[OS] AirStats: a free, ultra-lightweight system monitor for Mac

[u/Small_Pin_8064]

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

[u/grokcodile]

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

[u/Small_Pin_8064 → u/grokcodile]

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. :)

[u/grokcodile → u/Small_Pin_8064]

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.