The best free apps and tools for macOS in 2021
We bring you a list of the best free applications and tools for macOS in 2021, both the essential classics and some new programs that have been launched in recent months. We have tried to make the list varied and cover as many needs as possible, and that is why we propose a total of 37 applications on our list.
Like every year, the list does not focus on the new applications that have been released this year, but on the best that you can find on macOS for the most diverse tasks. The idea is that if you buy a new Mac you will have all this repertoire at your disposal, without forgetting the veterans, but trying to put some new tools.
And as we always say in Basics, if there is any application or program that you think should have appeared on the list but it is not, we invite you to leave us your proposals in the comments section , so that other users can benefit from the knowledge of our large community.
Amphetamine
This application has long been one of the best tools for the macOS menu bar , and it allows you to prevent your Mac from going to sleep when you have not used it for a while. You can configure keeping both the Mac and the screen activated, and turn it on or off through a simple button or automatically.
The application is an essential for those who work on their Mac, and it allows you to establish a period of hours and minutes in which you want it to never be at rest. There are also other options, such as setting it to never go to sleep when you use a certain application, changing its icon, setting wallpapers or a shortcut to launch it if you don't want it to start with macOS.
Any.Do
AppCleaner
It is a third party application that helps you uninstall applications on macOS . What it does is find and delete the files that each application distributes on the hard drive when it is installed , and it does so by offering you an extremely simple interface. It only shows you a window and you have to drag the application to it.
Audacity
One of the best known and most widely used free software applications in the world, and no list of best applications is complete without it. It is a tool for recording and editing audio tracks on any operating system , and there are few that can be compared to it for editing, recording, effect creation or audio conversion work.
You can use Audacity for free on macOS, but also on Windows and GNU / Linux, and it is open to other developers with its support for plugins with which to improve it. It also has 16, 24 and 32-bit sound quality, and allows you to import, edit and combine different audio files. You can even export your recordings in various types of formats, including being able to export multiple files at the same time.
Caliber
If you have an e-book reader, then you need to have Caliber . And if the e-book is a Kindle, then it is an added reason to install the best e-book library manager . With caliber you can have your virtual library organized, convert books into different formats , and send the books to the reader you are using by converting them into their native format, such as the Kindle.
It also allows you to download newspapers, your favorite websites or read from the same application. You can do dictionary searches, view the books on your PC or the connected eBook, read random books, have your books synchronized in the cloud , make format conversions or edit the metadata of the electronic books you have.
DailyWall
Every day at 10 in the morning, DailyWall will take care of selecting a new wallpaper and applying it to your Mac automatically. Furthermore, it is also available for iOS and iPadOS, syncing the same wallpaper on your iPhone or iPad as well.
Come on, it's a fairly simple application, but it can be very useful if you like customizing your devices, you want to surprise yourself every day with a new image, but you are too lazy to do it on your own. According to its creator, the selection of funds has been selected by hand by professional photographers, and is constantly expanding.
Darktable
For many, DarkTable is the closest thing to Lightroom you can get for free, and it has the added benefit of being a free software project. It is an application for the photography workflow that offers RAW development, editing and retouching of images. DarkTable is available for Windows, macOS, and packaged for multiple Linux distributions.
DaVinci Resolve
If you are looking for a professional level video editor for macOS, this is possibly the best alternative available to you. It is a paid program that costs 269 euros, but it has a free version with tools for editing processes, visual effects, graphic animations, color grading and audio post-production in a single application.
Of course, if you are a professional you should know that its paid version includes a neural engine, collaboration options, stereoscopic tools, dozens of ResolveFX and FairlightFX add-ons, HDR grading, and grainy, blur and fog effects. However, the free one is already a good starting point for your more advanced home editions.
Directive
Directive is an application that seeks to take these maintenance tasks that you usually ignore or avoid out of sheer laziness, and offer an application compatible with macOS, iOS and iPadOS to be able to manage them. In this way, you will have them separated from the rest of the daily tasks to which you usually give a different meaning and approach, and they are easier to do.
