10 Best Free Mac Apps You Should Be Using

Your Mac probably cost you a fair amount of money. Whether it was a MacBook Air or a fully loaded MacBook Pro, you expect it to just work. And it does — mostly. But macOS out of the box is missing some surprisingly basic features, and the apps that fill those gaps are often free, tiny, and criminally underrated.

I have been using these 10 Mac apps daily for a long time now, and they have made a noticeable difference to how I work. Most of them are free. All of them are worth your time.

Best Free Mac Apps for Cleaning and Maintenance

AppCleaner — Actually Delete Apps Properly

Here is something most people do not realise about macOS: dragging an app to the Bin does not actually remove all of it. Most applications scatter files across your system — preference files, caches, support folders — and those leftovers stay behind long after you think the app is gone.

AppCleaner, made by FreeMacSoft, fixes this. You drag an app into its window, and it instantly finds every associated file on your system. You would be surprised how many hidden files some apps leave behind. One click and it is all gone.

The real standout feature is Smart Delete. Enable it in preferences, and AppCleaner will automatically detect when you drag an app to the Bin — the normal way you delete things on a Mac — and offer to remove all the leftover files for you. No need to open AppCleaner itself. It just works in the background.

AppCleaner is completely free and has been trusted by the Mac community for years.

CleanMyMac — A Full Health Check for Your System

You will use your Mac for years, and over that time it fills up quietly with old caches, broken downloads, system logs, and forgotten files. macOS is not great at telling you about any of it.

CleanMyMac has a feature called Smart Care that runs a one-click health check across your entire system. It breaks results into five clear categories: junk you can clean, threats on your system, performance tasks, missing app updates, and duplicate downloads cluttering your drive. Everything is laid out in one dashboard.

The two features I have been using most recently are Space Lens and Cloud Cleanup. Space Lens builds a visual map of your entire drive, sorted by folder size, so you can instantly see what is eating your storage. Cloud Cleanup does the same thing but for your cloud accounts — iCloud, Google Drive, and so on — showing what is taking up space across all of them in one place.

What I appreciate most is that CleanMyMac does not try to scare you. There are no flashing red warnings. It just shows you what is there, lets you decide what to remove, and gets out of the way.

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Best Mac Menu Bar Apps

Hidden Bar — Declutter Your Menu Bar

If your menu bar looks like a crowded car park of tiny icons, you are not alone. Every app you install seems to want its own spot up there, and before long, half of them are disappearing behind the notch.

Hidden Bar is a tiny, free, open-source app that adds a small divider to your menu bar. Hold down Command, drag icons to the left of that divider, and they disappear. Click the chevron and they come back. Click again and they are hidden. You can set it to auto-hide after a few seconds and assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle the hidden icons.

It launches at login, and once you set it up, you genuinely forget it is there — which is the whole point. Hidden Bar is made by the Dwarvs Foundation and is available on the Mac App Store and GitHub.

System Colour Picker — Grab Any Colour From Your Screen

If you have ever seen a colour on screen — maybe on someone's website — and wondered what the hex code is, this is for you. System Colour Picker adds a colour picker to your menu bar. Click it, use the eyedropper on any pixel, and it instantly copies the hex code to your clipboard. That is the entire app.

It is tiny, fast, and free on the Mac App Store.

Best Mac Productivity Apps

CopyClip — A Clipboard Manager You Will Wonder How You Lived Without

Think about how many times a day you copy something, then copy something else, and the first thing is just gone. It is baffling that macOS still does not handle this well natively.

CopyClip sits in your menu bar and keeps a running history of everything you have copied. Need that link from 20 minutes ago? Click the menu bar icon, find it in the list, and it is ready to paste. The basic version is completely free on the Mac App Store.

Apple did eventually build clipboard history into Spotlight search, which tells you how overdue this feature was. But I still think CopyClip does it better.

Claude — An AI Assistant That Stays Out of Your Way

I know what you are thinking — another person telling you to use AI. But hear me out. Claude, made by Anthropic, has a native Mac app that sits on your machine as a proper macOS application. You press a keyboard shortcut (I use Option twice), and it is right there.

