11 Free And Open-Source Apps Every Mac User Needs To Try

The Mac has a thriving community of developers creating cool and interesting apps. And this isn’t limited to apps with subscriptions or large corporations. A dedicated indie community develops small, useful utilities that add features to macOS that don’t exist natively. The apps are free to download and open-sourced (the code is available for free to the public for anyone to download and use in their own projects). You can download these apps from GitHub, the preferred platform for hosting open-source projects. 

Because it’s such a large community, with new apps and features being developed and released publicly for years, you have a rich selection of apps to choose from. These small apps can solve annoyances in macOS that Apple won’t address, for example, hiding apps from the menu bar or fixing mouse scrolling issues. Then there are apps that enhance the default feature set, such as advanced window tiling, improved app switching, and an AirDrop alternative for Android and Windows. We’ve picked some of the best open-source Mac apps that are well-loved by Mac enthusiasts, available for free, and open-sourced on GitHub.

A productive Mac user’s menu bar can get messy quickly. Every useful app likes to add a menu bar icon for fast access and quick features. In fact, many of the apps on this list use the menu bar as the primary method of interaction, such as Apple’s new weather widget. But this means you end up with dozens of apps in your menu bar that will be hidden behind the MacBook’s notch or system menus.

You don’t need to sacrifice on the menu bar apps. Instead, just hide the ones you don’t use so frequently. And this can be done reliably with a free and open-source app like Hidden Bar. The app adds a divider to the menu bar. Every app icon that’s on the left-hand side will be hidden automatically. The icons on the right will stay visible at all times. You can organize icons from the menu bar itself. Hold the Command button and drag the icon to either side of the divider to configure the hidden section. Clicking the divider icon will show or hide the preconfigured icons easily.

The app also has a useful section for always hiding certain apps. These can be helpful when you can’t disable a menu bar icon for an important app, but you would rather not see it all the time either. You can trigger the hidden section using a global shortcut. The Hidden Bar app is available on the Mac App Store and from its GitHub page, where it has over 13,000 stars.

Mos solves two of the biggest issues with using the mouse on the Mac, especially if you use a third-party mouse. The first is that, by default, the Mac has a Natural Scrolling feature that mimics scrolling with your fingers on a touchscreen. To go down on a page, you have to scroll up. This is still fine when you’re using Mac’s trackpad, but on a mouse, it can be a bit jarring.

The second is the scrolling speed. The Mac’s touchpad is incredibly smooth and fast when it comes to scrolling. But when you’re using a mouse, it can be incredibly slow. Mos fixed both of these issues.

It has a “Reverse Scroll” feature to invert the scroll direction only when you’re using the mouse (and keeps the default natural scrolling enabled for the touchpad). The Smooth Scrolling feature makes scrolling using a mouse wheel as smooth as using a touchpad. The app offers advanced settings to customize the scroll step, speed, and scroll animation period, if you want to really speed things up. If you don’t want the fast scrolling to apply to particular productivity apps (like Excel), you can add it to the Exceptions list. You can also configure a Dash Key to increase scrolling speed on long pages (something like Control, Shift, or Option). Mos can be downloaded from the Mos official website or from GitHub, where it has over 19,000 stars.

MacOS has a built-in window management tool that can help dock two windows side by side. But if you’re a power user, it’s not nearly as customizable as you’d like. The Rectangle app is a dedicated window manager that makes things a lot easier. You can resize windows with just a keyboard shortcut or by dragging them to a snap area (edge of the screen). 

The Rectangle app is quite versatile and offers many options for organizing windows into grids. For example, you can have one window take up the last two-thirds of the screen, while another app takes up the first one-third. When you’re multitasking with more than two windows on a large external monitor, Rectangle can be quite useful. You will find a keyboard shortcut for every window position, but it might be more useful to customize the snap areas. You can customize multiple different drag gestures at the edge of the screen. For example, dragging a window to the top-right can dock it to take up the rightmost one-third of the screen. 

