MacBattery & Power

Three of the five do the exact same core job — a menu bar click that stops your Mac from sleeping — and all three are free. Amphetamine, the best-known of the trio and built by William Gustafson since 2014 (Apple has featured it editorially), goes furthest past the basic toggle with Triggers: rules that start a keep-awake session automatically when a specific app launches, an external display connects, or battery stays above a threshold. Caffeine is the original of the category, created by Tomas Franzén in 2006 and open-sourced under MIT since a 2018 handoff to current maintainer Michael Jones — just a coffee-cup menu bar icon with optional timed sessions. KeepingYouAwake, from independent German developer Marcel Dierkes, does the same one-click job but adds a feature the other two don’t: it can disable itself automatically once battery drops below a set level, so a keep-awake session doesn’t run a laptop dead unattended.

AlDente and coconutBattery both go past keep-awake into actually managing battery health, from opposite ends. AlDente, from Austria’s AppHouseKitchen since 2021, caps charging at a set ceiling (commonly 80%) to slow long-term wear — free for the core Charge Limiter, with a $13.99/year or $24.99-lifetime Pro tier adding automatic discharge scheduling and heat protection. It’s also the rare app whose own developer has publicly addressed being partially Sherlocked: a company blog post takes on macOS 26.4’s beta adding a native manual Charge Limiter to Apple’s Optimized Battery Charging directly, arguing Pro’s automatic scheduling and calibration still go beyond what Apple ships. coconutBattery, unavailable through any App Store and only distributed from coconut-flavour.com, reads live battery health for the Mac it’s running on plus any connected iPhone or iPad, going back to 2005; the free tier covers the core diagnostic view, and a one-time (not subscription) Plus upgrade — $12.95 for the current version or $17.95 for lifetime — adds historical temperature and voltage analytics plus low-battery alerts.