Vanilla alternatives: decide what you can drop

Replacing a menu bar utility stalls in a predictable place. Every candidate publishes a feature list, longer lists look better than shorter ones, and none of them answer the only question that matters, which is whether the specific behaviour currently in daily use exists on the other side. The way out is to stop reading candidate pages for a moment and count what is actually being used first. In this case the counting is unusually easy, because the paid tier of the current tool contains exactly four things.

Prices and dates below were checked on 10 September 2026.

The four situations that start the search

The reasons people go looking are worth naming, because two of them are not solved by changing tools at all.

The first is a new MacBook with a notch. Usable width drops, and when the bar is full macOS quietly stops drawing whatever does not fit, including the divider used to configure the tool itself. The developer publishes a setup guide specifically for this case, which is a sign it happens often rather than a sign anything is broken.

The second is a macOS upgrade that changed the behaviour. Every autumn release moves something in this area, and the first response is to check which build is installed rather than to start shopping.

The third is the paid tier. Somebody is looking at a purchase decision and wants to know whether the same four features exist elsewhere for less, or for nothing.

The fourth is language. The bundle ships one set of interface strings and they are in English, so anyone who needs a localised interface has a requirement that no setting inside the app can satisfy.

Only the third and fourth reasons genuinely point at a different product. The first two point at configuration and versions, and are worth ruling out before spending an afternoon on comparisons.

What the free tier covers and what the paid tier adds

The free download does one job: it places a divider in the menu bar and pushes icons behind it. Everything else sits in the paid tier, which is a one-time purchase of 10 dollars processed through Stripe, with each activation code usable on up to ten Macs.

The developer lists four additions in the paid tier.

A keyboard shortcut that toggles menu bar and desktop icons. A completely removed section for icons that stay out of sight even when the bar is expanded, visible only from the preferences window. Auto-hide, which puts icons away again five seconds after a toggle. Start at login.

That is the whole list, and it is short enough to audit honestly. Take each of the four and recall the last time it changed anything. A person who toggles from the keyboard forty times a day has one feature carrying the purchase, and the other three are packaging. A person who screen shares for a living cares about the removed section and nothing else. A person who has never opened the preferences window since setup is running on the free tier in practice, whatever the licence says.

The count matters because it converts an unbounded comparison into a bounded one. Without it, candidates get judged on features nobody uses.

Where the current build stands

Some of the reasons for looking around are about the tool and some are about the Mac it runs on, so a few facts about the shipping build help separate the two.

The build downloaded from the developer site on 10 September 2026 reports version 2.2, internal build 61, signed on 16 September 2025 with a Developer ID certificate and notarised. The bundle declares a minimum system version of macOS 12.4. The update feed lists 22 releases, the first from May 2017.

One more detail is visible inside the bundle: it ships a single set of interface strings, in English. Anyone looking for a localised interface is looking for a different app, and no setting will change that.

The candidates, side by side

Candidate	Price shape	How it is supplied	Most recent release
Vanilla	Free, with a 10 dollar one-time upgrade	Independent developer, direct download	2.2, September 2025
Bartender 6	3,072 yen one-time, or 2,095 yen per year, or 12,288 yen lifetime	Company, four-week trial	Described as built for macOS Tahoe
Ice	Free	Open source, GPL-3.0	Tagged 0.11.12, October 2024
Hidden Bar	Free	Open source, MIT	v1.10, March 2026
Dozer	Free	Open source, MPL-2.0	v4.0.0, August 2019

Sources, in order: store.matthewpalmer.net, macbartender.com, jordanbaird/Ice, dwarvesf/hidden and Mortennn/Dozer.

Two cautions about reading that last column. For open source projects the tagged release date and the last commit date are different measurements, and they can be years apart. The Ice repository carries a tagged release from October 2024 while commits continued into September 2025, so judging it by the tag alone understates the activity. Check both.

There is also a difference in what a licence buys. A one-time purchase on a direct download is tied to activation counts, so moving to a new Mac is an activation rather than a repurchase. An open source project has no licence to move at all, which removes a class of problem entirely and takes with it any expectation of support beyond an issue tracker. That trade is usually acceptable for a tool this small, and it is worth stating plainly rather than discovering later.