Rectangle is a free and open-source app you can download from the official website above or the Rectangle GitHub page, where it has over 29,000 stars. 

If you’ve switched from Windows to Mac, you might miss the app switcher from Windows. The Alt + Tab keyboard shortcut brings up a visual overview of all open windows across all apps, with a little thumbnail preview of each window. The Mac’s Command + Tab app switcher, by comparison, is boring, only showing app icons for switching between recently used apps. 

The free and open-source AltTab app brings a Windows-style Alt + Tab switcher to the Mac. It works using the Option + Tab keyboard shortcut (which you can customize). AltTab brings up a floating window over the screen with previews of every app window. You can use the Tab button to move around all the windows. You can hover over a window to get options to exit, minimize, or maximize the window. The app switcher interface is also customizable. Other than the default Thumbnails view, you can choose the App Icons style for something closer to the macOS look. There’s also an option to see all windows as just a list of all window titles. AltTab can be downloaded from the official website or from GitHub, where it has over 15,000 stars.

AirDrop is perhaps one of the best examples of Apple’s software integration. You can wirelessly send any file, of any size, instantly between your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. But what if you live a more cross-platform lifestyle? If you use Windows with an iPhone or an Android phone with a Mac, AirDrop doesn’t work. 

LocalSend fills in that gap. It’s a free and open-source app that’s available on every major platform, including Android, Windows, and Linux. Once it’s running on all your computers and smartphones, you can use local networking to send files between them. You just have to make sure that you’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network; it doesn’t even have to be connected to the internet for this to work. There’s no need to sign in to an account or connect to any servers. Open the app, choose any file that you want to send, and select the nearby device (make sure the app is installed on the other device and is active). Files will be transferred over local Wi-Fi at a fast rate. All transfers are encrypted using HTTPS, so you don’t need to worry about data security. You can also implement PIN verification for peace of mind. LocalSend can be downloaded from the project’s website or from GitHub, where it has over 80,000 stars. 

For remote workers, typing for hours on end on their keyboard can get exhausting. The Handy app wants to help make things a bit easier. It uses state-of-the-art AI models to transcribe your speech into text. All of it for free, and with local processing. It’s a simple speech-to-text app. You press and hold a keyboard shortcut to start the recording, begin speaking, and as soon as you release the key, Handy processes your text and pastes it into the text field. You can dictate anything you want, from emails to Slack messages, or entire blog posts. 

Handy has two AI models: Nvidia Parakeet V3, which is designed primarily for English speakers and European languages. It’s fast and accurate. There’s also OpenAI’s Whisper model, which is best for multilingual users as it supports more than 99 languages. Handy’s default keyboard shortcut is Option + Space, but you can customize it to anything you want in the settings. 

If you’re planning to dictate long messages, you can also disable the Push to Talk feature from settings to switch to the toggle mode. Here, you press the shortcut once to start recording and press it again to stop. Then, Handy takes over to transcribe and paste the text. You can download Handy from the official website or from the GitHub project page, where it has over 20,000 stars. 

VLC is a legendary open-source video player that has been going strong for 25 years. While it’s a versatile media player, it’s not natively designed for macOS, and its design hasn’t changed much in the past two decades. IINA is an open-source video player that will play anything you throw at it, and it has a native macOS design that fits the rest of the Mac aesthetic. IINA uses the open-source Mpv media player that can play almost every media format. You can also play any online stream or YouTube playlist.

The app’s interface supports a native dark mode, helping make the interface easier on the eyes when you’re playing media. The app uses Apple’s hardware acceleration features for speedy output. Even if you’re playing 4K movies, it won’t skip a beat.  It has all the basic features you’d expect from a media player. It supports playlists, chapters, and there’s native support for customizable subtitles. In fact, there’s a dedicated section to automatically load subtitles from online sources and to customize the font and the text style. With the native Picture-in-Picture support, you can watch media on top of any app. IINA is available on its official website, and you can also download it from the GitHub page, where it has over 44,000 stars.

