Barbee alternatives: decide what you can drop

Looking for a replacement usually starts the wrong way round, with a list of candidate apps. The list is long, every entry hides and shows icons, and after an hour of reading feature grids nothing has been decided. The faster order is to work out which of the features currently installed are genuinely in use, because that number is almost always smaller than expected, and it determines how wide the field of candidates really is.

Name the reason for leaving, and keep it to one

Four motivations account for most switches away from a menu bar tool, and each one points at a different answer.

Cost. The unlock is an in app purchase, and either the amount or the recurring nature of it is the objection. This resolves quickly, because free options in this category are mature.

Behaviour on the current system. Something changed after a macOS update. Worth separating from the rest, because a fix may exist that does not involve switching at all.

Distribution channel. Mac App Store sandboxing sets limits on what any app can do, and some people prefer a directly distributed tool for that reason, or the reverse, preferring App Store review and purchase history.

A missing capability. Rearranging order, conditional visibility, multi display handling, automation hooks. This is the only reason that requires real comparison work.

The listing itself opens by positioning the app as a replacement for another one in the same category:

Need a Bartender alternative? Barbee gives you full control over your menu bar! Source: apps.apple.com

Every tool in this space is somebody's alternative to another one. Switching is normal here, which also means the migration cost is worth measuring before starting rather than discovering halfway through.

Sort the seven features by what gets touched

The product page lists seven headline capabilities. Go through them and mark the ones actually used in the last month.

Feature	What it does	Used?
Hide and show instantly	Collapse and expand the hidden set
Auto hide and show	Hide or reveal based on context
Custom shortcuts	Keyboard triggers for toggling
Menu bar customisation	Replace an item with an emoji, SF Symbol, text or image
Notch compatibility	Handle the display cutout on newer MacBook Pro models
Reduce spacing	Narrow the gaps between status items
Hide app menus	Suppress the left hand menu titles

For most people the marks land on the first three. Customisation and hiding app menus tend to be configured once during the first evening and never revisited. That distinction matters: a person whose marks sit entirely in the first three rows can pick from every tool in the category, free ones included, because collapsing and expanding a hidden set is table stakes.

The paid tier adds a second list worth checking: unlimited toggle operations, notch support, free rearrangement, reduced spacing, cloud backup and profile sync, script and shortcut integration, and appearance styles. Profile sync and automation hooks are the two that many alternatives do not offer at all. A mark on either of those narrows the field considerably, and should be tested in a candidate before anything is uninstalled.

What transfers and what does not

Migration cost is concrete and can be estimated in advance.

• Settings do not transfer. Which icons are hidden, in what order, and under which shortcut is stored per app with no shared format. Photograph the settings window before removing anything.
• Purchases do not transfer. An in app purchase applies to the app that sold it. Nothing carries across to a different developer.
• Purchases do follow the Apple ID. Replacing a Mac while keeping the same account is not a migration at all, and needs no replacement app.
• Trials are separate everywhere. The 3 day trial described on the listing is granted per Apple ID for that app. A candidate's trial is its own clock, usually a different length.

Rebuilding the first three features on a new tool takes about ten minutes. Rebuilding a set of conditional rules takes considerably longer, because conditions have to be re expressed in whatever vocabulary the new app uses. Estimating this before switching prevents the half migrated state where two tools are installed and neither is configured properly.

The field, with dates attached

Read from each project page and vendor site on 10 September 2026.

App	Price	Distribution	Licence	Most recent activity
Ice	Free	GitHub	GPL 3.0	Repository updated September 2025
Hidden Bar	Free	GitHub and Mac App Store	MIT	1.10 on GitHub, March 2026
Bartender 6	Page shows "Buy from $12"	Vendor site	Commercial	Actively sold
Dozer	Free	GitHub	MPL 2.0	Last update November 2023

Ice carries more than 29,000 stars on GitHub, with its most recent tagged stable release dated October 2024 and development builds published since. Hidden Bar has more than 14,000 stars, and the versions differ by channel: 1.10 dated 3 March 2026 on GitHub against 1.8 dated 1 June 2021 on the Mac App Store, so the download source changes what gets installed. Dozer's repository is still online, but with no updates since November 2023 its behaviour on current systems has to be verified first hand.

