Free window manager for Mac: where the free ones stop being enough

The free options in this category are unusually strong. Rectangle is free and open source. Loop is free and open source under GPL 3.0. AeroSpace is MIT licensed and installs with one Homebrew command. And macOS itself now tiles windows without any app at all, which changes the question from "which free window manager" to "is a window manager needed here".

That is worth working out before installing anything, because the free tools are not a cut down version of the paid ones. They cover different ground, and the boundary between free and paid in this category is not about quality. Prices and licenses below were read from each project's own page on 25 September 2026.

The free option that is already installed

Recent versions of macOS include real tiling. Dragging a window to the left edge, the right edge, a corner or the menu bar snaps it into place, and holding Option while dragging is the quicker route. The green button in the top left corner of each window offers layouts under Move & Resize for that window and under Fill & Arrange for several at once, with extra layouts appearing while Option is held. The Window menu carries the same set as Halves and Quarters, plus Center and Fill.

The part most people miss is that those layouts are ordinary menu items, so they can be bound to keys. Under System Settings, then Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts, then App Shortcuts, adding an entry with the menu item name typed exactly as it appears in the Window menu gives a keystroke for left half, right half or fill. Three bindings take a few minutes and remove the most common reason a snapper gets installed.

Tiling is also not the same thing as Split View, and confusing them makes macOS look worse than it is. Tiled windows stay on the current desktop with the menu bar and Dock visible. Split View, reached through the green button under Full Screen, then Left or Right of Screen, creates a new desktop space and hides the menu bar and Dock until the pointer reaches them. Someone who tries Split View, dislikes being cut off, and concludes that macOS cannot arrange windows has usually not found tiling.

Stage Manager is free as well and answers a different question again: it keeps the current window centred and parks recently used apps down the left, with groups of windows that come forward together. It lives under System Settings, then Desktop & Dock, in the Desktop & Stage Manager section, and in Control Center.

Mission Control belongs in the free inventory too, since a good deal of what people want from a window manager is finding a window rather than placing one. Control-Up Arrow, or a three finger swipe up on a trackpad, lays every window of the current desktop out in one layer, with full screen apps, Split View pairs and additional desktops shown along the Spaces bar. Turning on "Group windows by application" under Desktop & Dock clusters them by app. For hunting inside a single app, Control-Down Arrow shows only that app's windows, which is more precise than Command-Tab, since Command-Tab picks an app and leaves the window choice open.

Bind three shortcuts to the native layouts first. Whatever is still annoying after a week is the specification for what to install.

What the free apps add

Rectangle is the reference free snapper. Windows move and resize from keyboard shortcuts or by dragging to snap areas, including corners, and portrait display layouts are supported. Repeating a shortcut cycles through sizes, which is how it reaches thirds without a separate binding for every width. The site states support for macOS 10.15 or later on both Intel and Apple silicon, which matters for older machines that recent macOS releases have left behind. It is also close to a drop in replacement for the older Spectacle app, and the Spectacle default shortcuts can be chosen on first run.

Loop takes the gesture route instead. It is free and open source under GPL 3.0, and describes itself as window management made elegant, which in practice means a radial selection rather than a list of key combinations to memorise. For people who never got on with snapper shortcuts, this is the free tool worth trying before concluding the category is not for them.

AeroSpace is a different proposition: an i3 like tiling window manager for macOS, MIT licensed, installed with a Homebrew cask. Every window is placed by the system and nothing overlaps. It is configured from a text file rather than a settings pane, and it emulates its own virtual workspaces rather than relying on macOS spaces. That is a change of working style, not a utility, and the documentation is best read top to bottom before committing to it.

Worth adding is that several tools already installed for another purpose include window commands as a secondary feature. Launchers and automation utilities often carry them, so anyone running one may have layouts and shortcuts available without installing anything new. That is worth checking first, and not only to save a download: two window tools running at once compete for the same keystrokes, and a snap that silently stops working is usually two tools disagreeing rather than one tool failing.

The important distinction between these three is not features but category. Rectangle is a snapper, Loop is a gesture tool, AeroSpace is an automatic tiler. Installing the wrong one and disliking it says nothing about the other two.