How do you usually download apps? From the Mac App Store, from the developer’s website, or for open-source apps, you use GitHub. If you install apps from a third-party source, you have to first download a DMG file, then extract the app, and move the app file to the Applications folder. You have to do this dance every time. What if you could download multiple apps together and update them with just one command? That is the function of the Homebrew app. It’s a package manager for Mac that has a large repository of apps and packages.

The Homebrew app is essentially a Terminal command, and you don’t need to be a coder to use the app. To install Homebrew, just paste the command from the website’s home page. Then, you can simply type “brew install (name of the app)” to install the software (as long as it’s available in the Homebrew repository). You can use the “brew search” command to find an app, or you can use Homebrew’s repository page to search through. You can also use the “brew update” command to install all pending updates for apps installed via Homebrew. Homebrew is open-sourced on GitHub, where it has over 47,000 stars. 

You install apps from multiple sources on the Mac. Some come from the Mac App Store, some directly from the website, and some use apps like Homebrew. Updating apps individually, especially when you’re trying to get work done, can become a chore. Latest can help. It’s a simple app that brings together app updates from the Mac App Store and apps that use the Sparkle network, covering a large swath of Mac apps.

When you open the app, you’ll see a list of all available updates on the left. You can choose an app and review the release notes to see what’s new in the update. Then, you can click the Update button to quickly install the update. The app does one job and does it well. It works best for free apps, and it doesn’t offer any other features like installing or uninstalling apps. The Latest app is available from the project’s website and from GitHub, where it has over 4,500 stars. 

MonitorControl is one of those classic small Mac utilities that fills the gap that the Mac has surprisingly left empty. If you use your MacBook with an external display (or two), you’re aware of this limitation. You can easily change the brightness and the volume of your MacBook’s built-in speaker. But to change the brightness on your external monitor, you have to use the built-in controls on your monitor, which can be below or behind the panel. 

The MonitorControl takes over these monitor controls and lets you change them via the Mac software. The app appears as a menu bar utility, with sliders for the monitor’s brightness and volume. Optionally, it can also take over the keyboard’s function row, and you can change brightness using the F1 and F2 keys on the keyboard. If you use your MacBook alongside an external display, there’s a setting option to sync the brightness changes between the MacBook’s screen and your monitor (using data from the ambient light sensor or changes made via the keyboard). The Monitor Control app can be downloaded from the GitHub page, where it has over 33,000 stars.

The Mac offers an easy way to uninstall apps. All you have to do is move the app to the Trash, empty it, and you’re done. While this works for most apps, it tends to leave things behind. Even after the process, you might still be left with cache and hidden files stuck in the Library folder. With hundreds of apps installed over time, all this data can add up. And it’s just taking up space on your Mac, without being helpful. Deleting unused, large apps can also help speed up your old MacBook. 

PearCleaner is a free open-source app that completely uninstalls the app and removes all related data that might be lurking behind. It’s a simple app that shows all installed apps and how much space they’re taking up. When you click an app, you’ll see the application file and the associated data. And you can delete all of it with just a click. It’s also customizable, so if you want to keep some of the data around (like a save file for a game or a project file for a music app), you can uncheck it before deleting the app. Pearcleaner can be downloaded from its official website or from GitHub, where it has over 12,000 stars.

To compile this list, we focused on curating a selection of free apps that add genuine utility for Mac users and are developed by the passionate Mac developer community. We limited our search to apps that are available for free and are open-sourced on GitHub (a Microsoft-owned brand), which is a trusted network for distributing open-source software. We also narrowed our search to apps that have gained interest among Mac enthusiasts over the years. 

We limited the list to apps that have received 4,000 stars or more on GitHub (a sign that thousands of Mac users are interested in following the project’s updates). Furthermore, we also used a combination of personal testing, reviews from reputable sources, and feedback from Mac enthusiasts from the r/MacApps subreddit to inform our list.