Stats

Stats is a free, open-source macOS system monitor that lives in the menu bar and surfaces CPU, GPU, RAM, disk, network, battery, and sensor data at a glance — all without launching a separate window.

What is Stats?

Stats is a lightweight menu-bar utility for macOS that replaces the need to open Activity Monitor every time you suspect your machine is running hot or your RAM is getting squeezed. Built and maintained by developer Serhiy Londar, it sits quietly in your menu bar and gives you a live dashboard of every meaningful system resource — with a level of visual customization that nothing else in this category matches.

The project is fully open-source and free to download, which means you get a professional-grade monitoring tool without a subscription or a nag screen. If you've ever caught yourself tabbing to Activity Monitor mid-call because the fans kicked in, Stats makes that reflex unnecessary.

What does Stats do best?

Stats excels at making dense system telemetry readable at a glance, directly from the menu bar, without stealing any screen real estate or focus. Each metric — CPU load, memory pressure, GPU utilization, disk I/O, network throughput, battery health, and even individual sensor temperatures — can be enabled or disabled independently, and each has multiple display styles to choose from: a mini graph, a percentage, a pie chart, or a raw number.

What sets it apart is the configurability. You can reorder the widgets, choose a light or dark popover, set custom update intervals per sensor, and toggle between displaying aggregate load or per-core CPU bars. I've been running it for weeks with CPU graph + network throughput visible inline, and a tap on either opens a popover showing every core's utilization and active network interface speeds. It's the kind of information density that turns a menu bar into a real ops panel.

The GPU module deserves a special mention for Apple Silicon machines. Stats surfaces Metal utilization and memory usage for the unified GPU, which almost nothing else exposes in a menu-bar format. If you're running diffusion models or doing video grading, that alone makes it worth installing.

Is Stats free?

Yes — Stats is completely free and open-source under the MIT licence. There is no paid tier, no premium unlock, and no telemetry. You can download it directly from the developer's GitHub repository or via Homebrew (brew install stats). Because it's open-source, the community can audit exactly what it reads and why, which is a meaningful reassurance for a tool that has deep access to hardware sensors.

Who should use Stats?

Stats is best suited to developers, designers, and anyone who regularly pushes their Mac hard — compiling large projects, running local AI models, encoding video, or simply keeping an eye on a remote-work machine's battery drain. If your workflow is light browsing and email, the menu bar overhead may not be worth it. But if you've ever wondered mid-Xcode build whether your M-series chip is thermal throttling, Stats answers that question without a single extra click.

It's also a natural choice for anyone coming from iStatMenus who bristles at the subscription price. Stats doesn't match iStatMenus feature-for-feature — iStatMenus has richer historical logging, a more polished notification centre widget, and a longer track record — but for real-time monitoring it covers the vast majority of use-cases at zero cost.

What are the best Stats alternatives?

The two most direct competitors are iStatMenus (paid, feature-rich, excellent historical graphs, the long-standing gold standard) and MenuMeters (free, venerable, but visually dated and slower to support new Apple Silicon metrics). Hot focuses exclusively on thermal throttling and is a useful complement rather than a replacement. Apple's own Activity Monitor provides the deepest process-level detail but requires you to open a full window — it's a tool, not a monitor. For most users who want always-visible system telemetry without spending money, Stats is the current best answer.

How does Stats compare to iStatMenus?

iStatMenus is the polished, paid incumbent — it has notification-centre integration, weather widgets, a more refined default aesthetic, and years of community polish. Stats matches or exceeds it on raw metric coverage (especially GPU on Apple Silicon) and wins decisively on price. The main trade-off is historical data: iStatMenus logs trends over days and weeks; Stats shows you right now. For a developer or power-user who wants a live readout rather than a trend log, Stats is the rational choice.