Tool	Kind	License	Notes
macOS tiling	Built in	Included	Halves, quarters, arranged sets, Center and Fill. Bindable via App Shortcuts
Stage Manager	Built in	Included	Centres one window or group, parks the rest down the left side
Rectangle	Keyboard snapper	Free, open source	macOS 10.15 or later, Intel and Apple silicon. Snap areas and corners
Loop	Gesture tool	Free, GPL 3.0	Selection by direction rather than memorised shortcuts
AeroSpace	Automatic tiler	Free, MIT	Homebrew cask. Text file configuration. Its own virtual workspaces

What every free tool needs from the system

Any app that moves another app's windows needs Accessibility permission under System Settings, then Privacy & Security. This is not a quirk of the free ones, and on a managed work Mac it can be blocked outright, which is worth checking before spending an afternoon on configuration.

Automatic tilers carry a second requirement to look at. Some of them ask for System Integrity Protection to be partially disabled to unlock their full feature set, which is rarely acceptable on a machine an employer owns. AeroSpace states it will never require that, which makes it the safer default where SIP cannot be touched.

One more setting affects every tool here. Under System Settings, then Desktop & Dock, then Mission Control, "Displays have separate Spaces" decides whether spaces are per display or span all of them. With it off, windows are more likely to be reflowed unexpectedly, Split View will not work on a secondary display, and Stage Manager will not switch on at all. A surprising share of complaints about a window manager misbehaving on an external monitor trace back to that checkbox.

Where free stops and paid starts

Four gaps are consistently on the paid side, and none of them is about polish.

Arbitrary custom sizes and positions. Free snappers work from a fixed set of regions and cycles. Defining a region by exact dimensions, or setting what happens on each repeated press of the same shortcut, is a paid feature. Rectangle Pro offers this, with a 10 day free trial before purchase.

Saved layouts that survive a disconnect. macOS has no memory of an arrangement across a display being unplugged, and no free tool in this list adds one. Restoring a whole set of windows to saved positions is the defining feature of the layout manager category, and it is paid. Moom is 15 dollars, or 8 dollars to upgrade from an earlier version, requires macOS 10.13 or newer, and can save layouts tied to specific apps as well as layouts that apply to the most recently used windows whatever apps they belong to.

Store distribution and a support line. Magnet is 4.99 dollars on the Mac App Store, Mac only, with a perpetual license, no subscription and no in app purchases, and optional iCloud sync of its settings. On a machine where software has to come from the App Store, that is the deciding factor rather than the feature list.

Triggered automation. Rearranging on its own when a display is connected or disconnected, rather than on a keystroke, is a paid capability.

A fifth difference is less about features than about how the tool is kept alive. The free projects here are maintained by their authors and funded by donations or sponsorship, and the paid ones carry a support address and a stated update policy. Moom, for example, states that a purchase includes at least one year of updates and that the license remains valid permanently. Neither model is safer in the abstract, but on a machine where a broken window tool would cost real working time, the difference is worth a moment's thought rather than none.

If none of those four describes the daily annoyance, the free tools are not a compromise. They are the correct answer, and the upgrade would buy nothing.

The gap no window manager closes, free or paid

Count the windows that are really a browser standing in for an application: mail, chat, a project tracker, a design tool, a support inbox, an admin console. For a lot of people that is most of the desktop. Every tool in this article will arrange them and leave the real cost in place, because the cost is not where the windows sit.

Two symptoms name it. Signing out of one account to reach another on the same service, or keeping a private window open permanently as a second login. And a link opening in the wrong place, landing in the personal account when it belonged to the work one. Snapping, tiling and saved layouts do not touch either, at any price.

The category built for this is an app aggregation browser, where each service gets its own cookie container so several accounts on the same service stay signed in at once, each in its own place. Grouping those services into workspaces that share nothing does at the account level what spaces do at the window level. It is worth knowing that this category also has a free tier: enough workspaces and apps to test the idea on two or three services before deciding, with what the free plan covers set out in full.

What to change first

Bind three keyboard shortcuts to the native tiling layouts, install Rectangle if thirds and snap areas are the gap, and stop there, because for most desktops that is the whole problem. If what remains is that one browser holds six services whose accounts keep colliding, no window manager will reach it, and SpaceDeck is built for that pile specifically.