Bartender is an award-winning app for macOS that for more than 10 years has superpowered your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them. Bartender improves your workflow with quick reveal, search, custom hotkeys and triggers, and lots more.
Features
Speed
Lightning-fast access to your menu bar items is now even better. Get instant access to your hidden menu bar items simply by swiping or scrolling in the menu bar, clicking on the menu bar, or if you prefer, simply hovering.
Full access
Access the menu bar items otherwise hidden by the notch on MacBook Air and Pro screens. Bartender will automatically hide your currently shown menu bar items when needed to create room to show the items hidden by the MacBook Air and Pro screens notch, giving you access to all your menu bar items.
Bartender Bar
Access your hidden menu bar items in the Bartender Bar beneath the menu bar. Great if you need more room for all your menu bar apps. * The macOS screen capture menu bar item can show when using this. more info
Styling
Make your menu bar your own, with menu bar styling you can:
- Add a color or gradient tint to your menu bar.
- Create a rounded/pill shaped menu bar, even with separate sides for the App menu abd menu bar items.
- Add a border and choose its color and thickness.
- Add a shadow to your menu bar.
- Add rounded corners to your display, or a black area under the rounded menu bar.
- The possibilities are endless
Styles are applied to an individual menu bar allowing you to create many different styles and quickly recognise your current space.
Groups
Combine multiple menu bar items into one customisable menu bar item, and have quick access to all the menu bar items within.
For example group all your cloud drive apps together like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive. Have a group for connection related items such as Wi-Fi and VPN. And another for media related items, like volume, media controls, airplay.
This can be a great way to have access to all your menu bar items on a MacBook Pro or Air with limited menu bar space due to the screen notch.
Presets
Create as many presets as you want and always have the right menu bar items available for your current workflow.
- Show the macOS default menu bar items when recording your screen or screen sharing
- Show work specific menu bar items in work hours, then social media items when at home... the possibilities are endless.
Presets can be automatically applied via triggers and also by macOS Focus modes.
Triggers
With a completely new Trigger system you can apply a preset automatically, or show a set of menu bar items whenever your trigger conditions are met. Triggers conditions currently include
- Battery - trigger when on battery power or charging, or at a specific level.
- WiFi - trigger when connected/not connected to a WiFi network. Or when connected to a specific network
- Location - trigger when at a specific location.
- Time/Date - schedule when to trigger.
- Many more still to come...
Conditions are combined to create a specific set of conditions required to trigger your preset and/or show the selected menu bar items.
Spacing
Reduce the space between menu bar items using Bartender, allowing you to have more menu items onscreen before reaching the macbook notch. Or just purely for style.
Search
Quick Search will change the way you use your menu bar apps. Instantly find, show, and activate menu bar items, all from your keyboard. * The macOS screen capture menu bar item can show when using this. more info
macOS Sonoma and Apple Silicon Support
Bartender 5 is designed for all the great changes in macOS Sonoma. Bartender 5 runs native and lightning-fast on Apple Silicon and Intel macs.
Coming soon
- Menu Bar Widgets!
Create your own menu bar items. With Bartender widgets you can create your very own custom menu bar items, that trigger pretty much any action you want, no coding required.
What's New
We've re-built Bartender from the ground up to be beautiful, performant, and reliable. Bartender has been a staple of Mac users for years, and that brought with it lots of old hacks & tricks. We've modernised everything, from the algorithms used to move your items, through to the design of the entire app.
We've also brought our new movement system to Bartender 5, so you'll get all the speed & reliability improvements for free on Sequoia. And yes, we've fixed the Apple menu bug.
Whilst we were in here, we're also localizing Bartender, starting with French, Spanish and Chinese. More languages are coming too - and we expect to add all the most popular languages shortly after launch.
If you're running on macOS Tahoe, we've also updated the app to be compatible with Apple's brand new menu bar. If you don't like the new bar, you can restore the old look from Sequoia (with more coming soon 😉) There's also plenty of Liquid Glass sprinkled around to fit right in with the new look.
We've maintained a strict commitment to privacy throughout the new Bartender. We know that granting screen recording permissions can be intimidating, so we've maintained our policy of the app not sending anything anywhere. Your menu item images are stored in memory to show them in Bartender Bar or the layout screen, and they aren't persisted. We've also reduced the amount of times Bartender has to capture the bar too, so you'll see the purple dot even less. For people who don't want this at all, you can re-arrange your items once, then disable screen recording permissions and use Bartender in a locked-down mode.
Finally, we've redesigned the layout screen to scale seamlessly, feel smoother, and better match the rest of the preferences pages.
The price of Bartender 6 is exactly the same as 5, and if you bought 5 in 2025, you'll get 6 for free. If you bought it earlier, you can get a discount upgrade.
There's loads more exciting updates coming to Bartender to really take it up a notch in the coming months, and we'll start sharing those shortly.
