Dropdowns for product names. Single-line fields for customer names. Optional sections that appear only when relevant. A customer support team builds one response template and personalizes it for every interaction.

Team sharing lets organizations maintain a central library of approved messaging. An admin creates Snippet groups, assigns permissions, and every team member gets access across all their devices. When someone updates a shared Snippet, the change reaches the entire team in seconds. Virta Health, a healthcare company with 359 TextExpander users, saved over 69,000 hours in a single year by standardizing their care team’s messaging through shared Snippets.

TextExpander runs on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Snippets stay current across every platform without manual configuration. Build a Snippet on your desktop and use it from your phone minutes later.

For regulated industries, TextExpander holds SOC 2 and SOC 3 certifications, maintains HIPAA compliance with Business Associate Agreements, and encrypts data with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.2+ in transit. These are requirements that healthcare organizations and enterprises verify before deploying any tool that handles sensitive text data.

TextExpander does require a subscription, and it handles one category of work. Window management, app launching, conditional macro logic? Different tools for those. TextExpander stays focused on text expansion.

Text expansion compared

This is where the two tools overlap. Keyboard Maestro’s typed string triggers and TextExpander’s Snippets both let you type an abbreviation and get expanded text. The difference is how far each tool takes that concept.

Keyboard Maestro’s typed string trigger monitors your keyboard input, watches for a matching string, deletes the typed characters, and runs the associated macro. For text expansion, that macro is an “Insert Text” action. You type ;em and Keyboard Maestro replaces it with your email address. The trigger supports case sensitivity, diacritical mark handling, word boundary restrictions, and regular expression matching. Type the trigger in all uppercase, and the inserted text follows suit. That’s a solid feature set for one corner of a much larger app.

TextExpander built its Snippet system from the ground up for text expansion. Fill-in fields present forms before expansion. Nested Snippets pull content from other Snippets, so updating your company address fixes every template that references it. JavaScript, AppleScript, and shell scripts run inline. Date math calculates future dates. Inline search finds any Snippet by title, abbreviation, or content.

Capability | Keyboard Maestro | TextExpander
Auto-expansion by abbreviation | Yes, via typed string triggers | Yes
Fill-in-the-blank fields | Limited via Prompt for User Input action | Yes: single-line, multi-line, popup menus, optional sections
Dynamic date and time | Yes, through ICU date format tokens | Yes, with date arithmetic
Clipboard insertion | Yes, including named clipboards | Yes, current clipboard
Case-sensitive matching | Yes, with case-adaptive output | Yes
Nested Snippets | Via macro subroutines, multi-step setup | Yes, native support
Script execution | Yes: AppleScript, JavaScript, shell, Swift | Yes: JavaScript, AppleScript, shell scripts inline
Rich text and images | Limited formatting in Insert Text | Yes: colors, images, hyperlinks
Inline search | No | Search by title, abbreviation, or content
Team sharing | No | Yes, with permissions, admin controls, real-time updates
Cross-platform | macOS only | Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, Android
Usage analytics | No | Yes, individual and organization-wide
Spelling correction | Not built-in | Yes, multiple languages

Keyboard Maestro handles text expansion fine if you have a handful of abbreviations and already own the app. TextExpander is for someone with hundreds of Snippets across multiple platforms, fill-in forms, or a team sharing templates.

Creating new text expansions in Keyboard Maestro means opening the macro editor, creating a new macro, adding a typed string trigger, and setting up an Insert Text action. Four steps before you’ve typed a single character of content. In TextExpander, you highlight text, press a shortcut, name your Snippet, and assign an abbreviation. That friction gap matters when you create Snippets regularly.

App-specific behavior also differs. Keyboard Maestro’s typed string triggers simulate keystrokes, so some apps handle expansion differently depending on how they process input. Users report needing micro-delays in apps like VS Code where the trigger fires before the app accepts the inserted text. TextExpander handles these edge cases without per-app tuning.

What Keyboard Maestro does that TextExpander does not

This section is long because Keyboard Maestro covers a lot of ground outside text expansion.

App automation. Keyboard Maestro can launch apps, select menu items, click buttons, and navigate interface elements programmatically. Build a macro that opens a specific spreadsheet in Numbers, selects a cell range, copies the data, switches to Mail, creates a new message, pastes the data, and sends it. Try doing that with a text expander.

Window management. Move, resize, tile, minimize, or maximize windows with macros or hot keys. Position windows to specific screen coordinates across multiple displays. The Application Switcher and Window Switcher give you quick visual navigation between open windows.

