Menu Bar System Monitor for Mac: Which One to Choose
CPU, memory and network load, even temperature, right in the Mac menu bar. What macOS shows by itself and what Stats, iStat Menus and Mac Resources can do.
macOS has no built-in load monitor for the menu bar, so you need a third-party app. For temperatures, fans and processes for free — Stats; the most detailed, but paid — iStat Menus; one number for the busiest of CPU, memory and GPU — Mac Resources.
You can check CPU usage on a Mac in Activity Monitor, but keeping it open all day is awkward. A menu bar monitor shows CPU and memory load all the time, right next to the clock. And it notices trouble before you do: a Mac doesn’t slow down out of nowhere — first the CPU or memory hits the ceiling, and only then do you notice the stalls.
Choose by three questions, not by the feature count: what you want to see, how much menu bar space you’ll give up, and whether you’ll pay.
A disclosure first: the author of this site is the author of Mac Resources, one of the options below. Stats and iStat Menus weren’t installed for this guide: what you’ll read about them is what their developers say on their websites and GitHub as of September 2026. For mine — including what it can’t do.
What macOS has by itself
macOS has no load monitor for the menu bar. In System Settings → Menu Bar you can turn on Wi‑Fi, battery, sound and other system items, but CPU and memory aren’t among them.
Activity Monitor (Applications → Utilities) can do a bit, though:
- View → Dock Icon replaces the app’s Dock icon with a live graph: Show CPU Usage, Show CPU History, disk or network activity. While the app is open, the load is visible in the Dock;
- Window → CPU Usage and Window → CPU History open small windows with graphs. Keep CPU Windows on Top keeps them above other windows.
Another option is desktop widgets — see the widgets guide. More on the tool itself is in the Activity Monitor guide.
Three questions
- What to see. If you only want “how busy is the Mac”, one number will do. If you want temperatures, fans, a list of the hungriest processes, network speed per app — you need a full monitor.
- How many icons. Monitors usually give each metric its own icon: CPU, memory, network, disk — that’s four already. On a laptop with a notch, the space on the right runs out fast.
- Whether to pay. The free options cover the basics; the paid one adds detail and settings.
The options
| What it shows | Icons | Price | Temperature | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Activity Monitor | CPU in the Dock and windows | 0 | part of macOS | no |
| Stats | CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network, battery, sensors, processes | per module or one combined | free | yes |
| iStat Menus | all that in more detail, plus weather | per module or one combined | $11.99* | yes |
| Mac Resources | the busiest of CPU, memory and GPU | one | free | no |
* The price on the developer’s website at the time of publication, September 2026.
The full comparison — with widgets, disks, processes and who each one suits — is in Stats vs iStat Menus vs Activity Monitor.
Stats is a free, open-source monitor (MIT license). Modules: CPU,
GPU, memory, disk, network, battery, sensors (temperature, voltage,
power), Bluetooth devices, a multi-time-zone clock and fan control. You
install it from a disk image on GitHub or with brew install stats; it’s
not in the App Store. It runs on macOS 12 and later, and updates come
often — five releases in September 2026 alone. The module popups show
the most active processes. Each module is its own menu bar icon, but a
Combined modules mode merges them into one. The developer calls fan
control legacy and no longer develops it.
iStat Menus by Bjango is the most detailed of this lot: per-core CPU, GPU, memory with pressure, compression and swap, a list of the apps using the most CPU and memory, disks with S.M.A.R.T., network per app, sensors and fan control, weather, clocks and rule-based notifications. Version 7.5, macOS 11 or later, a 14-day free trial. At the time of publication (September 2026) a license from the website costs $11.99 and a family license for up to five people $14.99 (US dollars, before local taxes); prices may change. It’s also part of the Setapp subscription. There’s an App Store version, but it can’t control fans and needs the separate iStat Menus Helper for temperatures, fan speeds and some other stats. Combined mode merges several items into a single menu bar icon.
Mac Resources is a single item styled like the keyboard layout indicator: the symbol and percentage of whichever of CPU, memory and GPU is busiest. Details are in “In the app” below. Free, runs on macOS 14 and later. There are no temperatures, fans or process list — not an oversight, but something the sandbox doesn’t allow; more on that next.
There are many more menu bar monitors; this guide sticks to the ones whose features are confirmed by their developers.
Temperatures and fans
Why do some monitors show temperatures and others don’t? The macOS sandbox. A sandboxed app gets only what it’s explicitly allowed. Mac Resources ran into exactly this: its widget extension must run in the sandbox, and the sandbox doesn’t hand over sensors or other apps' processes. You can see it in iStat Menus too: the App Store version needs a separate helper, downloaded from the developer’s website, for temperatures.
Stats is distributed outside the App Store and isn’t limited by the sandbox. It reads the sensors itself, and for fan control it installs a separate system helper, the SMC helper. The SMC (System Management Controller) is the Mac’s controller that, among other things, runs the fans. The developer’s script for removing the helper needs administrator rights.
One more thing about Apple silicon. The Stats developer says it plainly: CPU and GPU sensors are thermal zones, unrelated to the number of cores or to specific cores, and their keys change with every new chip. So the number in a sensor’s label isn’t a core number, and support for the newest chips takes time. They’ll tell you whether the Mac is running hot, but you can’t tie a reading to a core.
Menu bar space
Usually each module is one more icon. On a MacBook with a camera notch, extra icons don’t shrink — they quietly hide behind the notch. So:
- turn on only the modules you actually look at;
- move the monitor closer to the clock with ⌘-drag;
- if you want the full set but space is tight, use a mode that combines everything into one icon: Combined modules in Stats, Combined in iStat Menus.
How to tidy up menu bar icons with built-in tools is covered in the menu bar guide.
In the app
Mac Resources puts a single item in the menu bar: the symbol and percentage of whichever of CPU, memory and GPU is busiest. It updates every 2 seconds and turns red above 80%. Network and disk aren’t in the item: how full a disk is isn’t load, and network speed has no ceiling to take a percentage of.
The item’s menu shows the current numbers: CPU, Memory, Disk used, GPU, Battery. It also has Prevent sleep: whether the display may turn off, a duration and turning off when the battery drops below 20%. Open at login turns itself on at first launch. Move the item with ⌘-drag; macOS remembers the spot.
Alongside the item there are eight desktop widgets: System, Processor, Memory, Disk, Battery, Resources, Network and Last Hour. They refresh once a minute — macOS doesn’t allow more often. Network speed is a one-minute average: the Network widget shows download and upload, System and Last Hour one number with an arrow — the larger of the two.
Free, with no ads, subscription or account. The app isn’t notarized by Apple: that requires a paid developer account. It goes online for one thing only: checking for a new version every six hours.
No temperatures, fans or process list. If you need them, the honest advice is the same as on the app’s page: get Stats or iStat Menus.
If the monitor keeps turning red, find out why the Mac is slow.