TextExpander is compatible with Windows, macOS, and iOS, while featuring several handy automation perks. Just like most software of its kind, it has classic phrase expanding powers, but extra features also boost the user experience. For example, TextExpander embraces HTML, CSS, and even emojis as elements you might want to create shortcuts for. 5,605 likes 12 talking about this. TextExpander lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a repository of emails, boilerplate and other content, as you type – using a quick.

Elsewhere on this site, I covered a variety of different hacks and tricks you can implement using a tool like Textexpander. Textexpander is one of many text replacement tools available on the web. They all have varying capabilities and pricing levels, but they all do basically the same thing; they allow you to type a short word or key-phrase and have it automatically replaced with a full block of text.

At the most basic level you have an autocorrect feature that capitalizes words and acronyms for you. Higher tier usage allows you to use common commands to add symbols you’d otherwise need to look up and copy-paste into a document. Many people also use preconfigured text blocks to insert things like your name, address, and phone number, turning a full NAP block into something as simple as typing [nap] and hitting Enter.

Textexpander is a good app, but it’s not the right choice for everyone and every purpose. That’s why I’ve put together this list; fifteen different options for text expansion apps you can use to put those clever hacks into use.

15. Phrase Express

Phrase Express is one of the more robust entries on this list, with a ton of features that make it great for personal and for business use. In addition to a huge array of snippets, you can sync snippets across platforms and even share them with team members. One of their more clever features is the ability to translate entire phrase trees into different languages for cross-language work.

In addition to a free limited version, they have three versions licensed for commercial use with escalating ranges of features. Pricing ranges from about $50 to about $200, one-time fees for lifetime licenses, with additional costs for “maintenance”, which includes program updates.

14. Auto Hotkey

Auto Hotkey is one of the more popular text expanders for Windows. Unlike Phrase Express, it is not cross-platform, which is unfortunate, because it’s extremely powerful. AHK is open-source and is basically a free scripting language that can do, well, basically anything. I’ve seen people use it for simple text expansion and replacement, and I’ve seen people use it for automating entire tasks to the press of a button.

While it’s free and extremely light-weight, AHK is also a scripting language, which means you need to actually learn the basics of how to use it for scripting. If you’re not a code junky and just want something you can configure in a few seconds, this probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’ve literally ever written a line of code before, you can figure out AHK pretty quickly. I highly recommend that you give it a try if you can.

13. FastKeys

Auto Hotkey is a very powerful scripting language, but it’s also tricky to use if you’re not script-savvy. Fortunately, since it’s open-source, other developers are able to build their own platform using it as a base. That’s what FastKeys is; it’s essentially a GUI for AHK. It is, specifically, built to make the text expansion features of AHK much more accessible. You can still create complex macros and scripts that include mouse movement and other advanced features, it’s just all made a little easier.

Of course, this accessibility comes at a price. Open source software is typically free, but the apps built on top of it don’t have to be, and this is no exception. FastKeys is a $19 license to bring you all of the benefits of AHK with none of the need to learn scripting.

12. Typinator

Typinator is a relatively cheap, but not free, text expander program. One of its primary benefits is that it comes with a lot of basic autocorrect features built-in already, so you don’t need to set up snippets for individual typos and basic mistakes. Anything from double capitals, to sentence capitalization, to basic HTML works out of the box.

Typinator is a little bloated with some additional features you don’t really need in a text expander, which is a little unfortunate and makes the app a bit larger than it really needs to be. For example, it can do currency and unit conversions and basic math, in case you really need math done without tabbing over to a calculator. Overall, it’s still pretty good, though.

11. Alfred

Alfred is a text expander that has a free version and a paid Powerpack full of additional features for a one-time license fee. It’s also limited to Mac, because it has a lot of additional features beyond text expansion. It works as everything from a launchpad for your programs to a remote control that syncs via your phone. It includes everything from app search, web search, and a calculator to remote commands, clipboard history, and workflows.

Calling Alfred a text expander is dramatically downplaying its features. It’s way, way overkill if all you want is a text expander, but if you can make heavy use of the advanced features and remote access it gives you, it’s well worth the relatively small license fee.

10. Auto Text Expander for Chrome

This is a free Google Chrome extension that handles text expansion for you within your browser. It’s very simple, it doesn’t cost you money, and it handles both regular text and rich text. It has some more advanced features, including custom cursor placement, expansion inside sub-windows of Chrome like the address bar, and macros that can paste whatever is on your clipboard currently.

On the other hand, since this is a Chrome extension, it’s only available in Chrome. This means you can’t use it in a word processing app unless you’re using a web app, you can’t use it in other browsers, and it won’t work within business apps. That might be perfect for you, or it might be a deal-breaking limitation, that’s up to you.

