Best free menu bar apps for Mac

If you want CPU, memory, network throughput, fan speed, GPU load, sensors, and battery in your menu bar without paying, Stats covers all of it. It is the de facto open-source replacement for iStat Menus, which moved to subscription pricing in 2024. Native Swift, MIT licensed, actively maintained.

Configurable to a fault. The settings panel has twelve tabs and the defaults are reasonable but not ideal. Plan to spend twenty minutes on first setup, then forget about it.

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

The catch: heavier than a single-metric monitor. If you only want one number in your menu bar, see TeenyStat below.

Maccy is the open-source clipboard manager that most Mac developers eventually try. It lives in the menu bar, remembers what you copy, lets you search and paste with a keyboard shortcut. The interface is plain, deliberately so. The author has been clear that Maccy is meant to stay minimal and that has been a feature, not a limitation.

Things Maccy does not try to do: image previews worth speaking of, snippet pinning with separate keyboard shortcuts, app exclusion lists, cross-device sync. If you want any of those, the paid alternatives in the clipboard managers roundup cover them.

Available at maccy.app, on the Mac App Store, or via Homebrew.

The catch: spartan by design. If you copy a lot of images and want to glance at them in history, Maccy will frustrate you.

If your menu bar has gotten crowded, Hidden Bar tucks the icons you do not need to see all the time behind a small chevron. Click the chevron to reveal them. Configuration is drag-and-drop: hold ⌘, drag the icons you want hidden behind the divider, done.

Bare-bones compared to Bartender or Ice. Some icons drift back into view when their app re-adds them on launch. For a free hide-and-show toggle, that is acceptable.

The catch: minimal feature set. If you want notch handling, dynamic show rules, and per-display configurations, see the Bartender alternatives roundup.

The macOS menu bar shows the day, hour, and minute 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, double-click a date to open it in Calendar.app.

Mogens Mogensen has maintained Itsycal for over a decade. It updates when macOS breaks something, which is rare, and otherwise gets out of the way. There is an optional donation link.

From mowglii.com/itsycal.

The catch: not a full calendar replacement. If you want event creation and calendar editing in the menu bar, this is not 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 (the icon is hideable) 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. The free version covers the 90% case completely, and most users never need to upgrade.

From rectangleapp.com or via Homebrew.

The catch: macOS Sequoia and later have built-in window tiling that overlaps with Rectangle's basic features. If the system tiling covers your needs, Rectangle is redundant.

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 is modeled after the Windows Alt+Tab behavior, complete with thumbnail previews of every open window.

Runs from the menu bar (icon optional), configurable enough to mimic Windows, GNOME, or KDE behavior. People who switched to Mac from Windows almost always install this within their first month.

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 is 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 again to let it sleep. There is a duration timer setting, and that is about it.

This app has been in active maintenance since 2014. Small, works, stays out of the way.

From keepingyouawake.app.

The catch: no scheduling, no battery awareness, no calendar integration. It is essentially a button.

AppCleaner technically is not 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.

Free, the same, and reliable for over a decade. The download lives on a developer website that has not been redesigned since 2009. 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- 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, otherwise stays out of the way.

Made by Aleksandar Vacić, formerly of the Pixelmator team. Free, no upsell, no nag screens.

From topnotch.app.

The catch: cosmetic, not functional. Does not change anything you can do, just what you see.

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 open-source app) puts a more readable number in the menu bar and adds optional warnings for battery health changes and continuous-charge habits.

It also surfaces battery state for connected accessories, AirPods, Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, which macOS still does not expose anywhere convenient. Heavy laptop users get measurable value from this one.

Available on GitHub from various maintained forks; check Homebrew or search for "battery menu bar mac open source" for the current canonical project.

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