Amphetamine alternatives: decide what you can drop

The keep-awake app on the Mac needs replacing, or at least the question has come up. Maybe the last update was a while ago. Maybe something changed after a macOS upgrade. Maybe the menu bar is simply full and every icon is being audited for whether it earns its place. Whatever started it, the useful first move is not to open a list of alternatives. It is to work out which parts of the app are actually in use, because that number is almost always smaller than expected, and it decides which replacements are even worth looking at.

Three tiers, not one category

Tools that stop a Mac from sleeping look interchangeable until you sort them by how deep they reach.

The shallow tier holds sleep off for one task and then lets go. A file finishes downloading, an export finishes writing, and the assertion drops on its own. macOS ships with this tier already.

The middle tier is a menu bar app that sits there waiting, with a switch and a timer. Press it, the Mac stays awake. Press it again, normal behavior returns. Most of what is sold in this category lives here, and for many people this tier is the entire requirement.

The deep tier runs on conditions. Sessions start and end without anyone pressing anything: while an external display is attached, while a specific app is frontmost, while the power adapter is connected, while the Mac is on a particular Wi-Fi network. Amphetamine's published feature list names more than a dozen such conditions, and that is where it separates itself from almost everything else in the category.

Picking a replacement goes wrong in both directions. Someone who only presses a switch spends a week comparing condition engines they will never open. Someone who has quietly come to depend on conditions moves to a switch-and-timer app and then rebuilds those conditions by hand, every day, without noticing that is what they are doing. Sorting the tiers first prevents both.

Count what is actually used

Here is the published feature set, arranged so it can be checked off. Mark only what was used in the past month, not what sounded good at install time.

• A manual session: indefinite, for a set duration, or until a set clock time
• Conditional sessions driven by displays, apps, network, battery, power adapter, CPU load, mounted volumes, or idle time
• Closed-display mode, keeping a MacBook awake with the lid shut
• Letting the display sleep while the system stays awake
• Moving the mouse cursor periodically
• Locking the screen after a period of inactivity
• Keeping a drive from spinning down
• AppleScript control
• Hotkeys for starting and ending sessions
• Custom menu bar icons

Most people end up with two or three marks. The common pattern is a manual session plus a duration, sometimes with closed-display mode added because of an external monitor on a desk. That profile is portable. Nearly every app in the middle tier covers it, and the switch takes minutes.

The profile that is hard to move is conditions plus AppleScript. Few products in this category implement conditions at comparable depth, and the ones that do express them differently. If those two boxes are marked, the honest options are narrower than a comparison table suggests, and one of them is to keep the app and change something else instead, such as how much menu bar space it occupies.

What macOS already does

The shallow tier needs no purchase. caffeinate lives at /usr/bin/caffeinate on every Mac. caffeinate -d blocks display sleep, caffeinate -i blocks idle system sleep, and -t takes a timeout in seconds so the assertion releases itself.

The version worth knowing is caffeinate -i make, where a command is passed as an argument. The assertion is held for exactly as long as that process runs and drops the moment it exits. Nothing is left switched on by accident, and no menu bar space is used at all. For overnight renders, long builds, and large uploads, this covers the requirement completely.

System Settings covers a second slice. Behavior on battery and behavior on a power adapter are configured separately, including whether the Mac is allowed to sleep once the display has switched off. Someone whose only complaint is a screen dimming during a video call may not need a third party app at all. Exact panel names move between macOS releases, so check the current wording in Apple's support material rather than following an older screenshot.

Anything still unmet after these two checks is the actual requirement. That is a much shorter list than "an Amphetamine replacement".

The field, as of September 2026

Prices and system requirements below were read from Apple's published App Store data on 10 September 2026. Both change at the vendor's discretion, so confirm before installing.

App	Publisher	US price	Last updated	Requires
Amphetamine	William Gustafson	Free	10 Nov 2023	macOS 10.13 or later
Lungo	Sindre Sorhus	4.00 USD	9 May 2026	macOS 26.0 or later
Theine	App ahead GmbH	8.99 USD	6 Sep 2026	macOS 15.6 or later
Caffeinated	Yugen GmbH	3.99 USD	16 Oct 2025	macOS 15.0 or later
Owly	FIPLAB Ltd	Free	25 Feb 2026	macOS 11.5 or later

Outside the App Store, KeepingYouAwake is MIT licensed and free, with 1.6.8 published on 12 September 2025 and repository activity continuing into August 2026.

