Keyboard Maestro

Keyboard Maestro is a Mac automation engine from Stairways Software that lets you build complex, multi-step workflows triggered by keystrokes, time, application events, or virtually any system condition — no coding required.

What is Keyboard Maestro?

Keyboard Maestro is the most capable general-purpose automation tool available for macOS. Where Apple's built-in Shortcuts app handles simple, linear tasks, Keyboard Maestro gives you a full visual programming environment: conditional logic, loops, variables, subroutines, and hundreds of built-in actions covering everything from text manipulation to window management to REST API calls. I've been running it daily for years, and I still discover actions I hadn't needed yet.

The core concept is a macro — a named sequence of actions attached to one or more triggers. Triggers can be global hotkeys, application launches, clipboard changes, USB device connections, cron-style schedules, or a typed string abbreviation. That flexibility is what separates Keyboard Maestro from simpler launchers like Raycast or Alfred, which are primarily search and quick-launch tools rather than full automation platforms.

What does Keyboard Maestro do best?

Keyboard Maestro excels at bridging gaps between applications that don't natively talk to each other. I use it to extract a tracking number from an email, paste it into a logistics website, wait for the page to load, scrape the status field, and then push a notification to my menu bar — all triggered by a single keystroke. That kind of multi-app choreography is exactly where it shines.

• Text expansion and transformation — far richer than the system's built-in snippets; you can manipulate case, strip whitespace, run regex substitutions, and insert dynamic tokens like the current date or clipboard history.
• Window and space management — resize, reposition, and tile windows with pixel precision, or build layouts that restore your entire workspace when you open a specific project folder.
• Web and UI automation — click buttons, fill forms, and read values from any app or webpage, even ones that expose no API.
• Clipboard history and named clipboards — a genuinely useful clipboard manager built right in, with the ability to store and recall dozens of named snippets.

How much does Keyboard Maestro cost?

Keyboard Maestro is paid software, sold as a one-time purchase directly from Stairways Software at keyboardmaestro.com. There is no subscription, and the licence covers all Macs you personally own. Major version upgrades are offered at a discounted upgrade price rather than forcing a full repurchase. Given that I've used this on the same licence across multiple machine generations, the effective cost per year is remarkably low for a tool I use dozens of times every day. A free trial is available if you want to stress-test it before committing.

Who should use Keyboard Maestro?

Anyone who repeats the same sequence of actions more than a handful of times a week should try it — but it particularly rewards writers (text snippets, reformatting paste, drafting templates), developers (terminal macros, build triggers, git workflow shortcuts), and power users who operate across many applications simultaneously. If your automation needs are modest — launch an app, search the web — Raycast or Alfred will serve you faster. If you want to build something that would otherwise require a shell script, a Python cron job, and an AppleScript hack stapled together, Keyboard Maestro is the right tool.

It is less suited to complete beginners who have never thought about automation at all. The macro editor is approachable but not trivial; there is a real learning curve in understanding triggers, action groups, and variable scope. The payoff, though, is enormous once you internalize the model.

What are the best Keyboard Maestro alternatives?

The most common alternatives are Automator (Apple's own, free, but limited and largely abandoned), Apple Shortcuts (improved in recent macOS releases, good for simple flows, poor for complex logic), Raycast (excellent launcher with scripting extensions, but not a full automation engine), and BetterTouchTool (overlaps on hotkeys and gestures, weaker on multi-step logic). For terminal-centric users, Hammerspoon offers similar depth via Lua scripting with no GUI. None of these individually replaces the breadth of what Keyboard Maestro covers — most serious Mac power users end up running Keyboard Maestro alongside Raycast rather than choosing between them.