The CPU, memory, disk and network meters Mac users have kept in their menu bar since 2002. Rewritten in Swift, signed and notarized, and now with one home and a maintainer who answers.
Free. For macOS 26 Tahoe and later, including macOS 27 Golden Gate, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. A 2.7 MB disk image, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Using an older macOS? Here’s what to get.
Turn on the meters you want, then pick a style, colors and an update interval for each. They sit in the menu bar like any other status item, and Command-drag rearranges them.
Load averaged across the processor or shown for every core, as a graph, a percentage or a bar. Temperature comes from the Apple silicon or Intel sensors. The menu lists the busiest processes, system ones included, and stays live while it’s open.
Used and free memory as a pie, a bar, a graph or plain numbers. The menu adds memory pressure, compression, paging and swap, so you can tell a busy Mac from one that’s running out of room.
Read and write activity in six icon styles. The menu shows the free space on every mounted volume; choose one to open it in Finder, or hold Option to eject it.
Traffic on your main connection, or one you pick, as arrows, numbers or a graph. The menu lists every interface with its addresses, link speed and totals, and connects VPN and PPP services.
Each meter opens a menu with the numbers behind it: the processes using the CPU, the space left on every disk, what memory is doing, and the state of every network interface. A link at the bottom of each menu opens Activity Monitor.
Preferences sit one click away, with a tab for every meter.
MenuMeters is older than most of the Macs it runs on. It has had three homes and been rewritten twice, and it has survived because people kept caring about it.
At Raging Menace, for Mac OS X Jaguar. The meters are menu extras, small plug-ins that run inside the system’s own menu bar process, set up from a pane in System Preferences. It’s free, its source is open under the GPL, and it finds its way into a great many menu bars.
Version 1.8.1 arrives in October 2014, for OS X Yosemite.
OS X El Capitan stops loading third-party menu extras, and MenuMeters stops working. Before El Capitan has even shipped, Yuji Tachikawa publishes a version that runs as an ordinary app with status items. For the next decade, that fork is MenuMeters.
With macOS Catalina, MenuMeters 2.0 leaves System Preferences behind and becomes a signed, notarized app of its own.
Big Sur’s new look and the first M1 Macs arrive in the same autumn. MenuMeters ships as a universal app.
The last regular release for almost five years. In the meantime the project gathers more than 240 forks and more than 100 open issues. Fixes for each new macOS are spread across those forks, and some pull requests have waited since 2021. Version 2.1.7 follows in October 2026, with a community fix for a crash on macOS 27.
Twenty-four years of Objective-C, nib files and compatibility layers become a single Swift app for macOS 26, with its interface built in code.
Before shipping a line of it, I audited the rewrite for backdoors and hidden network access. There were none, but there were bugs: the CPU meter read close to 100% all the time, Intel temperatures never appeared, and the network and disk menus could freeze or show stale numbers. Version 3.1.0 fixes them, restores the license notices and credits, and adds signed automatic updates.
MenuMeters now lives at github.com/menumeters-osx and here, with issues open and a maintainer reading them.
Like a lot of people, I kept MenuMeters running by hopping from fork to fork. A new macOS would come out, something would break, and the search would start again. Which fork builds? Which one has the patch for this release? Is the disk image on that page signed by anyone at all? The fixes were out there, but scattered across hundreds of repositories, in pull requests that waited for years.
None of that is anyone’s fault, and I want to be clear about it. Alex Harper wrote MenuMeters and gave it away. Yuji Tachikawa kept it alive for more than a decade, in their own free time, for nothing. gonejack rewrote the whole thing in Swift. Dozens of people sent patches. I’m grateful to every one of them. Free time runs out, and nobody owes anyone a release.
Still, an app this many people rely on deserves better care than that. So I’m putting my time where my mouth is: MenuMeters now has one home, one download, signed updates, and a maintainer who has signed up for the job.
NERv
Maintainer
Your settings are copied over the first time 3.1.0 starts. Then delete the old copy: it has a different bundle identifier, so macOS treats it as a separate app with its own login item.
| Your macOS | Get |
|---|---|
| macOS 27 Golden Gate | MenuMeters 3.1, from this site. Apple silicon. |
| macOS 26 Tahoe | MenuMeters 3.1, from this site. Apple silicon and Intel. |
| macOS 15 Sequoia, macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 13 Ventura, macOS 12 Monterey | Yuji Tachikawa’s MenuMeters 2.1.7. |
| macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 10.15 Catalina, macOS 10.14 Mojave, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, macOS 10.12 Sierra, OS X 10.11 El Capitan | The older build on Yuji Tachikawa’s download page: an app on Catalina and Big Sur, a System Preferences pane up to Mojave. |
| OS X 10.10 Yosemite and earlier | Alex Harper’s original, from Raging Menace. |
App Store apps have to run in Apple’s sandbox, and inside it MenuMeters can’t list other apps' processes, read the Intel temperature sensors or eject disks. Apple silicon temperatures come from an interface that App Review doesn’t allow, and the GPL doesn’t fit the App Store’s terms either. So MenuMeters is distributed the way it always has been: as a free download, now signed and notarized.
The Swift rewrite is built on current AppKit and tested on macOS 26 Tahoe and macOS 27 Golden Gate. Keeping it focused on current systems is what makes the one-week promise possible. Older Macs can keep using an earlier version: the table under Install shows which.
It asks only if you turn on “Opens specific panes” in the preferences. That option lets MenuMeters switch Activity Monitor to the tab that matches the meter you clicked. Leave it off and MenuMeters never asks.
On the first launch it adds itself to your login items, once. After that it’s your choice: the Startup checkbox in the About tab turns it on or off, and so does System Settings, under General, then Login Items.
Stats is a great, actively maintained monitor that covers much more, from battery to fans. MenuMeters does less on purpose: four meters, the look many people have known for twenty years, and very little else. Pick the one that suits you.
Yes. Clone the repository and run ./build-clt.sh; Apple’s Command Line Tools are enough, and Xcode works too. The README has the details.
Please open an issue. Include your Mac model and macOS version, and a screenshot if the problem is visible.
Alex Harper created MenuMeters at Raging Menace and maintained it from 2002 to 2014.
Yuji Tachikawa brought it to El Capitan and kept it going from 2015 to 2026.
gonejack rewrote it in Swift in 2026.
With code from Jeffrey Lim, Enrico M. Crisostomo, schriftgestalt, Stephen, Lauri Nurmi, Marc Schwede, Hofi, David Gilman, luckman212, Justin, Julian Geywitz, Emir Sarı, billatq, Alexander Graf, Roman Turchin, Nick Lamkins, Maxime Lardier, Max Beckman-Harned, Joel Edström, Jeremiah Morris, Fred Wenzel, Fred Stutzman, Damian Nowak, Bryan Ischo, Andrew Udvare and Andras Suller. Updates are delivered by Sparkle.