System Utilities for MAC
50 free Mac apps in System Utilities, including Amphetamine, MonitorControl, and BetterDisplay. Each app page lists its version, size, macOS requirement and what’s new, and the download button leads to the developer’s official source.
50 apps
AmphetamineAmphetamine keeps your Mac awake. Start a session from the menu bar and your Mac won't go to sleep, indefinitely, for a set time, until a set time, while a file downloads or while a particular app is running. You can choose whether the display may sleep, whether the screen saver may start and whether the Mac stays awake with its lid closed. Amphetamine is made by William Gustafson and is completely free: no ads, no in-app purchases and no Pro version.System Utilities
MonitorControlMonitorControl is a free, open-source app that lets you control the brightness and volume of an external display from your Mac, just as you would on an Apple display. Use the brightness and volume keys on your Apple keyboard, your own keyboard shortcuts or sliders in the menu bar, and MonitorControl shows the familiar macOS on-screen indicator. It is made by the MonitorControl team and released under the MIT license.System Utilities
BetterDisplayBetterDisplay gives you control over your Mac's displays from the menu bar. It can make external monitors fully scalable with sharp HiDPI resolutions, adjust brightness, volume and input on monitors that support DDC, create virtual screens, and disconnect or reconnect displays without unplugging a cable. Some of these are Pro features. BetterDisplay is developed by waydabber at Kodeon Software.System Utilities
WhatCableUSB-C cables all look alike, but a charge-only USB 2.0 cable and a 240 W, 40 Gbps Thunderbolt cable are very different. WhatCable is a small menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do. For every port it shows a clear headline, such as Thunderbolt, display connected or charge-only cable, plus the cable's speed and power rating, the charger's power profiles and the connected device. When your Mac charges slowly, a banner points to the bottleneck, for example a cable rated below the charger.System Utilities
KekaKeka is the macOS file archiver. Drag files and folders onto Keka to compress them into a smaller archive, or double-click an archive to extract it. It creates 7z, ZIP, TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, XZ, LZIP, DMG and ISO files, and opens many more formats, including RAR, 7z, ZIP, TAR, ISO, DMG, LZH and CAB. You can protect archives with a password using AES-256 encryption, split large archives into parts, and exclude Mac-only files such as .DS_Store. Keka is made by Jorge García in Barcelona.System Utilities- AlDenteAlDente lets you set a charge limit for your MacBook's battery. Instead of always charging to 100%, your MacBook stops at the level you choose, for example 80%, which can help the battery keep its capacity for longer when the Mac is plugged in most of the time. AlDente runs in the menu bar and works with most Apple Silicon and Intel MacBooks. It is made by AppHouseKitchen.System Utilities
The UnarchiverThe Unarchiver is a small, free app that opens almost any kind of archive on your Mac. The Archive Utility built into macOS handles ZIP files, but The Unarchiver also opens RAR (including RAR5), 7-Zip, TAR, Gzip, Bzip2 and many older formats such as StuffIt, LZH, ARJ and ARC, as well as ISO and BIN disc images and some Windows installers. It is made by MacPaw and offered free on the Mac App Store.System Utilities
DantroleneDantrolene is a menu bar app that stops your Mac's screen from locking while you are on your home Wi-Fi. You choose the home network once from the menu bar; in automatic mode the Mac stays unlocked there, and as soon as you join any other network, normal locking returns. The display still dims and goes dark after your usual idle time, and a touch of the mouse or keyboard brings it back without a password. Dantrolene steps aside when Zoom, a presentation or another app keeps the display awake.System Utilities
Performance MonitorPerformance Monitor is a lightweight menu bar app that shows what your Mac is doing right now. A live readout sits in the menu bar, and one click opens a popover with cards for CPU, memory, disk, thermal, GPU, battery, network and Bluetooth. Each card opens a detail window with charts, per-core usage, top processes, listening ports, individual temperature sensors and fan speeds. A plain-language verdict at the top of the overview tells you what is happening and what you can do about it.System Utilities
FS PDF CompressorFS PDF Compressor, where FS stands for Fast & Simple, is a free, open-source app that makes PDF files smaller without uploading them anywhere. Drag one PDF, several PDFs or a whole folder onto its window and it compresses them on your Mac with Ghostscript, which is included in the app, so there is nothing else to install. It uses balanced compression by default, with two optional quality profiles, and it replaces the original only when the result is actually smaller. A Keep original mode makes a separate compressed copy instead and remembers your choice.System Utilities
Better Resource MonitorBetter Resource Monitor is a lightweight system monitor that lives in the Mac menu bar. It keeps CPU, memory, storage, GPU and network usage in view all day, so you can spot unusual load without stopping what you are doing or opening Activity Monitor. Its developer describes it as a quiet, low-noise tool for the core numbers people check every day, rather than a full hardware dashboard.System Utilities
