DevUtils is a native Mac application that bundles dozens of developer utilities — JSON formatting, encoding, hashing, diffing, regex testing, and more — into a single keyboard-accessible palette that lives permanently at your fingertips.
What is DevUtils?
DevUtils is an all-in-one developer workbench for macOS, designed to replace the scattered collection of browser tabs, CLI one-liners, and bookmarked web tools that most developers accumulate over years. Instead of opening a new browser tab to decode a Base64 string or validate a JWT, you hit a global shortcut and the tool is already waiting.
The app runs entirely offline. Your JWTs, database connection strings, API keys, and private code snippets never leave your machine — a meaningful distinction from the dozens of "free online tools" that process sensitive data through someone else's server.
What does DevUtils do best?
DevUtils excels at instant, friction-free access to the micro-tasks that interrupt a developer's flow dozens of times a day. The global shortcut (customisable) summons a compact window; you pick a tool, paste your input, and the output is already rendered before you've finished reading the screen.
- JSON formatter and validator — handles deeply nested or minified payloads without choking, and highlights syntax errors inline.
- JWT decoder — splits header, payload, and signature at a glance; optionally verifies the signature against a secret you provide locally.
- Encoding and hashing — Base64, URL encoding, MD5, SHA-1/256/512, bcrypt round-trips, all in one place.
- Regex tester — real-time match highlighting with capture group breakdown; supports JavaScript and other flavours.
- Unix timestamp converter — paste an epoch integer and get a human date instantly, with timezone awareness.
- Text diffing — word- and character-level diff that's cleaner than most standalone diff GUIs.
- Colour picker and converter — HEX ↔ RGB ↔ HSL without leaving the keyboard.
- Number base converter — decimal, hex, octal, binary in one shot.
The tool list keeps growing with each update, and the developer actively ships new utilities based on community requests. I've found myself reaching for the Lorem Ipsum generator and the HTML entity encoder more than I expected.
How much does DevUtils cost?
DevUtils is free to download and try, with a paid licence required to unlock the full tool set beyond a generous trial. The licence is a one-time purchase — no subscription, no annual renewal — which makes it unusually good value compared to SaaS-style developer toolkits. A single licence covers all your personal Macs.
If you're evaluating, the free tier gives you enough to decide whether the workflow click for you before spending anything.
Who should use DevUtils?
DevUtils is best suited to backend and full-stack engineers who regularly touch APIs, authentication tokens, database records, and configuration files — the people for whom JSON decoding or timestamp conversion is a background noise task that shouldn't require a context switch to the browser.
Frontend developers benefit too, particularly the CSS colour converter, regex tester, and HTML entity tools. If you're a DevOps engineer or spend time in terminals, the hashing and encoding tools save a surprising number of openssl and python3 -c invocations.
It's probably overkill if you write code only occasionally. But for anyone whose editor is open eight-plus hours a day, the accumulated time savings justify the price within the first week.
What are the best DevUtils alternatives?
The closest native-Mac competitor is Boop, which focuses on text transformations and is free and open-source — worth knowing about, though its tool list is narrower and it lacks the JWT and regex tools. Raycast extensions cover some of the same ground (Base64, JSON, timestamps) if you're already a Raycast user and don't want another app, but the experience is fragmented across dozens of community-built extensions with inconsistent quality.
Web-based alternatives like transform.tools and jwt.io are fine for non-sensitive work, but the offline-first, keyboard-driven experience of DevUtils is genuinely different — there's no page load, no ads, and no data leaving your machine. For sensitive tokens and keys, that last point matters more than most developers admit.
How does DevUtils compare to Raycast's built-in tools?
Raycast's developer extensions are powerful but piecemeal — each is a separate install, maintained by a different author, with different UX conventions. DevUtils offers a single coherent interface where every tool behaves the same way: paste in, result out, copy with one key. If you already use Raycast, running both is reasonable; they don't conflict, and DevUtils handles the deeper, more specialised cases (JWT signature verification, bcrypt, diff) that Raycast's ecosystem doesn't cover consistently.
