Menu bar manager for Mac: a comparison of the options

The menu bar fills up quietly. One utility at a time, over a couple of years, until an application with a long menu list is enough to push three icons off the screen. At that point the search begins, and it returns a short list of tools that all describe themselves the same way. They are not the same, and the differences that matter are rarely the ones on the feature lists. What follows sets out the current options, what each one charges, and the five behaviours worth checking before installing anything.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own page on 2026-09-03. Prices change and vary by region, so treat the figures as the state on that date rather than a permanent fact.

What a menu bar manager actually does

All of these tools solve the same underlying problem. macOS lays out menu bar extras from the right edge inward and the frontmost application's menus from the left edge outward. Where the two meet, whatever no longer fits is removed from the layout. Nothing is broken and no setting turns it off. On MacBooks with a camera housing in the middle of the display, the usable width is shorter still.

A menu bar manager inserts a divider into that strip. Icons to the right of it stay visible. Icons to the left are held out of the layout until you ask for them, which means they stop competing for the space. Most tools add a third state for items you almost never want to see, sometimes called always hidden.

That much is common to the whole category. What differs is everything that happens after an icon is hidden: how it comes back, what it looks like when it does, whether it can come back on its own under some condition, and whether the arrangement survives plugging in a monitor. Those are the axes worth comparing, and they are covered further down.

One more piece of shared behaviour is worth knowing before comparing anything. Because these tools reorder items rather than delete them, the order you place icons in decides which ones macOS drops first when the strip is still short. Holding Command and dragging works with or without a manager installed, and pushing the icons you press daily toward the right edge is a free improvement that applies no matter which tool you end up choosing.

It is also worth saying what none of them do. They do not remove the icon from the application, they do not reduce memory use, and they do not change how macOS allocates the strip. They change what is placed in it.

The options and what they cost

Tool	Price on 2026-09-03	Licence	Note
Bartender 6	¥3,494	One-time	¥2,382 per year and ¥13,975 lifetime are also offered
Barbee	$12.99	One-time	Sold as an in-app purchase on the App Store
Ice	Free	Open source	Hide, reveal, always hidden
Hidden Bar	Free	Open source	Hide and reveal

Sources, in order: macbartender.com, the App Store listing, github.com/jordanbaird/Ice and github.com/dwarvesf/hidden. A wider list, including the tool published by this site, is kept current at How it compares along with the date of the most recent check.

Two things about the table deserve a note. The first is that the paid options are not priced against each other in any meaningful way, because one is sold through a vendor site and one through the App Store, and the currencies shown depend on the store region. The second is that free here means free of charge, not free of cost. Open source projects are maintained by volunteers and their release pace varies, which is a real consideration when a macOS update changes something about how menu bar extras are drawn.

What the free options cover

Ice and Hidden Bar both do the core job. Items go behind a divider and come back when the divider is clicked, and Ice additionally offers an always hidden section for things you want out of the way permanently. For a Mac with eight or nine menu bar items where three or four are genuinely never used, that is often the whole requirement, and there is no reason to spend money to get it.

Both are distributed as source on GitHub with compiled releases, which has two practical consequences. Installation may require allowing an application from an identified developer or, in some cases, an unidentified one, depending on how a given release is signed. And support is a public issue tracker rather than a support address, so the answer to a problem arrives when a maintainer has time.

There is a second consideration that is easy to miss while comparing feature lists. Open source projects in this category tend to move quickly when they are actively maintained and stop entirely when the maintainer's circumstances change. Checking the date of the most recent release, and whether recent macOS versions appear in the issue tracker, gives a better picture of what to expect than the feature list does. A project with regular releases against the current macOS is a different proposition from one whose last release predates the version you are running.

The behaviour to check before settling on a free option is what happens when a hidden item needs to be used. If the interaction is expand, then click, then collapse, that round trip happens every time. For an icon touched twice a month that is irrelevant. For one touched six times a day it is the reason people go looking for something else a month later.

What the paid options add

The paid tools in this category earn their price on the behaviours around hiding rather than on hiding itself. Four recur across the paid feature sets and are worth naming individually, because they are the ones that decide whether a configuration survives contact with daily use.

