iStat Menus review

Updated 23 August 2026 · quoted from their own pages, checked on that date. We have not measured their app. Disclosure: WattMate is our app, and iStat Menus is not really our competitor — it is a different category of tool. Who measures this.

Bjango calls it "The ultimate system monitor", and battery is one item among nine. If you want CPU, GPU, memory, disks, network, sensors, fans, time and weather in your menu bar, this is the long-standing answer, and the battery readout comes along with it.

What it says about batteries

Their product page: "Detailed info on your battery's current state and a highly configurable menu item that can change if you're draining, charging, or completely charged. Plus, battery levels for AirPods, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad and other Bluetooth devices."

Two things follow from their own help pages. A remaining-time estimate is available and can be placed in the menu bar: they describe "adding a time until drained to your menu bar while your battery is draining". And health is defined in their glossary as "A comparison of the battery's capacity right now verses the designed capacity" (their spelling).

Watts, but not the kind we mean

Their sensors item lists "temperatures, hard drive temperatures (where supported), fans, CPU frequency, GPU frequency (where supported), voltages, current and power". That is hardware telemetry from the Mac's sensors, and it is genuinely useful — but it is the machine's power, not a breakdown by app.

The per-app lists they do advertise are by CPU, by memory and by network bandwidth. Searching their version seven pages, a per-app energy list is not among the features claimed today.

Worth saying plainly, because it would be easy to imply otherwise: they shipped exactly that once. Their own version history records, for 5.0 on 5 August 2014, "Added a list of process using significant energy to the battery dropdown". It is not claimed on the current pages, but "they have never done this" would be false.

Price and terms

Their wording	Where
"14-day free trial"	product page
"iStat Menus is also available via Setapp… For US$9.99/mo, use iStat Menus plus more than 250 other apps."	product page
"It can not control fan speeds." (Mac App Store build)	their help
"Apart from those things, it's the full iStat Menus."	their help

A direct-purchase dollar price does not appear on the page we checked, so we are not printing one. Their own routes are the App Store, Setapp and direct download.

Where it is better than ours

Scope. Nothing we do touches disks, network throughput, fan speeds or weather. If the question is "what is my Mac doing", this answers a far wider version of it than we do.

Track record. Bjango has shipped this since the 2000s, and their version history is public back to the beginning.

Privacy, stated and extended to their own site. "iStat Menus and all our products are privacy focused, with no ads, no analytics, and no creepy tracking. There's also no tracking on this website." They also publish a help page listing which domains the app contacts, which is rare in this market and worth copying.

Where we do something different

The two apps answer different questions. Theirs is "what is the state of this machine", across nine subsystems. Ours is "which app is spending the charge, what do I get back if I quit it, and did that actually work" — one question, measured in watts and then checked against the battery afterwards.

If you already run iStat Menus for the other eight items, nothing here suggests dropping it. The two do not conflict.

Questions people ask

Does iStat Menus show which app is draining the battery?

Their current pages advertise per-app lists for CPU, memory and network, not for energy. A battery-energy process list existed in version 5.0 in 2014; it is not among the features listed for version 7.

Does it show remaining time?

Yes. Their help describes putting a "time until drained" in the menu bar while the battery is discharging, and hiding it while plugged in.

Is the Mac App Store version the same?

Almost. Their own help says it cannot control fan speeds and needs a helper for some stats, then adds: "Apart from those things, it's the full iStat Menus."

Is there a free version?

There is a 14-day trial rather than a free tier, in their words: "Download iStat Menus now and use it for a couple of weeks before making up your mind."