Best Mac Apps 2026: 20 Tools Worth Installing on a New MacBook

Why you want it. Sowiks is a screenshot and screen recording tool for people who share visual context all day and do not want every capture to become another file on the desktop. The default Mac screenshot workflow is always the same: capture lands as a file, you find it, rename it, compress it, attach it to an email, and repeat that twenty times a day. Sowiks cuts the chain at the start. You take a capture, mark it up with an arrow or blur, and get a ready-to-share link. It goes into Slack, a task tracker, or email without an attachment. Downloads stays clean, and the person on the other end sees the context immediately.

What it does. Sowiks includes thirteen annotation tools: arrows, text, shapes, highlighting, and blur for sensitive data. It captures a region, window, full screen, scrolling content, and text via OCR. Screen recording exports to video or GIF, which is useful when a bug is easier to show than describe. It also adds automatic compression, cloud collections, and, for sensitive material, password-protected links with expiration dates.

Pricing. Free for unlimited local screenshots and the full editor. Solo is $14.99 one-time, with no subscription: it adds cloud storage, persistent links, and screen recording. Visit Sowiks.

Why you want it. Besaved is a save-it-for-later hub that collects references, links, code snippets, images, files, and notes in one place, then auto-sorts them so the pile stays searchable. Normally a reference, a bit of code, a color palette, an article, or a link from a chat ends up split between Notes, browser bookmarks, and messages to yourself, and after a month finding the one thing you need is guesswork. Besaved recognizes what you saved and applies smart rules to classify it. For a marketer or designer collecting dozens of small discoveries every day, that is the difference between an archive and a junk drawer.

What it does. Separate spaces keep work, side projects, and personal inspiration from bleeding into one another. Besaved saves text, images, files, voice notes, and photos, while OCR pulls text out of images, so a screenshot can be found by a word that appears inside it. You also get tags, filters, fast search, checkboxes, and color highlights. Real-time sync works across Mac, web, and phone, and you can invite teammates into a space.

Pricing. Free. Native app, 6.9 MB, requires macOS 14 or later. Visit Besaved.

Why you want it. Clop is a background media compressor that makes screenshots and screen recordings small enough to share without manually exporting anything. A 40-second screen recording can easily weigh 60 MB, which Slack will either reject or spend a minute uploading. Clop fixes that in the background: as soon as you copy an image or stop recording, it compresses the file. When you paste, you paste the lighter version. MaxiApple cites the practical result: screen recordings send roughly ten times faster.

What it does. Quality loss is minimal or zero because Clop uses pngquant and mozjpeg under the hood, not crude recompression. It works with PNG, JPEG, HEIC, GIF, MP4, MOV, and PDF. It uses the hardware Media Engine in Apple Silicon chips, so video compression does not eat your CPU. You can also disable it for specific apps.

Pricing. Free for up to five files per session. Pro is around 9,90 €.

Why you want it. Raycast is a Spotlight alternative and app launcher that turns common Mac actions into keyboard commands. Spotlight finds files. Raycast does everything else: launches apps, calculates, converts currency, manages windows, stores clipboard history, expands snippets, and talks to the APIs of your work tools. The practical result is that you stop switching between apps with the mouse. MacGeneration recommends replacing Spotlight outright and assigning Raycast to the same Cmd+Space shortcut. After a week, your hand adapts.

What it does. Raycast has thousands of community extensions for Linear, GitHub, Jira, Notion, translators, calculators, and more. The free version covers 30 days of clipboard history, snippets, quicklinks, and window management. Mac Life gives the honest warning: the first few days have a real learning curve because the app does nothing until you learn how to ask it.

Pricing. Free. Pro starts at $8 per month and adds AI, sync, and unlimited history. The interface is English-only.

Why you want it. Alfred is a Mac launcher that overlaps with Raycast, but its real strength is heavy automation through Workflows. These are custom chains of actions triggered by a word: collect links and send them to a spreadsheet, rename a batch of files, or compose an email from a template. You build them in a visual editor without code, or download ready-made ones. heise describes Alfred as a launcher that can be extended with almost anything, which is still the most accurate summary.

What it does. The key difference from Raycast is one-time purchase vs subscription, which is decisive for many users. Alfred also has no built-in AI layer and does not push your data into the cloud, so some users stay with it deliberately for privacy reasons.

Pricing. The base app is free. Powerpack is a one-time purchase at around 26 €, with a more expensive lifetime license. English-only.

Why you want it. PopClip is a contextual menu for selected text, and it saves time every time you copy, search, translate, or send text somewhere else. Select text and a row of actions appears directly above it: translate, search Google, save to notes, open a link, calculate an expression, or send it to AI. The key point is that the menu is not static. MacPlus notes that PopClip recognizes the type of selection, such as text, address, phone number, or link, and the type of app you are in, then shows only relevant actions. You are not hunting for the right button among twenty.

