At a glance
| iStat Menus | Stats | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ~$13 one-time (or via Setapp) | Free |
| License | Proprietary, commercial | MIT open source |
| Developer | Bjango (Australia) | Serhiy Mytrovtsiy (community) |
| UI polish | High - refined, consistent | Good - clean, occasionally rough edges |
| Customisation | Extensive, per-module | Extensive, per-module |
| Sensor support | Yes - temperatures, fans, voltage | Yes - temperatures, fans |
| Apple Silicon native | Yes | Yes (universal binary) |
| Last updated | Actively maintained | Actively maintained on GitHub |
iStat Menus: what you get for $13
iStat Menus is made by Bjango, a small Australian software studio with a reputation for meticulous design work. The app has been around since 2008 and has tracked every macOS transition since Snow Leopard. That kind of longevity is not accidental; it reflects a team that treats the product as a long-term commitment rather than a side project.
The feature set. iStat Menus monitors CPU load (per-core and aggregate), GPU usage, memory pressure, network throughput, disk activity, battery health, and sensor temperatures including fans. Each module can be independently configured: you choose what appears in the menu bar, how it displays, what colours and graphs it uses, and what notification thresholds trigger alerts. The notification system is particularly capable. You can set an alert when memory pressure exceeds a threshold, when a temperature sensor hits a ceiling, or when network usage spikes. These alerts are configurable to a degree that the free alternatives rarely match.
The polish budget. Bjango sweats the small things. The graphs are smooth, the typography is consistent, the popdown panels are well-structured. It is the kind of app where the quality is obvious in the first five minutes. On a Mac where your menu bar is precious screen real estate, an app that earns its presence matters.
Weather and extras. iStat Menus includes a weather widget that integrates directly into the menu bar clock. This is genuinely useful and something Stats does not replicate. If you want a unified system stats plus weather view in one bar item, iStat Menus is the natural choice.
Setapp inclusion. Like CleanMyMac, iStat Menus is included in the Setapp bundle. If you already subscribe to Setapp for other apps, iStat Menus costs you nothing extra. That changes the value equation considerably for Setapp subscribers.
The main caveat: at $13 it is a one-time purchase, not a subscription, which is a reasonable ask for what it delivers. The price is fair. The question is only whether Stats closes the gap enough that paying at all feels unnecessary.
Stats: what you get for free
Stats is an open-source menu-bar system monitor maintained by Serhiy Mytrovtsiy on GitHub. It is MIT-licensed, meaning you can inspect the source code, build it yourself, or fork it. In practice, most people download the release binary directly.
Core feature parity. Stats monitors CPU (per-core), GPU, memory, network, disk, battery, and sensor temperatures. It supports fan speed readings on compatible hardware. Each module can be toggled, reordered, and configured independently. The customisation depth is genuinely comparable to iStat Menus: you can choose graph styles, colours, what to display in compact vs. expanded views, and how the popdown panel is laid out.
Active development. The GitHub repository is regularly updated. Issues are triaged, pull requests are merged, and new macOS versions are typically supported within a reasonable window of release. This is not an abandoned project; it is an actively developed one, supported by the community and by the author's own continued investment.
Apple Silicon support. Stats ships as a universal binary and reads the M-series unified memory architecture correctly. It splits CPU usage across performance and efficiency cores, which is the right behaviour on Apple Silicon. There is no meaningful gap here compared to iStat Menus.
No telemetry. Being open source, the absence of telemetry is verifiable rather than just claimed. If you care about Mac apps with no telemetry, Stats is a strong choice on principle alone.
The honest limitations: Stats lacks the weather widget. Its notification system is less granular than iStat Menus. Some of its preference panels feel less polished. And because it ships outside the Mac App Store, you need to trust a manual installation, although it is notarized by Apple. None of these are dealbreakers for most people, but they are the real gaps.
The honest verdict
Most people will be happy with Stats.
The core job of a system monitor is to show you what your Mac is doing. Stats does that job reliably and completely. CPU load, memory pressure, network throughput, disk activity, temperatures, battery: all present, all configurable, all free. If you have been paying for iStat Menus without using the notification system, the weather widget, or the more refined UI, you are paying for features you do not use.
iStat Menus earns its price for a specific type of user. If you want fine-grained alerts, a unified weather display, or simply prefer the experience of a polished commercial app with a dedicated support channel, $13 is a fair ask. Bjango has an 18-year track record of maintaining the app across every macOS change. That history has value. The app will almost certainly be updated for whatever Apple ships next.
The practical recommendation: install Stats first. Use it for two weeks. If you find yourself wanting something it does not offer, switch to iStat Menus then. Stats is free, so trialling it costs nothing. Most people who do this do not end up switching.
You can read more detail about iStat Menus in our post on Shiny vs iStat Menus, and about broader system monitoring options in how to monitor memory from the menu bar.
The Shiny footnote
Both iStat Menus and Stats are monitoring tools: they show you what is happening on your Mac. Monitoring is one job. Acting on what you see is a different job entirely. When your memory pressure graph turns red and your Mac starts reaching for swap space, neither app does anything about it. Shiny does one thing: it clears inactive memory in a single menu-bar click, for a one-time $4.99 with no subscription. It is not a system monitor and it is not trying to be. If watching memory is one job, acting on it is another, and Shiny is built for the second one.