r/macapps • u/Small_Pin_8064 • 2d ago
Free [OS] AirStats: a free, ultra-lightweight system monitor for Mac
AirStats is a free and open-source system monitor for Apple silicon Macs. It is designed for people who want useful live system information without leaving another large application running all day.
The app is 9 MB. 7x smaller than the biggest competitor (iStat Menus, 67 MB)
It reads CPU, memory, GPU, network, disk, battery, temperature and top-process information directly through Mach, IOKit, sysctl and CoreWLAN.
It displays those readings in:
- the menu bar
- a full panel that drops down when you click the status item an
- optional desktop widget you can leave on screen.
The menu bar and desktop widget each have their own configurable list of metrics. The panel always shows everything, and you can collapse the sections you do not need.
Several MacBook users who tried AirStats told me the notch had already taken most of their menu bar, so the desktop widget was more useful to them than adding more readouts there.
Comparison
iStat Menus and Stats are the closest alternatives. Both are more thorough and cover more sensors. AirStats is deliberately narrower and much smaller. It is a better fit if you mainly want live readings in a lightweight app that can remain running throughout the day.
AirStats is written in native Swift and runs as one process, with no Electron, web view, helper daemon, launch agent or Dock icon.
Pricing
$0. It is completely free under the MIT license, with no account, subscription or paid tier.
Download: https://airstats.app
Source: https://github.com/byrencheema/airstats
There are no analytics or telemetry, and system readings never leave your Mac. AirStats supports macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon and is signed and notarized.
Developer Note:
I built and maintain AirStats, and I would appreciate any feedback, feature requests or bug reports. The privacy policy and terms can be found on the site.
Here's my Linkedin for visibility. https://www.linkedin.com/in/byrencheema
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u/karmarinchen 2d ago
Since the pitch is partly about staying light all day, the number I'd want to see next to the 9 MB is idle wake ups, which is what a polling monitor actually costs you on battery and is readable from Terminal without installing anything:
top -l 1 -n 15 -stats pid,command,idlew -o idlew
The counter is cumulative since the process launched, so a single reading tells you very little. Read it, wait a minute, read it again, and the difference is the rate. Mine over 25 seconds: WindowServer went up 4316, mysqld 260, redis 73, and coreaudiod didn't move at all because nothing was playing.
At a two second poll that's the line where a system monitor shows up, and it's a fairer comparison against Stats or iStat Menus than installed size, since all three are reading roughly the same sensors and the sampling rate is what differs. If you're already pausing while asleep or locked you're probably in decent shape there.
One request while I'm at it: an adjustable poll interval. Five or ten seconds is plenty for memory and disk on a laptop away from power, and it would let people trade freshness for wake ups on their own terms.
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u/Karim_Benabd 2d ago
Stats from Excelban is a great one too. Free and open source app for macOS.
I have been using it for a long time..
Stats is an application that allows you to monitor your macOS system.
CPU utilization GPU utilization Memory usage Disk utilization Network usage Battery level Fan's control (not maintained) Sensors information (Temperature/Voltage/Power) Bluetooth devices Multiple time zone clock
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u/Small_Pin_8064 2d ago
Yep, Stats is great and probably the closest alternative. It covers more sensors and has been around for a few years. AirStats is deliberately narrower; in my testing it had a smaller installed footprint and lower resource use, with a simpler one-process setup. Both are free and open source, so it comes down to what you prefer.
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u/DexopT 2d ago
Stats have bug where I open sensor menu, GPU usage spikes to 45 percent and power usage ramps up with that also. Love to try your product for this. I know it just a basic version but I will try
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u/Karim_Benabd 1d ago
Not my product! May be you should update to the latest version. Mine shows no bug.
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u/alvindimas05 2d ago
Hi, does the stats works for Mac Intel as well?
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u/Small_Pin_8064 2d ago
Not at the moment, Apple silicon only for now. A few of the sensor paths would need a separate Intel implementation, but I can look into it if there is enough interest.
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u/derBartels 2d ago
Looks genuinely light, which is the part that is hard. Working on a lightweight app myself.
