Best Free Menu Bar Apps for Mac

If you want CPU, RAM, GPU, network throughput, fan speed, and battery health in your menu bar, Stats does all of it and does it without a subscription. It's the de facto open-source replacement for iStat Menus, the long-running paid system monitor that recently moved to subscription pricing.

Stats is configurable to a fault. You can pick which metrics show, what order they appear in, what color the graphs are, and how often they refresh. The downside of all that flexibility is a settings panel with twelve tabs. Set it once, forget it, and live with the result.

Get it from github.com/exelban/stats or via Homebrew with brew install --cask stats.

The catch: heavy compared to single-purpose monitors. If you only want one number in your menu bar, this is overkill.

Maccy is the open-source clipboard manager that most Mac developers eventually try. It lives in the menu bar, remembers what you've copied, and lets you search and paste with a keyboard shortcut. The interface is plain and that's the point.

The friction with Maccy is that it's deliberately simple. It does clipboard history and that's it. No image previews in the popup, no rich-text formatting options, no syncing across devices, no pinned snippets unless you count favorites. If you want any of those, you're paying for something else. If you just want ⌘⇧C to bring up your last fifty copies, Maccy is the answer.

Available at maccy.app, on the Mac App Store, or via Homebrew. Read more in our Maccy alternatives roundup.

The catch: spartan by design. Paste images? Sync to iCloud? Look elsewhere.

If your menu bar has gotten crowded, Hidden Bar tucks the icons you don't need to see all the time behind a small chevron. Click the chevron to reveal them. The configuration is drag-and-drop: hold ⌘, drag the icons you want hidden behind the divider, and that's it.

It's a near-perfect solution if all you want is to hide things. It's a little weaker than its paid competitors at preserving order across reboots and at handling the notch on newer MacBooks. For more sophisticated menu bar management, separators, clicking through to hidden apps without unhiding, hiding only when not connected to power, see the Bartender alternatives roundup.

The catch: bare-bones. Reorder logic gets confused by apps that re-add their icon on launch.

macOS shows the day, hour, and minute in the menu bar by default but skips the actual calendar grid. Itsycal sits next to the system clock and pops up a tiny month view when you click it. Today is highlighted, your iCloud and Google calendars show as colored dots, and double-clicking a date opens it in Calendar.app.

Mogens Mogens (yes, that's the developer's name) has maintained Itsycal for over a decade. It updates when macOS breaks something, which is rare, and otherwise gets out of the way. There's an optional donation link if you want to support continued maintenance.

From mowglii.com/itsycal.

The catch: doesn't replace Calendar.app. If you want a full calendar in your menu bar, this isn't it.

Rectangle is the open-source descendant of Spectacle, the window manager that defined Mac keyboard-driven window snapping for a generation. It lives in the menu bar (you can hide the icon) and gives you keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to halves, quarters, thirds, and edges of the screen.

There is a paid Rectangle Pro that adds advanced features like snap areas, custom shortcuts per app, and todo-style window stash. The free Rectangle covers the 90% case completely. Most people never need to upgrade.

From rectangleapp.com or via Homebrew.

The catch: macOS already has Stage Manager and built-in window tiling in 14.0+. If you like those, Rectangle is redundant. Most people don't.

The standard ⌘Tab on macOS shows app icons but not windows. If you have three Safari windows open across two desktops, you cannot pick one of them with ⌘Tab. AltTab fixes this. It's modeled after the Windows Alt+Tab behavior, complete with thumbnail previews of every open window.

It runs from the menu bar (icon optional), is configurable enough to mimic Windows, GNOME, or KDE behavior, and is one of those tools that becomes invisible after a week. Switchers from Windows almost always install this within their first month on a Mac.

From alt-tab-macos.netlify.app.

The catch: changes a deep system behavior. If you ever need to do Mac support for someone else, the muscle memory shift can be jarring.

The original Caffeine app went paid and confusing years ago. KeepingYouAwake is the open-source replacement that does exactly what Caffeine did: click the menu bar icon to keep your Mac from sleeping. Click it again to let it sleep. There's a setting for a duration timer and that's about it.

This app has been in active maintenance since 2014. It's small, it works, and it stays out of the way. If you want fancier controls (auto-activate when on power, auto-deactivate when battery is low, integration with calendar events) the paid Lungo by Sindre Sorhus is the upgrade.

From keepingyouawake.app.

The catch: no scheduling, no battery awareness. It's a button.

AppCleaner technically isn't a menu bar app by default, but turn on its "SmartDelete" feature and it parks itself in the menu bar to detect when you drag an app to the Trash and offer to clean up the leftover support files, preferences, and caches. macOS does not do this for you.

It's been free, the same, and reliable for over a decade. The download lives on a developer website that hasn't changed since 2009 (literally, the design has not been updated). The app itself works fine on every macOS version.

From freemacsoft.net/appcleaner.

The catch: occasionally over-aggressive. Always review the file list before deleting.

The notch on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros is divisive. Top Notch hides it. It draws a black band across the top of the menu bar so the notch blends in, gives you the option to hide the menu bar accent on full-screen apps, and otherwise stays out of the way.

Made by Pixelmator team alumnus Aleksandar Vacić. Free, no upsell, no nag screens. If you've adapted to the notch, you don't need this. If you actively dislike looking at it, it's a one-click fix.

From topnotch.app.

The catch: cosmetic. Doesn't actually change anything functional.

The default battery indicator on macOS shows a percentage, an icon, and a "time remaining" estimate that Apple removed years ago for being inaccurate. Battery (the app, by Julien Vermette and contributors) puts a more readable number in the menu bar and adds optional warnings when battery health drops below a threshold or when you've left it on the charger continuously.

It also shows the battery state of connected accessories, AirPods, Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, which macOS still does not expose anywhere convenient. If you're a heavy laptop user this one earns its menu bar slot.

From github.com/julienvermet/battery.

The catch: limited customization compared to Stats, which also covers battery.