The first is opening a hidden item's menu without expanding the bar. Some implementations click through to the hidden icon in place, leaving the bar collapsed, which removes the round trip described above.

The second is appearance fidelity. A hidden icon that comes back as a generic placeholder loses whatever it was reporting. Battery percentages, recording indicators, unread counts and small graphs are the reason several of those icons exist at all, so a tool that reproduces the live drawing rather than a substitute keeps the information intact.

The third is conditional reveal. Rather than deciding once and for all, an icon can be brought out while a condition holds: the battery below a level, a particular application in front, a time range, or a script returning success. When the condition ends, the icon goes back.

The fourth is search. On a machine with twenty items, remembering which ones were hidden becomes its own task. Typing part of a name and getting the item, with its menu, avoids that entirely.

Whether any of these justify a purchase depends on how often the hidden icons are actually needed. Features sets out what this category can control, which is a reasonable checklist to hold each candidate against.

The five things worth comparing

Feature lists are long and mostly overlap. These five separate the tools in practice.

• Reveal method. Clicking a divider, hovering the bar, scrolling over it, pressing the notch, or a keyboard shortcut. Whether the tool lets you enable only the gestures you want matters more than how many it offers, because an accidental reveal on hover is its own irritation.
• Behaviour in place. Whether a hidden icon's menu can be opened with the bar still collapsed, or whether the bar has to expand first.
• Fidelity. Whether the revealed icon is the live drawing or a stand-in.
• Per-display memory. Whether the arrangement is stored per display configuration and switches automatically when a monitor is connected or disconnected. On a laptop that docks daily, a tool without this is re-tuned constantly.
• Conditions and shortcuts. Whether an icon can come out on its own under a rule, and whether individual icons can be assigned keys.

Everything else, including spacing controls, menu bar appearance options and profile switching, is a preference rather than a decision point. Useful, but not the reason a setup succeeds or fails.

Permissions, requirements and switching

Every tool in this category needs Accessibility permission, granted in System Settings under Privacy and Security, because moving another application's menu bar icon is exactly what that permission governs. Two consequences follow. An application update can leave the permission listed but inactive, which produces a distinctive symptom: the tool's own icon responds while everything it manages ignores clicks. Removing and re-adding the entry, then relaunching, restores it. And a tool that asks for no permissions at all cannot be doing this job. Apple's material on those settings is at Apple Support.

System requirements vary and are worth reading before downloading, since several of these projects have raised their minimum macOS version over the last few releases. Support for Apple silicon and Intel also differs by project, which matters on older hardware.

On switching between tools, expect assignments to transfer and rules not to. The categories an icon is placed into are a simple mapping that one tool can read from another. Keyboard shortcuts, conditional triggers, spacing and appearance settings generally are not, because they have no equivalent structure between products. Budget a few minutes to set those up again rather than assuming a migration carries everything across.

How to choose without installing four of them

Start by counting. Open System Settings, go to Control Center, and count how many modules are set to appear in the menu bar. Turn off the ones never pressed. Then count what remains. If the total is under about ten and only two or three are ever needed in a hurry, a free tool covers it and the decision is finished.

A second useful count is how many of the remaining icons you would want back automatically rather than on demand. A VPN indicator that only matters while disconnected, a battery reading that only matters below a threshold, and a recording indicator that only matters during a call are all cases where a conditional rule does the work that would otherwise be done by leaving the icon permanently visible. If none of your icons fit that description, conditional reveal is a feature you will never open, and it should carry no weight in the decision.

Above that, the deciding question is how often you press a hidden icon. Rarely, and any of these work. Several times a day, and the in-place behaviour and the search function are what you are actually buying, so check those specifically rather than comparing feature counts. If price is the constraint, the comparison table above gives the figures as they stood on the survey date, and each vendor's own page carries the current one along with the minimum macOS version required.

What to change first

Before installing anything, remove the Control Center modules you never press and Command-drag the icons you use daily toward the right. That is free and takes two minutes, and it tells you how much of the problem is genuinely about capacity. If icons still go missing afterwards, a tool such as Koffret addresses the part that remains without giving any of them up.