What it does. PopClip has hundreds of free extensions in a catalog where each one is described clearly, so you can see exactly what you are installing. Unlike most of the category, PopClip is fully localized, including in French.

Pricing. Paid, one-time purchase. A trial is available.

Why you want it. Supercharge is a bundle of small system tweaks that fixes the everyday annoyances macOS keeps leaving in place. Accidentally hit Cmd+Q and close a browser with twenty tabs? Supercharge lets you remap quit to another shortcut. Desktop switching feels slow because of animation? Turn it off. Finder gets “Move to,” AirDrop, and image dimensions in the context menu. Caps Lock can become a Hyper key, a single key that enables all four modifiers and opens an entire new layer of shortcuts.

What it does. The app is light and behaves as if it belongs in the system, which is why Reddit users describe it as one utility that replaces five smaller ones.

Pricing. $6 lifetime. Requires macOS 15.4 or newer.

Why you want it. Thaw is a free open-source menu bar manager for MacBooks where the menu bar fills up faster than it should. Ten icons are enough for some to disappear behind the notch forever. Thaw splits items into three groups: visible, hidden, and always hidden. It then reveals the ones you need with a click or keyboard shortcut.

What it does. This is where many roundups are out of date, so the short version matters. For years, the standard was the paid app Bartender. Then the free open-source Ice became the community answer, but its development stopped, while Bartender 6 moved to a new owner, which the community received badly. The current 2026 answer is Thaw, a fork of Ice by developer stonerl: it imports Ice settings, adds item search, profiles, and icon drag-and-drop. It has more than 6 700 GitHub stars and active releases, making it one of the best Mac menu bar apps right now.

Pricing. Free, open source. German localization is available.

Why you want it. Rectangle is a window manager that lets you snap and resize Mac windows with keyboard shortcuts instead of dragging everything by hand. On a large monitor, half your window-management time can disappear into mouse fiddling. Rectangle removes that: one shortcut sends a window to half the screen, another to a quarter or a third. If shortcuts are not your thing, there are magnetic zones: drag a window to an edge and it snaps into place.

What it does. Rectangle is free, open source, and written by Ryan Hanson as the successor to the once-popular Spectacle. It divides the screen into halves, thirds, quarters, and even sixths, which is genuinely useful on ultrawide monitors. JustGeek gives advice that is hard to argue with: before paying for Magnet, install Rectangle. There is a good chance you will no longer want to pay.

Pricing. Free. Pro is 9,99 € one-time and adds custom sizes, saved workspaces, and iCloud sync.

Why you want it. Alcove turns the MacBook display notch into a Dynamic Island-style status area, which is more useful than leaving it as dead space. For years, the black cutout at the top of the screen was just an obstruction. Alcove turns it into a place for music controls, notifications, AirPods connection status, volume changes, and battery warnings. The practical benefit is that these small status items stop covering your workspace and live in an area that was already lost.

What it does. You can enable only the scenarios you actually want, so the notch does not become a notification landfill. Its main competitor is NotchNook, but in 2026 Alcove appears noticeably more often in reviews.

Pricing. 72 hours of fully functional trial, then $13.99.

Why you want it. BetterTouchTool is a gesture and shortcut utility that unlocks far more from the Mac trackpad, mouse, and keyboard than Apple exposes by default. The Mac trackpad can do less than it is capable of. BetterTouchTool lets you assign custom actions to gestures, such as three fingers down to close a tab or four fingers left to switch desktops, and it can do this per app. Macwelt adds an important point: even if you use a mouse on an external monitor, the tool is still useful because its other half is arbitrary keyboard shortcuts for almost anything.

What it does. BetterTouchTool recognizes one-, two-, three-, four-, and five-finger gestures, plus tap sequences. It supports the MacBook trackpad, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Mouse. German reviews recommend leaving auto-updates enabled because the app hooks deeply into the system.

Pricing. Trial for 45 days. A license with two years of updates is around 9,20 €, and lifetime is around 21,50 €.

Why you want it. Dropover is a drag-and-drop shelf for collecting files from different places before moving or sending them together. The familiar problem: you need eight files from four folders and want to attach them to one email. Normally that means keeping every window open at once. Dropover removes the problem. Start dragging a file, lightly shake the cursor, and a shelf appears. You can drop anything onto it from anywhere, then move the whole set in one gesture.

What it does. You can have multiple shelves, they stay above other windows, and they do not get in the way. ifun.de calls it the most practical drag-and-drop extension on the Mac, and after seven years in the App Store the app has reached version five.

Pricing. Download is free. The 4,49 € purchase activates only after 14 days of use.

Why you want it. Maccy is a lightweight clipboard manager that saves everything you copied, so the previous item does not vanish the moment you copy a new one. Copy a link, then copy text, and the link is gone forever. Maccy keeps what you copied during the day and brings it back with one shortcut and full-text search. It stores not only text, but also files and images.

What it does. By default, Maccy keeps the last 200 entries. It lives in the menu bar, weighs very little, is deeply configurable, and is immediately understandable. One security detail matters: specific apps, especially your password manager, can be excluded from monitoring so passwords do not land in clipboard history.