Then there’s the conditional logic engine. This is where Keyboard Maestro starts feeling less like a utility and more like a visual programming language. If/then/else branching, while loops, repeat actions, try/catch error handling, and variable manipulation let a single macro check the frontmost app, read a variable, query the clipboard contents, and take different actions depending on what it finds.

Clipboard history: Every piece of text, image, or file path you copy goes into a searchable history. Mark entries as favorites. Password-like entries get automatically obscured.

System control: Adjust volume, toggle Bluetooth, change display brightness, connect to VPN, mount network drives, eject disks, and control system settings through macros.

Web automation is another big piece. Fill out forms, click links, extract data from pages, and download files through browser integration. Scrape a web page and pipe the results into a spreadsheet without touching the browser yourself.

None of this exists in TextExpander. By design. Different tools, different job.

What TextExpander does that Keyboard Maestro does not

Team Snippet sharing is the biggest gap. An organization maintains approved response templates, onboarding messages, legal disclaimers, and medical documentation standards in shared Snippet groups. When compliance updates a template, every team member sees the change immediately. Permission controls determine who can view, edit, or manage each group. Keyboard Maestro has nothing comparable.

Cross-platform availability is the second gap. Keyboard Maestro is Mac-only. TextExpander works on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, and Android. A sales rep who drafts emails on a MacBook, responds to Slack messages on a Windows desktop, and handles urgent requests from an iPhone has the same Snippet library everywhere. Keyboard Maestro macros cannot leave the Mac.

Fill-in fields with forms. TextExpander Snippets present a fill-in form with dropdowns, multi-line text areas, single-line inputs, date pickers, and optional sections before expansion. Keyboard Maestro has a “Prompt for User Input” action that can collect variable data, but wiring it into a text expansion workflow requires building a multi-step macro. In TextExpander, the form is part of the Snippet itself.

TextExpander also offers Snippet search: press a shortcut and search your entire library by title, abbreviation, or content. Insert any result without remembering its abbreviation. Usage analytics show individuals how much time they save and show organizations which Snippet groups drive the most value.

Compliance certifications matter for regulated industries. SOC 2, SOC 3, HIPAA BAAs, AES-256 encryption, SSO through Okta or Azure, and SCIM user provisioning are TextExpander features that Keyboard Maestro does not offer. An IT department deploying a text expansion tool across a healthcare or enterprise organization needs these certifications before approving a vendor.

Using both together

If you spend your days on a Mac, you’ve probably met someone who runs both. Common power user setup because the two tools barely overlap in daily practice.

Keyboard Maestro handles automation, app control, window management, and multi-step workflows. TextExpander handles all text expansion. Clean split.

To avoid interference, make sure only one app handles typed string expansion. Either disable typed string triggers in Keyboard Maestro for text expansion macros, or avoid abbreviations in TextExpander that match any Keyboard Maestro typed string triggers. Most users let TextExpander own all abbreviation-triggered expansion and keep Keyboard Maestro on hot key, app-based, and schedule-based triggers.

Both apps request Accessibility permissions in macOS. Both can hold them simultaneously without issues. I’ve run this setup for years without a single conflict.

A few examples:

Keyboard Maestro macro opens a new email in your preferred app and positions the cursor in the body. TextExpander Snippet fills in the template with fill-in fields for the recipient’s name and project details.

Keyboard Maestro watches for a specific app to launch and rearranges your windows. TextExpander provides the canned responses and message templates you use inside that app.

Keyboard Maestro runs a shell script that pulls data from an API. TextExpander Snippets format your written analysis with consistent structure and terminology.

Combined cost: $36 one-time for Keyboard Maestro plus $4.16/month for TextExpander Individual. For a Mac power user, that covers automation and text expansion in two tools that save hours every week.

Pricing comparison

Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander use different pricing models. Direct comparison is less straightforward than it looks.

Keyboard Maestro pricing

Keyboard Maestro 11 is a one-time purchase:

New license: $36 for one user on up to five Macs

Upgrade from version 10 or earlier, purchased before March 2023: $25

Upgrade from version 10, purchased after March 2023: Free

No subscription. No annual renewal. You pay once and own version 11 indefinitely. Future major versions may require a paid upgrade, but Stairways Software has historically offered reasonable upgrade pricing and generous free-upgrade windows.

