AirStats: an open source, ultra-lightweight system monitor for the Mac menu bar
Everything on a Mac has quietly got heavier, including the apps whose whole job is to tell you how heavy everything is. A menu bar monitor runs every second the machine is on, and reading a few kernel counters twice a second is not hard work. It should not cost much.
AirStats is 11 MB, and idles at about 0.05% of one core.
It reads CPU, memory, GPU, network, disk, battery, temperature and top processes directly through Mach, IOKit, sysctl and CoreWLAN, and draws them in three places:
- the menu bar itself
- a panel that drops down when you click the status item
- an optional floating overlay you can leave on the desktop
Written in Native Swift, no Electron, no web view. One process, with no helper, no launch agent and no Dock icon.
Other menu bar monitors, like iStat Menus are more thorough than this and have years of polish behind them. Stats is the open-source one most people already know. However, AirStats is narrower on purpose. It covers fewer sensors and spends the effort on staying small and on the overlay, which is the part I use most.
There are no analytics and no telemetry, and readings never leave the machine. It makes two outbound requests, both visible in the source: an update check, and a public IP lookup that is off unless you turn it on. Policy at https://airstats.app/privacy
It is free, with no account and no subscription. macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon. Signed and notarized, so it opens with no warning.
- Site: https://airstats.app
- Source: https://github.com/byrencheema/airstats
If there is a feature you want or an issue you hit, feel free to reach out.