One fact about Bartender belongs in any comparison because it changes who is being paid: the page carries the notice "Copyright © 2026 Applause Group, Inc.", and ownership of the app transferred in 2024. Prices on that page load dynamically, so the figure has to be read at checkout rather than quoted second hand.

Distribution channel deserves one more line, because it decides more than convenience. An App Store app runs inside the sandbox, receives updates through the App Store, and restores through purchase history on any Mac signed in with the same Apple ID. A directly distributed app is delivered by the developer, updated by its own updater, and licensed by key with the machine count stated in the licence terms. When something goes wrong with a payment, the App Store route puts Apple in the middle, which helps with refunds and complicates nothing else. When something goes wrong with a feature, the direct route usually reaches the developer faster. Neither is superior in the abstract, but preferring one of them is a legitimate reason to switch on its own, independent of any feature comparison.

Trim with macOS settings before choosing anything

Some of the clutter can be removed without any third party tool, and doing this first changes which category of candidate is needed.

System Settings has a Control Center panel where each system provided item, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Focus, Screen Mirroring, Sound, Battery and Now Playing, can be set to appear in the menu bar or not. Turning off the ones never clicked commonly removes two to four icons. Shortening the clock format by dropping the day and date reclaims more width than expected.

Third party apps have their own switches too. Cloud storage clients, backup agents and password managers almost all offer a "show in menu bar" preference. Anything that is neither clicked nor read as a status indicator can be turned off at the source. Apple documents the Control Center behaviour on Apple Support.

Count what survives that pass. Four or fewer icons rarely justifies installing anything. Eight or more, especially when the useful set changes with the time of day or the attached display, is where a dedicated tool earns its place.

A one week evaluation that produces a decision

Comparing feature lists produces a shortlist, not a decision. The decision comes from a week of ordinary work with one candidate installed, structured so that the result is a set of observations rather than a vague preference.

Day one is setup only. Hide everything that is not clicked daily, keep the live indicators visible, and note how long the configuration took. Setup time is a real cost, and a tool that needs an hour of fiddling to reach a usable state will need it again on the next machine.

Days two to four are the click count. Each time a hidden icon has to be reached, notice how many actions it took: expand the bar, then click, is two, while opening the menu in place with the bar still collapsed is one. Also record the opposite failure, when something was missed because it was hidden and gave no signal. That number is the argument for conditional visibility rules, which reveal an item when its state changes rather than keeping it permanently out of sight.

Day five is the display test, and it is the one most often skipped. Connect and disconnect whatever external display is normally used, and check whether the arrangement of icons and the hidden set survive the change or have to be rebuilt each time. On a desk setup where the laptop moves between a dock and a bag, a tool that forgets the arrangement will be uninstalled within a month regardless of how good the rest of it is.

Days six and seven cover the edge cases specific to the marked features: a shortcut that has to fire while another app holds focus, an automation that runs from a script, a profile that has to appear on a second Mac. Whatever was marked in the earlier sort gets exercised here. If a marked feature cannot be made to work during a dedicated test, it will not start working later under time pressure.

Close the account before opening a new one

Order of operations prevents most of the mess.

Turn off auto renewal first if a yearly tier is active, through the subscriptions section of Apple ID settings. Access continues to the end of the paid period, so this costs nothing and removes the deadline pressure. Quit the existing app before installing a candidate, because two of these tools running at once fight over icon coordinates and neither can be evaluated properly. Remove it from Login Items in System Settings under General. Then uninstall, and if settings should go too, move the folder under ~/Library/Containers/ whose name starts with the bundle identifier.

When the new tool asks for permissions, grant them at the prompt. Deferring means adding entries to the privacy lists by hand later, which takes longer and fails more often. Run the trial across both weekdays and a weekend, because the set of resident apps is not the same on a Tuesday as on a Sunday.

What to change first

Count the icons, remove what Control Center and per app settings can remove, then mark which of the seven features are genuinely used. If the marks stay in the first three rows, a free tool finishes the job. If profile sync or automation hooks are marked, test that specific capability in a candidate before uninstalling anything, and compare how many clicks it takes to reach a hidden icon while the bar stays collapsed, which is the difference that accumulates daily. The features page shows that behaviour in detail, how it compares lists the category with prices and survey dates, and pricing states what a one time purchase covers across future versions.