Best free productivity apps for Mac

From its maker: Caddie brings tasks, notes, calendar and meeting notes together on Mac, with hold-fn dictation, a coach in the notch, booking links and a hub for Claude Code and Codex via https://usecaddie.app/mcp. Supports teams.

From its maker: Blook is a self-hosted, private, and lightweight bookmark manager for the links you use every day, beautifully organised and always instantly searchable.

Slap Alert is for founders who like to see a sale land. It watches Stripe, Paddle, RevenueCat, Polar or Dodo Payments with a read-only key, and Shopify orders arrive by webhook. For every new sale, a pixel monkey slaps a sticky note on your screen with who paid and how much, and win cards mark milestones like your first $1k. It is free for scripts, or $19 once with a 7-day trial.

From its maker: A private file organizer for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android. Save links, photos, videos, documents and notes into folders, stored in your own iCloud and encrypted on your device.

From its maker: Native macOS meeting notes app with Active Listening, real-time transcription, always-on AI chat, and Google Calendar integration.

From its maker: Group apps, files, folders, and links in your Mac Dock with Otterdock. Add desktop widgets and empiezan free with 2 groups on macOS 14 or later.

From its maker: Pixtamer is a native Mac app that turns batches of images into web-ready assets. Drop in a folder, pick a format, and export JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF with real before/after sizes for every file.

From its maker: ScreenVerb is a screenshot app for Mac built around AI. Snap a window, drag a pixel-exact region or grab a full scrolling page with one shortcut, then press a number key to run an AI action.

ActionClip puts a small action menu beside text you select: copy, rewrite, translate, search or run a saved workflow. You can describe a new action and it builds one using AI prompts, JavaScript, AppleScript or shell commands. Free for 30 actions a day, with lifetime licenses from $12. It is a native Swift app for Apple silicon with macOS 15 or later.

LokalBot records meetings without a bot joining the call, then transcribes and summarizes them on your Mac. It can also search your meetings and, if you turn it on, what you saw on screen. Processing runs locally by default. It is free and open source, for Apple silicon with macOS 15 Sequoia or later.

Sonder is a free, open-source Markdown editor. It opens your own folder of .md files, so there is nothing to import or export, and adds a Focus Mode plus the AI tools you already have. It works offline and needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

From its maker: JellyDraw is a menu bar app for drawing and highlighting over any app on your Mac. Each drawing sticks to the window it was drawn on, so when you move, resize or minimize the window, your marks go with it.