TextExpander pricing

TextExpander charges per user per month, billed annually:

Individual: $4.16/month billed annually ($49.92/year) for a single user across all platforms

Business: $10.41/month per user billed annually for teams needing shared Snippets, admin controls, and permission management

Growth: $13.54/month per user billed annually adding SSO, SCIM, unlimited analytics, and consolidated billing

Enterprise: Custom pricing with training, onboarding, and invoiced billing

Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial requiring no credit card. Start your free trial

Which is the better value?

Depends on what you need. If you want a Mac automation suite and text expansion is a bonus, Keyboard Maestro at $36 one-time is hard to beat. It does the work of five or six separate utilities.

If you need text expansion with fill-in fields, cross-platform access, or team sharing, TextExpander’s subscription pays for itself fast. Virta Health’s 69,000 hours saved in one year across 359 users works out to roughly 192 hours per person annually. At even a modest hourly rate, that return dwarfs the subscription cost.

For teams, TextExpander is the only option. Keyboard Maestro has no team management, no shared macro libraries with permissions, and no way to push updates across an organization. TextExpander’s Business and Growth plans handle that use case.

Other Mac text expansion options exist if neither tool fits. Typinator and aText are Mac-focused alternatives at lower price points, while Alfred includes a Snippet feature alongside its launcher. We’ve compared TextExpander with each separately.

Frequently asked questions

Can Keyboard Maestro replace TextExpander?

For a solo Mac user with a small number of text expansions, yes. Keyboard Maestro’s typed string triggers handle abbreviation-to-text replacement, date tokens, clipboard insertion, and case-adaptive output. Dr. Drang, a well-known Mac automation blogger, has written about switching between the two tools and making Keyboard Maestro work for text expansion through custom AppleScript macros. If you already own Keyboard Maestro and your expansion needs are modest, it can cover the job. TextExpander’s fill-in fields, cross-platform access, team sharing, Snippet search, and fast Snippet creation workflow have no equivalent in Keyboard Maestro.

If you migrate, expect a manual process. There’s no automated export-import path between the two apps. You recreate each Snippet as a Keyboard Maestro macro with a typed string trigger and an Insert Text action. Users who have documented the process report it takes roughly an hour for a library of around 100 text-only Snippets. Snippets that use fill-in fields, nested references, or cross-platform access need reworking or won’t carry over.

Do Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander conflict on Mac?

No. Both apps use macOS Accessibility permissions, and both can hold them at the same time without performance issues or interference. The only potential conflict: identical abbreviations in both apps. Let one app own all typed string expansion. Most users who run both assign text expansion to TextExpander and keep Keyboard Maestro on hot key and app-based triggers.

Which should I buy first?

Start with the problem you’re trying to solve. If you type the same text repeatedly and want to stop, try TextExpander first. The 30-day free trial costs nothing, and you’ll know within a week whether text expansion fits your workflow. If you want to automate Mac tasks like window management, app control, or multi-step workflows, start with Keyboard Maestro. If you discover you need both, the combined cost is reasonable.

Is Keyboard Maestro hard to learn?

Harder than TextExpander. Keyboard Maestro presents an editor with hundreds of possible actions, conditional logic, variables, and scripting options. The community forum and wiki are excellent resources, and the macro library has hundreds of pre-built examples. But the initial learning curve is steep compared to TextExpander’s “create Snippet, assign abbreviation, done” workflow. Think of it as the difference between learning a spreadsheet app and learning a programming language.

Does Keyboard Maestro work on Windows or iOS?

No. Keyboard Maestro is macOS-only. No Windows version, no iOS app, no browser extension. Your macros exist on your Mac and nowhere else. If you work across platforms, TextExpander is the text expansion tool that follows you between Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, and Android.

Related resources

What are text Snippets? An introduction to text expansion and how it saves time

TextExpander features for a full breakdown of fill-in fields, sharing, and cross-platform support

TextExpander for teams to see how shared Snippet libraries work

TextExpander security and compliance for SOC 2, HIPAA, and encryption details

TextExpander pricing for current plans

Alfred vs TextExpander for a comparison with another Mac productivity tool

PhraseExpress vs TextExpander for a cross-platform text expander comparison

Typinator vs TextExpander for a Mac-focused text expander comparison

aText vs TextExpander for a budget text expander comparison

Espanso vs TextExpander for an open-source text expander comparison

Best macro software for a broader look at automation tools including Keyboard Maestro

TextExpander for healthcare

TextExpander for enterprise

Ready to see how TextExpander fits your workflow? Start a free 30-day trial with no credit card required.