The application itself will offer you some example tasks so that you can catch the tone of the type of tasks it manages, such as changing the car oil, going to the eye doctor or replacing your toothbrush. Each task has an assigned periodicity that you can change, and with a smart action related to the product that can be, for example, a link to Amazon to buy that new toothbrush.
Discord
Little by little, year after year, Discord is gaining strength and becoming a more important application to unite communities. It is a free application in which you can create chat servers with different channels. It's like being able to set up your own Slack or your own IRC, and includes the ability to make voice calls and video calls between users.
Flume
An Instagram client for macOS with lots of options. The application is paid if you want to be able to use all its tools, but it has a free version that, although it lacks some options such as being able to publish from the app and use multiple accounts, it has the rest of the options available.
And what are these options? Well, it has statistics on your posts and followers , direct messages, activity indicators, advanced search engine, gestures, translations and integrations with other applications such as Apple Maps or the macOS file sharing system.
Haste
Haste is an application that is designed to try to help you optimize your searches on the Internet. We could consider it as a search launcher that you open by pressing the Command key twice, and in which you type the term you want to search for. Then, you choose the search engine or service you want to use to find the result and voila, Safari opens with the results.
In a way, choosing the search engine is reminiscent of DuckDuckGo's Bangs , only Haste levels them up, since it allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts for each search service , and thus make your searches extremely fast. No more having to search for something in your favorite search engine, go to the image section, or enter a website to search it.
IINA
IINA is a more modern alternative to VLC built for macOS . It is a tool that has on the one hand the functionality of VLC, and on the other an excellent design that makes the tool also stand out before the eyes. All this in a free and open source application.
The application has PiP mode, it has dark mode, online subtitle search, and integration with the Touch Bar with the trackpad through gestures. As if that were not enough, it is capable of playing 4K YouTube videos with its own controls, something that even the Safari browser is not capable of doing at the moment.
Itsycal
Itsycal is a tool that is as small as it is useful, a small calendar in the menu bar very much like the one shown in the GNU / Linux distros. It is complemented by the native macOS calendar, showing all your appointments for the day so you don't miss any. It is customizable, it has a dark mode, and above all, it is very useful.
jDownloader
jDownloader is one of the best direct download management applications you can find . It has the possibility of storing your user accounts in different file download services, such as Mega and company, and it analyzes your clipboard so that when you copy one or more links, it automatically adds them to start the downloads.
It has versions for Windows, GNU / Linux or macOS, and you can work with files divided into several parts as long as they are downloaded at the same time. It also decompresses the content that is compressed, and allows you to download YouTube videos or any content from the clouds that you have directly in the folder that you assign for all downloads.
Jiffy
Many applications have their own menus in which to find GIFs of all kinds to integrate them into conversations. But what about all those desktop apps that don't have a GIF finder? Well simple, because you can insert one into macOS itself using tools like Jiffi .
The application shows a drop-down in the menu bar, and in it you have a search engine where you can find all kinds of GIPHY GIFs . In addition, you can set a keyboard shortcut to display it quickly, and when you select a word in another application you can search for it in Jiffy to insert a GIF into whatever you are using.
Code
Kodi is practically essential if you want to turn your computer into a multimedia center , and it has been the most recommended for these tasks for years. Its code is free, and it has versions for both Windows and GNU / Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, Raspberry Pi and practically any other you need.
It is a totally modular application , with a clean interface but to which you can add plugins to adapt it to your needs. You can also change its interface thanks to the theme system it includes, and it also has add-ons with which to add different types of functionalities. With them you can watch different television channels over the Internet, show weather forecasts, or connect to services such as Plex, SoundCloud or YouTube. You also have them to listen to the radio, access some of your cloud storage services.
Chalk
Krita is an excellent digital painting program designed especially for artists who work with illustration, comics, concept art, painting, and more . It is a free software application, and therefore it is completely free. It's cross-platform too, with versions for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
It has an intuitive user interface that doesn't get in the way of your work, with panels that you can move and customize to suit your work style. It also has brush stabilizers, pop-up palette, brush engines, envelope mode, and resource manager.
Lightworks
Lightworks is an open source video editor , which offers many advanced options completely free of charge. It has a simple and intuitive interface, allows easy editing with the trimming function in the timeline, supports the use of audio and video FX in real time, and includes access to audio and video content at no cost. It also allows you to export your videos to platforms such as YouTube, Vieo or Facebook.