9. Phrase Expander

Not to be confused with Phrase Express, Phrase Expander is a Windows app that is aimed at a specific professional niche. Specifically, this app is aimed at doctors and medical professionals. What this means is that it has a built-in dictionary of medical terms, which are often complex words with obscure Greek roots that can be a pain to have to type out repeatedly, and can cause issues in medical software if they’re typed in incorrectly.

In addition to the dictionary, it includes a template engine that allows you to customize the fields you want added to a notes document, including fields for symptoms and chief complaints. It’s all very well put together, if you’re in one of the industries that wants it. Otherwise, it’s probably not for you.

8. Breevy

Breevy is an odd app. It looks simple when you’re glancing at its website, and in fact the website makes it look like one of those old Windows XP programs with website design that hasn’t been updated since 1995. Under the hood, though, it’s actually a surprisingly deep text expander. It has a good basic interface and allows you to import snippet data from other text expanders, or even sync to the same library to use different expanders in different places.

If the website design turns you off, don’t worry too much. They could probably attract a lot more attention with a modern design, but they don’t need to; they have people like me writing articles like this to include them when we find them. Breevy costs $35 as a one-time fee to use it forever.

7. FastFox

Not related to Firefox in any way, FastFox is a text expander that includes keyboard shortcuts and macro support. It’s available on both PC and Mac. The app works a little differently under the hood than other text expanders, working directly with text rather than sending keystrokes rapidly to replace what you had typed, but in practice that difference is minimal.

What sets FastFox apart? Primarily, they have a pseudo-learning feature that will monitor your typing behavior and can suggest snippets as you write. Over time, you can build up a library of custom snippets based on the most common phrases and corrections you need to make, dramatically speeding up your writing.

Unfortunately, FastFox is a little expensive for the limitations it has, including a lack of custom cursor placement, delimiters, and some other advanced features. It’s $70 for a license.

6. ActiveWords

At first glance, I almost mistook this app’s website for a parked domain. They don’t really go all-in on their homepage design. Unfortunately, that lack of emphasis on design carries through in their app as a whole. They are a sort of “engineer’s solution” to text expansion.

What they have is powerful, and it works everywhere. It has custom scripts and complex commands, can you can do everything from launch programs to sending emails with it. You just have to take a while familiarizing yourself with the app and how it works. It’s obtuse, it’s not very user friendly, and it doesn’t spoon-feed you its advanced features. If you can’t learn it through use, you’re going to have a hard time with it. It also has an annual fee rather than a one-time license, so it will be more expensive over time.

5. aText

This is another Mac-based text expander with a bunch of advanced features you can make good use of as you go. It works with cloud-based syncing for snippets, so it’s cross-device. It has automatic corrections for capitalization and spelling, including double capitals. You can add images and formatted text in any Mac program you’re using. One of the more useful features is actually just the fact that it works in virtual machines.

It may not have all of the most robust features of an automation engine, and it may not have the best developed user interface, but it’s perfectly serviceable for the price, which is a whopping $5. Give it a try and see what you think.

4. TypeIt4Me

TypeIt4Me claims to be “the original” text expander for Mac, which I’m not sure is entirely true, but I don’t know enough about their history to disprove it either. It does standard text expansion, phrase replacement, contact information, and even pictures. You can set up your snippets with point and click menus, which works well enough. It’s only available for Mac and, while it has a free trial, does require a license to keep forever. It’s a mere $20, so it’s not a bad fee, but it’s not free.

One added bonus of TypeIt4Me is that they have a Touch version for iOS devices. You can find it available on the app store here.

3. canSnippet

CanSnippet is intended to be an assistant for coders looking to save snippets of code they use frequently. Whether for reference or repetition, having that code available can be quite handy. Of course, under the hood it’s still a service that uses simple keyboard shortcuts to replace short phrases with snippets. One of the more useful features is simply the ability to highlight text or code and save it as a snippet directly, instead of having to copy and paste a snippet into your editor.

CanSnippet is free for up to 10 snippets, which isn’t very much. The $10 version adds more features, including language recognition, syntax coloring, dark themes, and customization of keyboard shortcuts, all of which are quite useful.

2. Keyboard Maestro

Keyboard Maestro is one of the more robust Mac text expanders. In addition to text expansion, it has help documentation, a machine learning and macro production set, a MIDI support system, touch bar support, the ability to send SMS and iMessages, and a whole lot more.

Seriously, their feature list is huge. Obviously it’s overkill if all you need is a text expander, but if you want something more dev-oriented than Alfred but with similar capabilities, this is a great choice.

1. Emailmate

One of the most common use cases for text expansion is simply crafting unique emails based on common phrases and information, without needing to use templates. Emailmate is a powerful tool that allows you to do just that. Think of it like a cross between a text expander and a template engine, with many of the best features of both. I highly recommend you try it out.