I use it for drafting emails, researching topics for scripts, and working through ideas. What makes the desktop app particularly useful is how it integrates into macOS. You hit the shortcut, it can grab a screenshot of what you are looking at, you ask your question, get your answer, and go straight back to work. No browser tabs, no distractions.

The app is free to download and use. There are paid tiers for more usage or access to more powerful models, but the free plan is genuinely useful.

PopClip — The Text Selection Tool macOS Should Have Built In

When you select text on a Mac, nothing happens until you right-click. PopClip changes that. Highlight any text and a small toolbar pops up above your selection, similar to what you get on an iPhone or iPad.

The real power is in its extension library. There are over 200 extensions you can download from the PopClip website, adding actions like translating a word, sending a paragraph to Apple Notes, converting to markdown, running a word count, and more.

PopClip is available as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store, or you can try the free trial from the developer's website.

Best Free Mac Utility Apps

Mos — Fix Choppy Scrolling on Non-Apple Mice

If you use a third-party mouse on macOS, you have probably noticed that scrolling feels choppy and jerky compared to the smooth experience you get with the trackpad or Magic Mouse. Apple restricts non-Apple hardware from using smooth scrolling, which is frustrating.

Mos is a tiny, free, open-source app that fixes this using a custom interpolation algorithm. It also separates your trackpad and mouse scroll settings independently, so you can reverse the scroll direction of your mouse without affecting your trackpad — something macOS bizarrely does not let you do natively.

You can download Mos from the developer's website or install it through Homebrew.

Xnapper — Screenshots That Actually Look Good

For the longest time I used the built-in macOS screenshot tool, then opened everything in Preview to annotate. Xnapper does all of this and more. Assign a keyboard shortcut, select what you want to capture, and it instantly wraps everything in a gradient background with perfect padding, rounded corners, and a subtle shadow.

It also has a clever feature that automatically detects and redacts sensitive information in your screenshots — things like email addresses and credit card numbers. You can customise backgrounds, adjust border radius and shadow, annotate with arrows and shapes, and set up presets for different social media platforms.

Xnapper is free with a small watermark, or a one-time payment removes it permanently. No subscription.

Rocket — A Faster Way to Type Emojis

The default emoji picker on Mac is slow. You press Control-Command-Space, wait for it to load, search, scroll, and eventually click the emoji you want. Rocket replaces all of that.

Type a colon followed by a keyword — like :thumbsup — and Rocket instantly suggests matching emojis as you type. Hit Enter and the emoji is inserted right where you are typing. Your hands never leave the keyboard.

It sounds small, but you will end up using it dozens of times a day. The free version covers all standard emojis. There is a paid upgrade for GIF search and custom emoji support, but most people will not need it.

Which of These Mac Apps Should You Install First?

If you are brand new to macOS, start with AppCleaner, Hidden Bar, and CopyClip. They are all free, they solve genuinely annoying problems, and they take about 30 seconds each to set up. From there, Mos is a must if you use a non-Apple mouse, and CleanMyMac is worth it if you want to keep your system running well over time.

If you are curious about more free apps in the Apple ecosystem, I have covered some lesser-known iPhone apps too.

FAQ

Are these Mac apps safe to install?

All of the apps listed here are either available on the Mac App Store or are well-known, trusted applications within the Mac community. Several, including Hidden Bar and Mos, are open source, meaning their code is publicly available for anyone to inspect.

Does macOS have a built-in clipboard manager?

macOS added clipboard history to Spotlight search in recent updates, but it is fairly basic. A dedicated clipboard manager like CopyClip offers a persistent, scrollable history that is easier to access and more reliable for daily use.

Do I need to pay for any of these apps?

Most of the apps on this list are completely free. PopClip is a one-time purchase, Xnapper is free with an optional one-time payment to remove the watermark, and CleanMyMac is a paid app with a free trial. None of them require a subscription.