Pricing. Free from GitHub. In the Mac App Store it costs 11 €, which is simply a way to support the developer. The functionality is identical.

Why you want it. Hazel is a file automation tool that watches folders and applies “if this, then that” rules so you do not have to clean them manually. Downloads can become a mess in a week. Hazel watches selected folders and applies rules: screenshots older than a month go to archive, installers go to trash after installation, invoices move to an accounting folder with the right name. Set it once, and the cleanup stops being your job.

What it does. Hazel’s strongest feature is one that often gets underplayed: it can read not only file names and dates, but also metadata and document contents, including recognized PDFs. A rule can say, in effect, “if this PDF contains the word ‘invoice,’ rename it by date and move it to the client folder.” Files can also be archived, tagged, and handed off to other workflows.

Pricing. $25 one-time, trial for 14 days.

Why you want it. Keyboard Maestro is a full automation system for turning repeated multi-step Mac tasks into a single trigger. If you catch yourself doing the same eight-step sequence every day, Keyboard Maestro can turn it into one key. Each macro has a trigger, such as a hotkey, app launch, time of day, or clipboard change, and then it can do almost anything that can be done on a Mac.

What it does. rete-mirabile describes the learning curve better than most: beginners can simply record their clicks and immediately get a working macro, while experienced users move on to complex setups like window layouts for any monitor size. Inside, there is a built-in clipboard manager, web page automation, and scheduled execution.

Pricing. $36 one-time, with a free trial.

Why you want it. Homebrew is the Mac package manager that replaces website-hopping, .dmg downloads, and manual version tracking with a Terminal command. Instead of visiting ten sites and managing updates yourself, you type one command. Homebrew handles sources, versions, and dependencies. Through <code>cask</code>, it installs normal graphical apps too, not just command-line tools, which means a new Mac can be set up with one script.

What it does. Phlow puts the benefit neatly: installation becomes reproducible, updates become manageable, and removal becomes clean. Before installation, you will need Xcode Command Line Tools, which Homebrew will prompt you to install. It installs via the official script, which correctly sets paths and permissions.

Pricing. Free, open source.

Why you want it. Obsidian is a notes app built around ownership, because your notes live as plain Markdown files in a folder on your disk. The main argument is not features, but control over data. There is no proprietary database and no mandatory third-party server. If the app disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still open in any text editor. For anyone building a knowledge base over years, that is decisive.

What it does. The graph view shows how notes connect to each other, and each note shows its backlinks. Advanced features are off by default, so the start remains simple. Then come plugins: Dataview for dynamic tables, Excalidraw for diagrams, Copilot and Smart Connections for LLM work, including local models through Ollama without sending data outside.

Pricing. Free for personal use.

Why you want it. 1Password is a password manager that remains the French tech press’s benchmark for balancing ease of use and security. The practical value is simple: passwords are generated, stored, and filled automatically, while work and personal data live in separate vaults that do not get mixed together.

What it does. Watchtower monitors compromised and outdated passwords and tells you what needs changing. Its distinctive feature among competitors is Travel Mode, which temporarily removes selected vaults from a device so they are physically not on the laptop while crossing a border. Sync across Mac, iPhone, Windows, and browsers is seamless.

Pricing. Here is the one catch: from 27 березня 2026 року, the individual subscription costs 43,80 € without VAT per year, and the family plan for five people costs 69 €. The price increase triggered a separate 442-comment Reddit discussion, so if subscriptions are a hard no for you, look at Bitwarden.

Why you want it. Little Snitch is a network monitor and firewall that shows when apps try to connect to the internet and lets you decide what to allow. Apps constantly talk to the internet, and by default you see none of it. Little Snitch alerts you whenever a program tries to reach out and lets you allow it once, allow it forever, or block it. The most convincing feature is the built-in Network Monitor, which maps exactly where traffic is going. The first day of use is usually an uncomfortable education.

What it does. Developed by Vienna-based Objective Development for more than twenty years, Little Snitch filters both outgoing and incoming connections. For users who only want monitoring without rule-making, there is the lighter Little Snitch Mini.

Pricing. 59 € for a single license. Version 6 works on macOS 14 Sonoma and newer.

Why you want it. Pearcleaner is an open-source app uninstaller that finds the caches, logs, configs, and launch agents left behind when you drag an app to the Trash. Over a year, that residue can become tens of gigabytes of junk from software you no longer use. Pearcleaner shows installed apps and, with one click, finds the files each app scattered across the disk.

What it does. AppCleaner was the classic in this category for a long time, but Tutonaut puts the difference fairly: AppCleaner is simple and still works, but it is effectively no longer being developed. Pearcleaner is fully open source, actively updated, and transparent about the removal process, so you can see exactly what will be deleted. A bonus feature, App Lipo, strips unused CPU architecture from universal apps and frees space.

Pricing. Free, open source.