DustyDusty is a menu bar app that frees up disk space and memory on your Mac, and shows you everything before it goes. Its developer describes it as a free, open-source alternative to CleanMyMac. A scan measures every cleanup target and sorts what it finds into three levels: Safe (caches, logs, the Trash and browser caches), Developer (Xcode DerivedData, simulators and package manager caches) and Deep (old installers, Xcode archives, local Time Machine snapshots and the build folders of projects you have not touched in a month). Scanning never deletes anything, and every path and its size are on screen before a clean.System Utilities
ByeBye is a small menu bar app for the Mac that closes your running apps in bulk. After a long working session you may have a design tool, a code editor and a dozen utilities still open; instead of quitting each one by hand, you open Bye from the menu bar and quit them all with a single click. Before you do, you can click to select or deselect individual apps, so anything you still need stays open.System Utilities
Mole WidgetMole Widget is a lightweight system monitor that lives on your Mac desktop. It shows live CPU, memory, disk, network, battery and process figures in a borderless window that sits above the wallpaper and below your app windows, styled after the terminal look of the mo status command from the Mole command-line tool. A header shows your chip, RAM, macOS version, uptime and an overall health score from 0 to 100, and clicking any section title opens Activity Monitor.System Utilities
TopOffTopOff is a lightweight native menu bar app for keeping Homebrew packages up to date. If you use Homebrew, it is easy to forget to run brew update and brew upgrade for weeks at a time. TopOff checks quietly in the background, shows outdated packages in the menu, and updates them with one click. The icon is a beer mug: full when everything is up to date, half full when updates are available, and animated arrows while it works.System Utilities
SleeplessSleepless is a small menu bar app that keeps a MacBook awake with the lid closed, even on battery and with no external display attached. Closing the lid normally puts a Mac to sleep, and apps built on caffeinate cannot change that. Sleepless switches the one setting that can, pmset disablesleep, then reads it back so the menu bar always shows the real state. You click the cup in the menu bar, flip the switch and close the lid. It suits overnight builds and renders, big downloads and backups, a hotspot shared from your bag, or a local server or SSH session you want to keep reachable.System Utilities
Core-MonitorCore-Monitor is a native system monitor and fan controller for Apple Silicon Macs. It shows CPU, GPU, memory, battery, thermals, power draw, fan speeds, network and disk in one dashboard, with readings taken from the Apple SMC and standard macOS system APIs. You choose which readings appear in the menu bar, open a compact popover for a larger summary, and can put live widgets on the Touch Bar if your Mac has one.System Utilities
ShuffleShuffle is a small, native file manager for macOS and an alternative to Finder. It is GPU rendered with Metal and uses fully virtualized lists, so its developer says a folder with 100,000 items scrolls as smoothly as one with 10. It is written in Rust with GPUI, the interface toolkit behind the Zed editor, and it does not use Electron.System Utilities
HardwareVisualizerHardwareVisualizer is a desktop app that shows how your computer's hardware is doing right now and how it behaved over days and months. It has live gauges and graphs for CPU, memory and GPU usage, per-core usage and running processes, plus a specifications sheet with a hardware report you can copy. Its Insights section looks back at usage history, and a menu bar widget keeps the main figures in view.System Utilities
Prefs EditorPrefs Editor is a free macOS app that edits application and system preferences in a simple table. Its developer describes it as a graphical version of the Terminal's defaults command, or a Registry Editor for macOS. You choose a preferences domain, filter the list by typing part of an app's name, or drag in a plist file or an app. You then see its keys and values, and you can edit values, add or delete entries, copy and paste, and undo.System Utilities
ClearDiskClearDisk is a macOS menu bar app that monitors and cleans the caches developer tools leave behind. It scans 79 known cache paths, including Xcode, Swift PM, CocoaPods, Homebrew, npm, pip, Cargo, Go, Gradle and Docker, and shows how much space you could get back. It also looks through your project folders for stale build files such as node_modules, and it explains what each cache is before you remove it.System Utilities
muCommandermuCommander is a lightweight, dual-pane file manager: two folders side by side, so copying and moving files between them is quick. It can copy, move, rename and batch rename files, email them and calculate checksums, with multiple tabs, universal bookmarks and configurable keyboard shortcuts.System Utilities
BurnBurn is a disc burning app for Mac that keeps things simple while still offering plenty of advanced options. You can use it to put files on a disc for safekeeping, make audio CDs, create video discs to share with family and friends, and copy discs you already have. It works by dropping files into a list for the kind of disc you want, and it converts your audio and video files to the right format for you, with quality and size options in its preferences.System Utilities
FreeFileSyncFreeFileSync is a folder comparison and synchronization app that creates and manages backup copies of your important files. Instead of copying every file every time, it finds the differences between a source and a target folder and transfers only the minimum amount of data needed. The basic steps are simple: choose the left and right folders, compare them, select the sync settings and press Synchronize.System Utilities