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Top 10 Free TextExpander Alternatives

Considering a TextExpander alternative? In this post, we have both free and paid TextExpander alternatives that you can try out. We bring you text expander alternatives to select from based on web, desktop and mobile platforms.

Free Auto Text Expander as a TextExpander Alternative

Free Auto Text Expander is a Chrome extension that allows you to define text shortcuts and insert text on various websites.

Pros of Free Auto Text Expander:

  • Works on majority of commonly used websites
  • Privacy focused design is at the core of Free Auto Text Expander. Your data remains with you and your keyboard or browsing history stays safe. And by design the Free Auto Text Expander won’t run on all websites, it only runs when it is activated on a website.
  • Free to use. The product is absolutely free to use.

Cons of Free Auto Text Expander:

  • Free Auto Text Expander has to be manually switched on for all websites. While this is an admirable security feature, it does hinder your ability to frictionlessly carry out your day to day work.
  • Free Auto Text Expander doesn’t work on a range of websites like Facebook.
  • User experience - Free Auto Text Expander comes with an user interface that isn’t very user friendly.
  • Advanced functionality - This TextExpander alternative is very limited to unmodifiable text templates which make it not very helpful for a range of use cases that most users face in their daily workflow.
  • Only available for Google Chrome.

Ratings: This TextExpander alternative is rated at 3.5/5 due its limitations and usability challenges.

Our conclusion: Free Auto Text Expander can be considered as a good TextExpander alternative if you need limited text template support and aren’t planning to use it on websites like Facebook.

Text Blaze as a TextExpander Alternative

Text Blaze is one of the highest rated TextExpander alternatives available on the Chrome store. Apart from supporting templates, Text Blaze has considerably more features that allow users to carry out common and complex text copy-paste and insertion tasks.

Pros of Text Blaze:

  • Automatically starts working on all websites and allows inserting/text expansion on the majority of the websites.
  • Text snippets or templates can have form fields, paragraph fields, checklists, etc that can be dynamically customized as you insert the template. Making it significantly better than a simple static insertion TextExpander alternative.
  • High user satisfaction - Text Blaze has been rated perfect 5 star by its users, which also speaks volumes about the product quality and the usability of the product.

Cons of Text Blaze:

  • The biggest problem with Text Blaze is that the product is only limited to the Chrome store.
  • Pricing - the free version of Text Blaze restricts the number of team members you can keep and the usage of the text templates.

Ratings: A 5/5 Chrome store ratings assure you that Text Blaze is a good Chrome based TextExpander Alternative.

Our conclusion: If your needs are limited to a text expander alternative that works on the Chrome store, Text Blaze can be considered. But, it won’t work for you if you are looking for a product that works on Desktop apps or mobile devices.

Magical As TextExpander Alternative

Magical is a good, free TextExpander alternative that is being used by over 400,000+ users across 14,000 companies. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using Magical as a TextExpander alternative.

Pros of Magical:

  • Free to use without any usage limitations on text templates or message snippets.
  • Allows auto-filling data from an open webpage, a Google sheet or using the transferring feature.
  • You can not only write faster, but also log your data to your CRM, ATS, etc.
  • Customizable form fields are available for you to customize your snippets as you go.

Cons of Magical:

  • The logging features of Magical are still in their beta testing phase and are not available to everyone.
  • Magical doesn’t work well on websites like Google docs, Facebook, etc.
  • Limited to a single platform - Google Chrome store.

Ratings: Magical has a 4.6/5 rating on the Chrome store.

Our conclusion: Overall, Magical is an excellent free TextExpander Alternative to use. It has features like text templates and auto-fill that makes it a highly usable product. Also, it is extremely user friendly for non technical users as well.

aText as a TextExpander Alternative

aText is a text automation app that allows you to create text shortcuts for frequently used text and use them.

Pros of aText:

  • Easy to user interface
  • Allows you to create unlimited text templates and shortcuts to use them
  • Works on both platforms: Mac OSX and Windows

Cons of aText:

  • Outside of creating simpler text templates, no other significant features are present to support writing.
  • Allows only static text templates. You can’t expect to use this app to craft dynamic text templates.
  • It is a desktop only application which reduces it’s capability to operate on certain based websites and web apps is limited.
  • Image copy paste is not supported.

Ratings: There aren’t significant ratings available for us to provide a helpful deduction here.

Our conclusion: aText is a good free alternative to TextExpander if you are looking for a text expander app that allows you to create text shortcuts and use them on a range of desktop apps and certain web apps.

PhraseExpress as a Free TextExpander Alternative

PhraseExpress is a desktop based text expander alternative. On the surface it might appear to be similar to aText, it brings considerably more features to the table and is a bit more advanced.

Pros of PhraseExpress:

  • Available for Mac OSX, iPad, iPhone and Windows platforms.
  • Allows you to create text templates that you can use across most desktop apps and certain web apps.
  • Supports rich media types like images, signature templates, etc and text formatting.
  • Supports clipboard access that allows your text shortcuts to access clipboard content that you can use while typing.
  • Macro supported.
  • Dynamic forms that users can use while inserting a text template.

Cons of PhraseExpress:

  • PhraseExpress doesn’t have a team feature that allows you to share your text templates with your team or organization.
  • No integration features available.

Ratings: PhraseExpress has been rated 3.5/5 on the Apple store. Our conclusion: PhraseExpress is not a very good choice if you are looking for a TextExpander alternative

Espanso as a Free TextExpander Alternative

Espanso is the only cross platform text expander platform that runs on all major operating systems. It is an open source text expander alternative that is very robust and works predictably.

Pros of Espanso:

  • Espanso is completely free to use.
  • Espanso works on all major platforms.
  • Espanso works on most desktop apps and web apps.

Cons of Espanso:

  • While Espanso is an unbelievable engineering marvel, it fails to be user friendly. It is incredibly hard for non-technical users to use it. You need to be a programmer to be able to use Espanso.
  • No Chrome extension is available.

Ratings: Espanso has no public ratings available.

Our conclusion: Espanso is a pretty great alternative to text expander if you are tech savvy and are a programmer. It works on pretty much most platforms and is supported by a very large community of open source developers.

KeySmith as a TextExpander Alternative

KeySmith is a text expansion + macro automation app for Mac OSX. It allows you to record your mouse/keyboard actions and replicate them in addition to inserting text.

Pros of using KeySmith

  • Macro support available.
  • Text expansion available.
  • Free version is available.

Cons of using KeySmith:

  • No advanced features for text automation.
  • Free version only allows up to 5 macros.
  • No integration features are available.

Ratings: No publicly available ratings.

Our conclusion: KeySmith is a great product for creating macros to automate certain tasks. But, KeySmith falls short when it comes to supporting text automation and that’s why it isn’t the best alternative for TextExpander.

So far, we have looked into web or desktop based text expander alternatives, but here’s another category that’s worth a mention here - mobile app based alternatives for TextExpander. So, next on our list is a mobile based text expander.

TextExpand as a TextExpander Alternative

TextExpand is an Android based TextExpander alternative that allows you to create text shortcuts and templates and insert them using a mobile app on the Android platform. With more than 500,000+ installs, it is a popular Android based alternative to TextExpander when it comes to Android platform.

Pros of TextExpand:

  • Easy to use text expander alternative.
  • Supports text expansion.

Cons of TextExpand:

  • Considerable bugs.
  • Limited features and functionality of text expansion.

Ratings: TextExpand has an overall rating of 4.2/5 on the Play store.

Our conclusion: TextExpand is a good TextExpander alternative for Android.

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