Martha
It is a file explorer with two panels, a simple application with which you have two columns with which to browse your files, and you can be in a different folder in each column. This will make it very easy to move files or search. It is an application that has not even reached version 1.0 yet, so be patient with it.
Meter
The video call boom in 2020 is being spectacular, although sometimes it can be a bit complicated to have to manage them from different different services. Meeter is a tool to help you with this on macOS, as it allows you to easily join video calls from various services , such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet.
You can open it in the menu bar, and a box will appear in which the video calls you have scheduled, the start time, and a button to join them will appear. It will be important to link your calendar service, such as Google Calendar or Microsoft Exchange, so that you can access your calendar and know when you have video calls scheduled.
Mmhmm
Whoever was the CEO of Evernote in its good times has created Mmhmm , a new tool that comes to make your video calls more interactive, allowing you to add any type of content behind you. Thus, it will be as if you had your own television program , showing in the background, for example, content that you are talking about.
Mmhmm allows you to choose the background you want on the screen behind you during video conferences, and you also can resize your image on the screen to make it look smaller and give more importance to the content. In the background, you can be showing images or videos, in which you can integrate, making yourself transparent and disappear completely. Just have a little patience, because the application is new, and you need to subscribe to receive an invitation to try it.
NightOwl
NightOwl is an application specifically designed for the latest versions of macOS . It can be downloaded for free and allows us to switch between one mode or another at the moment. It is installed as a tool in the menu bar, and from there we can either change it manually or set certain hours.
It has three modes. The first is a manual mode with two buttons with which to choose whether you want to use light or dark mode. It also has a sunrise / sunset mode that activates one and the other depending on the time of day, and a programming mode in which you can set specific hours to activate the dark and light mode.
OBS Studio
OBS Studio is possibly one of the most popular and recommended applications for streaming videos , and it acts as a kind of intermediate layer between the webcam and your computer to be able to add multiple options to the camera. It is a free and open application, with versions for Windows, Linux and macOS.
Besides streaming, it also works for video editing. Among its options is the ability to create scenes with multiple sources , including video capture, images, text, browser windows, webcams and capturers. You can create an unlimited number of these scenes to alternate, it includes an audio mixer and it is very easy to configure, with specific options for streaming.
OpenToonz
This is the software that Studio Ghibli uses to make most of their movies, and the code of which was opened in 2016 so that anyone could see how it works. It is a program for the production of 2D animations, and which is currently completely free and available for Windows and macOS.
The tool allows to perform a sequential scan efficiently according to the numbers of animation intermediates, it supports black and white modes, in colors, with or without binarization, and it allows saving scan options. It also allows you to reproduce the processes when it is necessary to rescan some shots, and it is compatible with the TWAIN standard.
Pasta
Pasta is an application that seeks to solve one of the great current deficiencies of macOS, which is the lack of a history in the clipboard as Windows does . And as usually happens in these cases, where the native functions do not reach there will always be a third-party tool to help.
The free version of this application is capable of remembering the last 20 items that you have copied to the macOS clipboard. In addition to remembering everything you copy to the clipboard, this application will also organize the content by categories, even showing you a preview of the content in a beautiful interface.
Plex
Plex is, with the permission of Kodi , one of the best applications to turn your computer into a multimedia center using the digital content you have on it. It recognizes all the multimedia files that you have hosted in the source folder, and organizes them with different sections so that you have them relatively ordered regardless of whether or not you have them organized within the folder on your computer.
Although the application itself is free to use the files on your computer on any device that shares the same Internet connection with it, you also have advanced payment options to access from the cloud, allowing you to create your own Netflix or your own Spotify .
qBittorrent
There are many applications to download torrents , but few of them are better and more complete than qBittorrent. It is open source and does not have any surprises or unwanted additions, it is multiplatform and can be used on any PC, and it has its own torrent search engine , to which you can also add the sources you want by hand to search more and better.
It also allows you to make several simultaneous downloads, and has the classic options to pause, resume or delete the downloads. The application opens Magnet links by default, supports DHT, IPv6, Proxies, RSS and protocol encryption, and allows you to play files while they are downloaded , which will help you save time detecting erroneous downloads.