Two columns in that table matter more than price. The first is the minimum macOS version, which spreads across nine years of releases. Lungo requires macOS 26, so an older Mac rules it out immediately. Amphetamine's floor of 10.13 is the widest in the group, which is precisely why it is still running on machines that nothing newer supports.

The second is the last update date. Amphetamine's most recent App Store release is dated 10 November 2023, and several major macOS versions have shipped since. Whether it still behaves correctly is answerable only by running it. The real consequence of a long gap is different: if the next macOS release changes something underneath, there is no schedule for a fix. Some people can accept that on a free utility. Others cannot, particularly where closed-display mode is part of a daily desk setup.

On the other checks that matter for a tool you depend on, the record is public. Amphetamine has never been paid, has no in-app purchases, and has not changed hands. It came close to disappearing once: in late December 2020 Apple notified the developer that the name and pill icon breached a guideline and set a removal date of 12 January 2021. The appeal succeeded on 2 January 2021 and the app stayed. That episode is worth knowing not because it signals risk today, but because it is a reminder that distribution is never guaranteed, for free software or paid.

What does not transfer

Nothing in this category exports settings in a format another app can read. Assume a rebuild, and know which parts are the expensive ones.

Conditional rules do not move. The trigger vocabularies differ enough that a rule based on "while this app is frontmost" may exist in one product and not another, and the ones that exist are configured through different interfaces.

Hotkeys do not move, and the combination in use may already be taken by the replacement's defaults or by macOS.

AppleScript does not move. Each app defines its own scripting terminology, so an existing script targeting one app will not compile against another.

Closed-display mode is the one to check before anything else. Not every app implements it, and among those that do, the conditions attached vary. On Apple silicon laptops this feature also has a known wrinkle: the developer publishes a separate script and configuration file, called Power Protect, because a sandboxed App Store app cannot install them directly.

That sandbox limit explains another piece of the setup. App Store apps cannot enumerate every running process, so full process based conditions are handled by a companion, Amphetamine Enhancer, distributed outside the store. Anyone running that two part arrangement should confirm a candidate can reproduce the whole thing, not just the visible half.

Test a candidate in one evening

Feature lists say what an app claims. macOS says what it is doing. Run pmset -g assertions in Terminal while a candidate has a session running, and the output names the process holding the assertion and which kind it holds: PreventUserIdleSystemSleep for the system, PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep for the screen. If a session is switched on and no matching line appears under the owning process, the app is not doing what its interface says, and no amount of configuration will fix that.

Three more checks fit in the same evening, and they are the ones that surface problems after the trial period ends rather than during it. First, quit and relaunch the Mac, then confirm the app comes back on its own; a keep-awake tool that has to be started manually after every restart quietly stops being used within a fortnight. Second, if a laptop with an external display is involved, close the lid with a session running and confirm the machine stays up, because closed-display behavior is where implementations differ most and where the failure is least visible until a build dies overnight. Third, watch what happens on battery, since some assertions are documented to apply only on AC power and a rule that works at a desk can behave differently on a train.

Anything that passes those four is safe to configure properly. Anything that fails one is not worth the hour it takes to rebuild a trigger set inside it.

The menu bar seat comes with every option

One thing survives every migration in this category: a menu bar icon. Replacing one app with another leaves the count unchanged, and during evaluation both run at once, so it briefly goes up. If crowding was part of the original complaint, switching apps does not address it.

That is a separate decision with its own answer. What tools in this space actually do, described as discrete behaviors rather than a feature list, is set out on the Features page. The useful distinction is between how many background apps are running and how many icons are visible, because those two numbers do not have to match. Where hidden items can still be pressed and their menus opened without expanding the bar first, hiding costs nothing in daily use.

Differences between products in this category come down to three axes, and How it compares lays them out in the order worth checking: pricing model, minimum macOS version, and how a hidden item is reached. The first of those is set out in full on Pricing, where a one time purchase, a subscription, and a paid upgrade at each major version produce very different totals over a few years.

What to change first

Spend ten minutes on the checklist above and mark only what was used this month. If the marks are a switch and a timer, the shallow tier or any middle tier app will do, and caffeinate costs nothing to try tonight. If conditions and closed-display mode are marked, treat the menu bar problem as a separate question and solve that one on its own terms, which is what Koffret is built for.