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1. FastFox installed, without warning, some bloatware, which fortunately was uninstalled when I uninstalled the main program That would have been a deal-killer all by itself. Also, it does not support importing autocorrects from MS Office. I have only 4000 or so of those.

There are a million and one different productivity hacks you can incorporate into your lifestyle and your workflow. There are so many options out there, it comes down to personal preference what you want to learn and adapt to, and what tools work best with your unique situation.

One such set of tools is the text expander, autofill, or autocomplete style tool. It’s like shorthand, except instead of a series of nigh-indecipherable scribbles, you type abbreviations or short words and a program automatically expands them into full words. You can set them up and customize them as much as you want.

Of course, we live in the 21^st century, where capitalism has spurred on an endless array of alternatives as everyone tries to gain their own market share, and as such, there are a lot of different options for everything, including text expanders. In this case, I’ll be talking about three options specifically: TextExpander, Typinator, and Alfred.

What can you do with text expander apps? Basically, you just plug in snippets and have them replaced with full, pre-configured information. You could set it up so typing in “addr” inserts your full business address, typing in “tdate” inserts today’s date in a specific format, and “gbye” adds in a standard closing sentence and goodbye to a message.

Now, you might be thinking you can already do that, and you can! Most office programs, for example, have autocompletes added to them already. Email has templates that can insert those kinds of expanded features, and there are often plugins that can do the same thing.

The difference is, using a text expander app is system-wide. You get your “addr” in every app, be it a word processor, a web browser, an email client, or a custom app with no API or integrations available. Since it’s system-level, it works in anything you’re running on your system.

It might not seem like a lot, to save you the effort of typing a few extra words. What does it save you, 10-15 seconds? Well, once you set it up for 500 different phrases you use every day, dozens or hundreds of times a day, you quickly build up into hours saved. Stretch that over the course of years and you’ll find yourself with entire days of extra productivity on a monthly basis.

Let’s take a look at three of the most popular text expander apps.

TextExpander

Website: https://textexpander.com/

Available Platforms: Windows 7/8/10, Mac OS10.11-10.14, Google Chrome, iOS9+.

Pricing: Free for 30 days. Buying the app now, you can get it for $3.33 monthly for the Life Hacker plan, or $7.96 per month per user for the Team version. Upgrading from an older version costs either $1.66 per month or $3.98 per user per month respectively. Buying a stand-alone non-subscription version costs $45 for the Mac version or $5 for the iOS version. No stand-alone version is available for Windows platforms.

Features: TextExpander was initially created with personal use in mind, but it has since expanded to be a business and team-focused app. It works with basically any field on a computer where you input text. The fact that it is now a subscription service is very convenient: your snippets are stored on the cloud, so they are synced across devices and linked to your TextExpander account. Snippets can be shared with others, and you can set up an Organization to sync snippets across a team.

This is one major selling point of TextExpander: it’s useful for brand consistency across teams. If you have a brand name that has specific formatting and you want to make sure your team members always type it properly, you can set up those snippets. It is also widely used in Healthcare, minimizing typos for lengthy and complex medical terminology.

Snippets are not limited to just text. Since it’s a simple character replacer, it can replace something as short as “aa” with a huge block of text or code. You can include HTML and URLs, you can include styling and formatting, and more.

TextExpander also has a reminder feature. If you’re typing something that it recognizes as part of an existing snippet, it will remind you that the snippet exists and ask if you want to use it.

Snippets can be nested. You can use one snippet for a block of contact information, and use other snippets in that block for specific elements of contact information, making it easy to change multiple snippets by editing a nested snippet.

Snippets can also be dynamic in some situations. Specifically for dates, you can include date math. A snippet can be “today’s date + one week”, using plus or minus specific amounts of time, making scheduling easier.

There are also a variety of additional features for programmers. It works with HTML, CSS, accented words and symbols, and even emojis. You can create code templates and scripts, and can even automatically create shortlinks through TextExpander.

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TextExpander is also available in a number of different languages, including several with non-Latin character sets, like Russian and Japanese.

Overall, TextExpander is a very good app with a ton of robust features, limited only by your imagination and the depth of configuration effort you want to put in. Once you settle in and build up snippets, you can save a nearly uncountable amount of time. Luckily for you, TextExpander also tracks how often snippets are used and the amount of time or effort you saved in using them. Pretty cool, huh?

Typinator

Website: https://www.ergonis.com/products/typinator/

Available Platforms: Mac OSX 10.6 or newer.

Pricing: Typinator does not have a monthly subscription fee. You can buy an individual license for 25 Euros, about $28 USD as of this writing. A single license covers one user and up to two computers. Family licenses allows up to five computers in a private household, but is not acceptable for business usage. There are discounts for bulk licenses if you need more than one. If you have an older version of Typinator, you can pay a cheaper price to update, roughly half price. There are also specialized site licenses for large businesses, with pricing calculated for your needs.

