Mac maintenance
50 Free Mac Apps Every Owner Should Know About
50 free Mac apps that punch above their weight, organized by use case. No bloatware, no trial-only tricks. macOS Sonoma and Sequoia compatible.
The Mac App Store is a graveyard of paid apps that haven’t been updated since 2019 and free apps that hold features hostage behind a $9.99/month subscription. The good ones are out there, but they’re scattered. Here are 50 that earn their spot on the dock — fully free, actively maintained, working on Sonoma and Sequoia.
Window management
1. Rectangle (rectangleapp.com) — Cmd-Option-arrow keys to snap windows. The successor to Spectacle, and the standard.
2. AltTab (alt-tab-macos.netlify.app) — Windows-style alt-tab with thumbnails. macOS’s built-in Cmd-Tab only shows apps, not windows. AltTab fixes that.
3. HiddenBar — Hides menu bar icons you rarely use. Free Bartender alternative. Available through GitHub.
4. Maccy — Clipboard manager with a 200-item history. Cmd-Shift-C to summon. Open source, no telemetry.
Productivity
5. Raycast — Replaces Spotlight. Instant calculations, system commands, app launcher, snippet manager, all keyboard-driven.
6. Obsidian — Markdown notes that live as plain .md files in a folder. Your notes outlive the app.
7. Notion Calendar (formerly Cron) — Cleaner than Apple Calendar, integrates with Google and Notion.
8. Logseq — Outliner-style notes with bidirectional links. Local-first, no account required.
9. Anytype — Open-source Notion alternative, fully local.
10. TickTick — Tasks across Mac, iOS, web. Free tier is generous.
Browsers
11. Arc — Vertical tabs, spaces, command bar. Actually rethought what a browser should look like.
12. Brave — Chromium-based, blocks ads natively, no Google telemetry.
13. Orion — Apple’s WebKit engine but with Chrome and Firefox extension support.
14. Zen Browser — Firefox fork focused on UI minimalism.
Files and storage
15. The Unarchiver — Handles RAR, 7z, ISO, and 60+ other formats. Built-in Archive Utility doesn’t.
16. Disk Inventory X — Treemap visualization of your disk. Find the 30 GB Final Cut event you forgot about.
17. ExtFS / FUSE-T — Read-write access to ext4 and NTFS drives.
18. Transmission — Torrent client with no ads. The clean alternative to uTorrent.
19. Cyberduck — FTP, SFTP, S3, Google Drive client. One window, all protocols.
20. KeepingYouAwake — Menu bar coffee mug. One click prevents sleep. The canonical replacement for the long-dead Caffeine.
Media and design
21. IINA — Modern video player built on mpv. Plays anything QuickTime can’t.
22. VLC — The fallback that plays everything else.
23. Pixelmator Pro — Wait, that’s $50. Skip it. GIMP is free, less polished but capable.
24. Krita — Open source illustration. Best for digital painting on Mac.
25. Blender — 3D modeling, animation, rendering. Hollywood-tier free.
26. DaVinci Resolve — Free video editor that pros use. The free tier handles 4K, color grading, and Fairlight audio.
27. Audacity — Audio editor. Quick and capable.
28. Inkscape — Vector graphics. SVG-native.
Developer tools
29. Visual Studio Code — The default code editor.
30. iTerm2 — Better Terminal. Split panes, search, hotkey window.
31. Warp — Modern terminal with command palette and AI features.
32. Homebrew (brew.sh) — Package manager. brew install anything.
33. DBeaver Community — Database GUI for Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, etc.
34. Postman — API testing.
35. Fork — Git client that doesn’t get in your way.
Communication
36. Signal Desktop — Encrypted messaging.
37. Discord — If you’re in any community, you’re already on it.
38. Zoom — Free tier, 40 minute group calls.
Menu bar utilities
39. Stats — CPU, RAM, network, GPU, disk all in the menu bar. Replaces iStat Menus completely.
40. CleanMyMac… wait, no. Stick with Sweep — see below.
41. Vanilla — Hides menu bar icons you don’t use often (free version of Bartender’s basics).
42. ItsyCal — Tiny menu bar calendar.
43. Amphetamine — Granular sleep prevention. Wake on motion, schedule, app-triggered.
Maintenance and cleanup
44. Sweep (sweep.app) — Clutter cleanup, app uninstaller, privacy auditing. macOS 14 Sonoma+. Free download.
45. AppCleaner — Drag-and-drop uninstaller. Catches the leftover ~/Library files. Limited compared to a full sweep, but works.
46. Onyx — Maintenance scripts and hidden settings. Powerful but the UI hasn’t been rethought since 2010.
47. Stats (already #39) — also shows you what’s burning cycles.
Security and privacy
48. Little Snitch (free trial only) — Skip. Use LuLu instead. Free, open-source firewall by Patrick Wardle. Watches outbound connections.
49. KnockKnock — Also from Wardle. Shows what’s persistently installed on your Mac (launch agents, daemons, kernel extensions).
50. Bitwarden — Free password manager. iCloud Keychain works, but Bitwarden is cross-platform.
Honorable mentions that almost made the list
- Mos — Reverses scroll direction for mice without changing it for trackpad
- OpenInTerminal — Right-click any folder, “Open in Terminal”
- Karabiner-Elements — Remap any key to anything
- Keka — Archive utility with native compression formats
- MonitorControl — Software volume and brightness control for external monitors
Apps explicitly NOT on this list
A few popular “free” apps got cut for trial-period theatrics or aggressive upsells:
- Apps that show you “47 GB of junk found!” then demand $40 to remove it
- VPN apps that claim to be free, then sell your data
- “Free” PDF editors that watermark every export
- Menu bar weather apps that ask for your contacts list
The 50 above don’t pull that. Some have paid pro tiers, but the free version is genuinely free and useful.
Installation tip
Install Homebrew first, then brew install --cask most of these in one shot. A new Mac setup that used to take three hours is now 15 minutes:
brew install --cask rectangle alt-tab maccy raycast obsidian arc brave the-unarchiver iina vlc visual-studio-code iterm2 fork signal discord stats appcleaner sweep
That’s most of the list, installed in a single command, into /Applications exactly the way the App Store would have done it.
Whichever apps you settle on, the system maintenance pattern is the same: install lean, audit quarterly, uninstall what you stop using before it accumulates 5 GB of cache. The Mac runs best with 30-40 active apps, not 130.