Service Station
When you right-click on an item on the Mac, a context menu opens with different options and actions. Service Station is an application that allows you to customize this contextual menu by adding your own elements or scripts. It also has script support, so that customization is maximum.
It is a paid application, although it has a free mode in which you can edit up to four rules without any additional payment. It's perfect for those things that you usually do on a recurring basis, and you want them to be perfectly accessible from the context menu.
Snap
Snap is a useful tool for creating shortcuts custom on macOS. It will help you improve your productivity , especially when you are working in full screen and you do not have the macOS dock at hand, since it will allow you to create key combinations to launch certain applications whenever you want.
SoundSorce
SoundSorce is an advanced computer sound manager, in which you have total control over what sounds your Mac plays and what the sources are. You can, for example, lower or raise the volume of just one element of the internal sound of the Mac, and also manage the volumes of the different websites or installed applications.
For each sound, you will be able to choose a different source, being able to reproduce some in the internal sound source, others in speakers that you connect, and so on. In addition, it also has an equalizer and allows you to add different types of sound effects. It has a paid version with better sound quality, but the free version will help you to know how worthwhile these controls are.
Spark
Spark has been years the reference third-party email application for on iOS and macOS, and little by little it has been leaving the ecosystem, also having an app for Android . It has a very careful and attractive design, but what has really earned its fame is for its many possibilities.
The application has functions such as postponing the sending of the email, adding a reminder after sending an email, or creating groups with whom to comment on emails that arrive. It also allows you to create emails as a team, perform searches, mark emails as favorites, and all this organized with what they call a smart grid.
Station
web applications or web apps Windows are those pages that become applications with an independent window, a kind of hybrid between both concepts, and Station is a tool to manage all the ones you need that includes support for more than 670 web applications and an interface that is becoming more polished.
What allows you to do Station is have all the webapps running in the same window with several tabs, one for each webapp. It has a unified notification system, search functions, support for multiple accounts, and more. It is as easy as downloading the application for free, and then linking all the ones you want to use.
Telegram
Telegram is one of the most versatile messaging apps out there . It started as an alternative to WhatsApp, but as it does not stand out in its privacy, it is trying to do so by offering all the options you may need and more, from being able to use it on more than one device with an independent app, to shipping messages to yourself, being able to send files from your mobile to your PC and vice versa .
Telegram also allows you to create groups and has a sticker system , but it also allows you to create broadcast channels or synchronize websites with IFTTT so that each of the new news they publish reaches you. All this without forgetting all the messaging options you may need, and that makes it superior to WhatsApp in many aspects.
Tweet
If you are a Twitter lover and you need a client with which you can make the most of the social network with multiple columns , you have payment alternatives such as the famous Tweetbot for Mac, although you also have other free and very powerful ones like this Tweeten.
It is an improved version of Tweetdeck, and with customization options, an emoji selector, a GIF search engine, the possibility of downloading videos or a filter system. It also offers answers with its classic look, integration with the Touch Bar, and the ability to customize it with CSS.
Typora
If you write regularly on Windows, Mac or Linux, you appreciate the simplicity, you want to concentrate more easily, you like to try new applications and also from a proposal that does not cost you anything, this is a minimalist text editor that could interest you .
Don't be fooled by its apparent simplicity and clean interface: Typora stands out among its class. We are in front of a Markdown editor and reader, with support for MathJax, extremely powerful. Because it makes sure to provide a smooth and distraction-free experience both when writing and reading, without forgetting to include a good handful of useful options for the most varied users.
Glass
Glass is a video conferencing application that focuses on making your presentations more visual, since when you are sharing your screen you will continue to be seen in the background as if you were a hologram, a very visual and modern result. By doing this, you will be able to point to different points of the screen while sharing it, something that in some explanations can be really useful.
We have decided to include Glass here despite the fact that it is a paid application, since since the beginning of the pandemic they have decided to make their application free . However, we still do not know if it will stay that way indefinitely or if they will charge for it again in the future. By the way, the application also has a mirror mode so you can see yourself in the background while you work.
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