Mac battery apps, one by one

Updated 1 September 2026. That date covers the Mac 4 Breakfast card only; the other five rest on checks from 23 August 2026, and each review page carries its own date. Every claim on these pages is a quote from the product's own site. We do not measure other people's software. Who measures this.

We sell one of the apps in this category, WattMate, so read these accordingly. What we can promise is the method: nothing here is written from memory, every claim links to the page it came from, and where another app is the better pick, the page says so.

The reviews

WhatBattery Free and open source, with unrounded health and live watts in the free tier and per-app watts in a £9.99 Pro. States plainly that it is "strictly read-only", so it will never write to your battery. Better than ours on three counts, listed on the page. Mac 4 Breakfast The closest product to ours in intent: per-app watt-hours, sleep-drain breakdown, other Apple devices, and a free tier that already covers health and cycles. Their launch price ended on 31 August as their page said it would; Pro reads $9.99 one-time, checked 1 September 2026, and one payment still covers a lot of ground. iStat Menus Not really a battery app: a whole-system monitor where battery is one of nine menu items. Twenty years of record, no analytics anywhere including their own website, and a sensors readout that shows the machine's power rather than a breakdown by app. AlDente The best known charge limiter, with a free tier that includes the limiter itself and support reaching back to macOS 12. Since macOS 26.4 caps charging natively, the question it answers has changed shape. BatFi Charge limiting with rules by time and place, one payment, no subscription. It also lists the apps using significant energy, which puts it closer to us than most limiters get. Energiza Charge control that still supports Intel MacBooks back to 2010 and macOS 10.13, which is hardware we deliberately do not reach. Five machines on the one-time licence.

Head to head with ours

A review is about their product. A comparison with WattMate is about choosing, and those live separately: Juicy · AlDente · coconutBattery · TurtleBar · Endurance. Two of those five end by recommending you stay where you are.

If you would rather start from the problem than from a product name, which one is best for which job is the page for that: finding what is using the charge, controlling charging, checking health and alerting are four different jobs that share one shelf.

Why this list is short

Six reviews rather than a dozen, on purpose. Three products we looked at could not be written up honestly.

Endurance publishes no system requirements at all: searching their site for "requires", "Intel", "Apple silicon" and every macOS version name returns nothing. A review whose platform section is one long "not stated" is not a review.

AirBuddy and AirBattery are well documented, and both answer a different question: how much charge is left in the things around your Mac. None of the five points we compare on belongs to their job, so a page about them would be a column of "not claimed" with nothing useful in it.

The list will grow as products are checked, not before. Each one takes a pass through their own pages and a second pass to verify the quotes, because writing about a dozen products from memory is exactly how a competitor of ours ended up publishing two claims their rivals' own sites disprove.

Questions people ask

Can I trust a review written by a competitor?

Check it rather than trusting it. Every claim quotes the source and links to it, so the page can be falsified in about a minute. That is a deliberately higher bar than "we tested it", which you would have to take on faith.

Why not just test the other apps?

Because our instruments are set up for WattMate, and running them on someone else's software would compare methods rather than products. A number we produced about their app would say more about our measurement than about their work.

How current are the prices?

Each page carries the date it was checked, and a script re-fetches these sites weekly to flag changes. Where a price has a stated expiry, the page prints the expiry too.