MacWindow Managers

All five of these are free at the core, with only two — Rectangle and AltTab — layering on a small optional paid upgrade. Rectangle, from Ryan Hanson, is the direct spiritual successor to the discontinued Spectacle app — its own license file credits Spectacle, and it offers Spectacle’s original keyboard shortcuts on first run — with edge/corner snap areas and portrait-display support included free; a $9.99 Rectangle Pro upgrade (10-day trial) adds quicker snapping and fully custom shortcuts. AltTab, built and maintained since 2016 by a developer using only the handle lwouis (8.6M downloads, 16k GitHub stars, per the project’s own site), solves a different problem: it replaces macOS’s plain app-icon switcher with live thumbnails of every open window, grouped or flat. Its core switching stays free and open source; an AltTab Pro upgrade ($9.99 one-time or $24.99 lifetime) adds in-switcher search, extra display styles, and up to 9 independently configurable shortcuts instead of the free tier’s one.

Amethyst and Hammerspoon both do automatic tiling rather than manual snapping, but reach it from opposite directions. Amethyst, from Ian Ynda-Hummel, ships eleven built-in xmonad-style layouts (Tall, Wide, Column, BSP, and more) that arrange every window with a keyboard shortcut, no configuration required — and it’s free with no paid tier at all, its README explicitly redirecting donation interest to charities instead. Hammerspoon isn’t a dedicated window manager at all — it’s a general Lua scripting bridge to macOS’s own APIs (windows, screens, battery, wifi, clipboard), and tiling is something you or a shared community “Spoon” script on top of it; that flexibility is also the cost of entry, since out of the box it does nothing. BetterCmdTab, from solo Polish developer Artur Rok, splits the difference and says so directly in its own FAQ, naming both the stock Cmd+Tab switcher and AltTab as what it’s built to replace: three switcher layouts, fuzzy app search and launch, and window tiling (halves, corners, maximize) baked in for free under GPL v3, with zero telemetry — no Pro tier gating any of it, unlike AltTab’s newer paid layer.