The other caution is that price shape is a longer-term decision than it looks. A one-time purchase ends the payments but may not cover the next major version. A yearly plan keeps the updates coming and keeps the invoices coming with them. Free and open source removes the money question and makes continuity depend on whoever maintains the repository. None of the three is correct in general. The answer follows from how many years the machine is expected to stay in service.

What does not carry over

There is no shared export format across this category. Nothing gets migrated. Three things in particular have to be rebuilt by hand.

The first is the arrangement itself: which icons are always visible, which sit behind the divider, and which are hidden outright. The second is the licence, which is naturally specific to the product that issued it. The third catches people out, because it is not stored in the app at all.

macOS keeps permission records separately from applications. Utilities in this category ask for Accessibility, and some ask for Screen Recording as well, because reading what the menu bar currently looks like is how they blend a divider into it. Those grants are recorded by the system and survive the deletion of the app that requested them. A machine that has cycled through three of these tools carries three sets of stale entries, and stale entries make the next round of troubleshooting harder than it needs to be.

The fix costs two minutes. Before installing anything new, open Privacy and Security in System Settings, look at Accessibility and Screen Recording, and remove rows for apps that are no longer installed.

Migration day, in order

Knowing that the setup has to be rebuilt is not the same as having a sequence. Doing it in this order takes about half an hour.

Take a screenshot of the current menu bar first, with the divider expanded so the hidden items are visible too. That picture is the specification for the rebuild, and it records the ordering, which is the part memory always gets wrong.

Quit the old tool. Remove its rows from Accessibility and Screen Recording before installing anything else, so that a permission problem later has one possible cause instead of two. Install the replacement, grant what it asks for, then restart the Mac or sign out and back in.

That restart is not ceremony. Whether an arrangement survives a restart varies between tools, and it is worth finding out on day one rather than in three weeks. Anyone using an external display should also disconnect and reconnect it once, because a change in screen configuration is the other event that can scatter a carefully built layout.

Only then rebuild the groups from the screenshot.

The four things that separate these tools after a month

Feature lists converge. What actually differs shows up later.

How many steps it takes to use a hidden item. Expanding the bar and then clicking is two actions, and the bar stretches sideways in between. Reaching the item directly is one. For something touched fifteen times a day, this is the difference between hiding it and leaving it on display forever.

What permissions it needs, and for what. More permissions is not automatically worse. Screen Recording sounds heavy until the reason is clear, and in this category the reason is usually reading a strip of the menu bar to blend the interface into it. Read the developer's own explanation and the system prompt, then decide.

Behaviour on a Mac with a notch. When the bar runs out of room, macOS stops drawing the overflow. There is no second row and no warning. Whether a tool works around that, and how, is hard to judge from a product page and easy to judge in ten minutes on the actual machine.

Update cadence. macOS ships a major version every autumn, and this category needs to follow it every year. The gap since the last release is the most honest single number available about what next October will look like.

A fifth item deserves a mention even though it is harder to check: what happens when the arrangement is wrong. Every tool here will eventually put an icon somewhere unexpected after a display change, a system update, or an app that adds a second menu bar item without warning. What separates them is whether fixing it means dragging one thing back into place or opening a preferences window and rebuilding a section. Trying to break the layout deliberately during a trial, by connecting a second display or quitting and relaunching a noisy app, gives a better read on this than any feature list.

Test the shortlist in thirty minutes, not thirty days

Trials get wasted by using the tool the way it was intended and concluding that it works. The useful trial does the opposite and goes looking for the failure modes on purpose.

Five checks cover most of it. Hide three icons and then use one of them without expanding the bar, counting the actions required. Restart the Mac and see whether the arrangement came back intact. Connect or disconnect an external display and look again. Open an application with a long menu, such as a design or development tool, and check that the status items on the right survive the squeeze. Finally, open Privacy and Security and note exactly what the tool asked for, so the cost of the permissions is a known quantity rather than a vague worry.

Anything that clears those five is going to be fine in ordinary use. Anything that fails one of them will fail it again next month, and knowing which one it was makes the next comparison shorter.

What to change first

Count the four paid features, mark the ones that changed something this week, and let that list decide the shortlist rather than the feature grids. Then compare the survivors on recall speed and permissions, using How it compares for the current prices with the dates they were checked, and try the shortlist on the machine that has the problem, starting from Koffret.