Features: Typinator is a standard text expander program, but it also includes a lot of built-in autocorrect features. Common typos and mistakes are fixed automatically, similar to an autocorrect on a modern mobile device. You can, of course, disable those that aren’t actually typos, such as slightly-misspelled brand names or words you would otherwise want to use. This package of autocorrect changes exist in English, German, and French. This includes errors like ACcidental DOuble CApitals, sentence capitalization, sub and superscripts, and HTML snippets.

Typinator also includes a drag-and-drop import of snippet libraries from other text expander apps, including TextExpander, Textpander, TypeIt4Me, aText, and Spell Catcher. This makes migration from one program to theirs much easier.

Some advanced features are basically form-based composition engines. Typinator can ue a window to ask you for information like a person’s name and title, their interests in categories you’ve et up, and special fields, which will generate a complete email for you. It’s very deep, but also tricky to configure.

Typinator includes several features that I can only describe as feature creep that a few people wanted and no one turned down. For example, you can type a mathematical calculation and it will give you the result in various formats for you to paste in. You can also have it automatically do unit conversions, such as currency, distance, and weight conversions.

TextExpander synces their snippets in the cloud automatically. Typinator does not, but it syncs with Dropbox if you have an account, and can sync your snippets that way. Additionally, Typinator allows you to configure different snippet behavior for different applications. You might configure a snippet to behave one way in an office program and another in an email client, for example.

Also, for those who live their lives in the night, Typinator includes a Dark Mode that works on Mojave and newer OSX versions.

Alfred

Website: https://www.alfredapp.com/

Available Platforms: Mac OSX only.

Text Expander App

Pricing: The basic version is free to download and use forever, with limited features. Advanced features require the Powerpack. Alfred Powerpack is a 23 British Pound (about $30 USD) for a single user license, or 39 pounds for a “mega supporter” license that includes free lifetime upgrades.

Text Expander Extension

Features: I’ll divide up the features based on whether they’re available in the free version or require the Powerpack.

Free features include app search and launching, web searching, and a calculator. You can check spelling and add word definitions to a custom dictionary. You have Mac system commands, including putting your computer to sleep, activating your screensaver, or emptying your trash. You have a quick-look preview for files, and can expand text on the screen to be larger and more visible. Alfred includes usage stats as well.

The Powerpack adds a number of features. One such feature is a history of clipboard usage, allowing you to keep multiple items in your clipboard at once. Snippet expansion is, unfortunately, a Powerpack feature. It also includes workflows and hotkeys to launch apps. You can navigate your file structure and perform actions via keyboard as well.

Text Expander For Windows

Powerpack includes more than just that. You can control your iTunes through it, browse your recently used documents, and customize Alfred’s themes and colors. It links to Email in Powerpack, and it links to 1Password for password management. You get default searching, syncing through Dropbox, and a file buffer too. It can even access the Shell for terminal commands, as well as access to your contacts for quick action.

Overall, Alfred is much more of a command center for a Mac, with incidental snippet expansion as one of a wide variety of features. To further reinforce this perspective, Alfred has an iOS app that acts as a remote control for your Mac, allowing you to do things like issue system commands, launch applications, and open websites remotely.

My Final Verdict

In the realm of text expansion, both Typinator and Text Expander are very powerful tools. Alfred only includes text expansion as a side benefit for all of their other features, and as such is not really in the running as far as I’m concerned. If you want a total control command center application, Alfred is great, but that’s not what I’m reviewing these apps for today.

To me, the choice between Typinator or TextExpander comes down to how much you want to use it as a business productivity tool versus a personal productivity tool.

They both have a comparable list of features for personal use. However, the fact that Typinator is a one-time purchase puts it ahead for me for personal use. Either one of them will work just fine, though.

For business uses and for business consistency, such as when you want to use it for multiple employees in your sales or marketing teams, TextExpander is by far the better option. The very fact that it is now designed to accommodate business-level syncing from the ground up is enough for me. Pricing isn’t bad, though it does stack up for large numbers of users. Still, it’s one of the only cross-platform apps of its kind for business.

What do you think? Have you used one or the other, and do you prefer their advanced features? Do you have any persistent issues with either of them that need to be addressed? I haven’t personally had any problems, but I also haven’t gone super deep into all of the advanced use cases. I’d like to hear what you have to say.

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1. I’m a long time TextExpander user and tested Typinator – it looked quite well and i was really interested until i had to spot that Typinator will not expand into the AlfredApp text input box and was not able to handle my snippets starting with “;” (i think Typinator simply ignore special characters in the beginning). I´ve to amit that i did not do any further investigations – so it might be that there are ways to get around these two issues. But the turn to typinator was not seemless so i decided to stay with TextExpander.

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