Looking for a coconutBattery alternative?

Updated 6 November 2026 · Who measures this.

coconutBattery has earned its 2 decades. Since 2005 it's been the Mac's household thermometer for battery health. Their own page describes it as showing "live information about the battery quality in your Mac, iPhone and iPad". The app is free, with a paid Plus upgrade. If you open it twice a year to check whether the battery is aging normally, it does that job with a long, trusted record.

Disclosure: WattMate is our app, and for some jobs the honest pick isn't us. coconutBattery reads iPhone and iPad batteries over a cable, which we do not. Everything said here about coconutBattery comes from their own page, checked on 2 November 2026.

The search for an "alternative" usually starts when the thermometer stops being enough: when the health number says one thing and your afternoon says another.

The gap: health says "fine", the battery still doesn't last

The most common battery complaint on a Mac isn't "my capacity is degraded". It's "health says 96%, so why am I barely making it to 2 PM?" A health snapshot can't answer that, because the answer isn't in the battery but in what's running. Answering it takes a different kind of tool:

• Power by app, in watts: live, ranked, with helpers grouped under the app they belong to.
• The price of a fix, in minutes: "quit this, get about 12 minutes back", and a re-measurement a couple of minutes after you quit that prints what actually changed.
• Nights, explained: which service woke the Mac while the lid was closed, how many times, for how long. Read from the macOS power log, which the health readouts do not touch.
• History: this week against last week, so decline is a chart, not an anecdote.

WattMate also keeps the thermometer: battery health (capacity against design, cycle count, temperature) is in the free part of the app, alongside the lifetime counters the battery keeps for itself. Our own month by month record of how the battery ages comes with Pro.

Side by side

Questions people ask

Why does coconutBattery show a different health number than System Settings?

Because your Mac keeps 2 capacity figures: a smoothed one and the controller's raw one. On the 4 Macs we read, the raw figure sat 2.4 to 2.8 points lower, and the gap is not constant. What macOS prints can match either figure or neither. Which of the 2 coconutBattery reads, their page does not say. Both numbers are real. Our health checker prints them side by side so you can see the gap on your own machine.

Is coconutBattery free?

There is a free version with a paid Plus upgrade, and their page says all Plus versions are one-time purchases. Its "Compare Editions" table lists what Plus adds: Wi-Fi instead of a cable for iPhone and iPad, their details in the menu bar, a battery lifetime analyzer, an advanced viewer, custom printing templates and notifications.

Can I use both?

Yes. WattMate only reads, so there is nothing for it to collide with.

Does either one tell me what is draining the battery right now?

A health readout answers how large the tank is, not what is emptying it. That is the part we measure: watts per app, and what quitting one gives back. The measured costs are here.

The short version

Checking whether a used MacBook's battery is healthy before buying it? coconutBattery is the classic for a reason. Trying to find out why a healthy battery keeps emptying by mid-afternoon, and what quitting the right app is worth? That's WattMate's whole job, receipt included.

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