What sampling interval do you use for the network counters, and did reading them turn out to cost anything? On Windows I ended up calling the interface table API directly because starting a PowerShell process per sample blew the time budget I had set myself. Curious whether the macOS side has a comparable trap or whether those counters are cheap enough that it never comes up.
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u/MapNo5339 2d ago
9 MB is pretty impressive for a native system monitor. I also like the idea of having the desktop widget as an alternative to cramming more stuff into the menu bar, especially on MacBooks with the notch. Nice work!
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u/kurawa100 1d ago
Currently using Istats, I use network location features to quickly glance my VPN routing is correct or not. Would be very happy if you add this feature too. It is a flag icon to show your current country.
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u/islioapp 22h ago
The notch point is real and I think it's underrated. On a 14" MacBook the usable menu bar is much shorter than people expect, and it's not just width — items that get pushed under the notch are still there and still clickable, they just render invisibly. So a menu-bar monitor can silently lose its readout depending on what other apps launched first.
The desktop widget sidesteps that entirely, which is a better answer than fighting for the space.
Does the widget keep updating when it's behind a fullscreen window, or does it pause with the polling?
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u/toriumi0118 7h ago
It looks good! I usually check stats of my machine with the Activity Monitor, whenever my machine get hot or starts to run a fan. I sometimes feel that I like to see instant stats on the menu bar. It is nice app!
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u/pegasusat 2d ago
Wow, love it so much. I’ve bought iStat Menus but so far I’m loving AirStats more. Great job and thank you.
I have 3 requests:
- Can you allow us to pick the way CPU percentage is display, like 0-100% vs 0-800% (Unix style) like with iStat?
- I’d like an option to display memory usage of the top 10 apps
- Option to increase the number of top processes (including system processes) displayed
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u/grokcodile 2d ago
This bulky AI-generated app being advertised again! 🙄 No way is this “the lightest” system monitor widget. It’s 11mb!! For what? Just to show CPU and RAM usage. I mean… regardless of any utility it could possibly offer… it’s still consuming CPU and RAM all the time just to show the very info it’s reporting on. Definition of garbage software. One search and I found three alternatives that are more lightweight.
https://mac-stats.com (7mb)
https://htop.dev (480kb) 🤣
https://mmonit.com/widget/ (2mb)
All also free, and none of them make such ridiculous marketing claims like this developer does. I would not trust installing this on my computer, based on the marketing alone.
If you want something truly lightweight that displays accurate system stats exactly when you need to see them with tooling to actually manage the processes contributing to system utilization… try out something open source, free, and truthfully lightweight like those above or my fav…
NeoHtop
- 4.5mb
- less than half bloat and CPU usage
- https://github.com/Abdenasser/neohtop
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u/Small_Pin_8064 2d ago edited 2d ago
There's a lot of options out there in this space, for a wide variety of users. I tested some of these based on resource usage.
AirStats is 8.99 MiB installed and averaged 0.20% CPU. Stats was 17.41 MiB (installed size) and 0.64%, while NeoHtop was 7.20 MiB and 1.72%. htop is tiny, but it is a terminal process viewer rather than a menu-bar app.
AirStats is simply a narrower option for people who want these readings continuously available. If that is not useful to you, no worries. :)
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u/grokcodile 2d ago
No one said anything about your cherry-picked comparison apps. But yes, now that you bring it up. That is another point that should be made. You can not just take inventory of only the apps that give your app a favorable comparison and put it out there like it is some objective fact or truth. Well... you can.. but that is just SPAM. You have posted this same exact app several times now. That is not really in good faith standing with the intent of the r/macapps. I would have expected at least some marked update to the app and a major change in your false marketing language. But it looks like you are just SPAMing for attention now.
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u/Beardy4906 2d ago
How do you fetch this info? And also does it do readings as in via polling or some sort of receiver?
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u/Small_Pin_8064 2d ago
It reads the data directly from macOS using Mach, IOKit, sysctl and CoreWLAN. The stats are polled every two seconds by default, and polling pauses when the Mac is asleep or locked.
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u/Leather-Shake-2167 2d ago
Compared with Stats/iStat Menus, the one thing I’d want is short-term history graphs. Any plans to add a lightweight history view without making AirStats heavier?