a Brow alternative you can read the source of

what Brow gives you for nothing

one shortcut into everything. launcher with app search, clipboard history, window management, screenshots with OCR, cleanup, battery and fan readings, focus timer, emoji and GIF pickers, calculator, unit and currency converters, notes, snippets, calendar, contacts, a site blocker, an app uninstaller, a file converter, network diagnostics, notch widgets and more. over forty, all in the free tier.

there is a Pro tier at $4.99 a month or $49 a year, checked on 10 September 2026, and what it holds back is AI: an agent you talk to in plain English, grammar fixing in any app, translation, dictation, generated AppleScript workflows. the ordinary tools are not behind it. macOS 14 and up, about 20 mb, no account.

hop has no AI features at all, free or paid, so that whole tier is not a thing we compete with. it is a thing we do not have.

one thing neither of us competes with any more is Launchpad — on this Mac, macOS 26.6.2, /System/Applications/Launchpad.app is simply not there. what replaced it, and what to do if the grid is what you miss, is a procedure with a page of its own. open your apps without Launchpad

Apple's own answer is Spotlight, which now browses apps as well as searching them: view and open apps on Mac — Apple Support

where Brow is better than hop

we have not run Brow tool by tool, and nothing below says anything is missing from it or broken in it. this section is the other direction: what it has and we do not, taken from what Brow itself lists. we would rather you find that out here than after installing.

forty tools against eighteen

at least fifteen of them have no answer in hop at all: emoji and GIF pickers, unit and currency converters, snippets, notes, calendar and contacts, a site and app blocker, a PDF editor, killing a process by port, widgets in the notch, a file drop zone, fan control, screen mirroring.

if two of those are on your list, that settles it, and no argument further down this page outweighs it. eighteen tools is a smaller answer to the same question, chosen deliberately, but smaller is smaller.

a launcher you type into

Brow's launcher searches every app on the machine by name. hop's is a grid you fill by hand: you add the programs you open all day, arrange them like a home screen, and click one. it never searches, and it never shows an app you did not put there.

for someone whose hands stay on the keyboard that is a step backwards, plainly. for someone who wants nine icons in the same nine places every day it is the point. neither of those is a defect.

this same split — typing a name against pointing at a thing — is the whole of another comparison on this site, and it goes into it further than there is room for here. a Raycast alternative

AI, if that is what you came for

dictation, translation, grammar fixed in place, a workflow described in a sentence. we have nothing in that direction and nothing planned, so if AI is the reason you are looking at a toolkit, the answer is Brow and the price is $4.99 a month.

the one thing we can show you and Brow cannot

a toolkit like this asks for accessibility, screen recording and the clipboard. that is not unreasonable — a window manager cannot move windows without accessibility, OCR cannot read the screen without screen recording. it does mean you are handing one app the ability to watch what you type, copy and see.

what «open source» is being claimed

hop's whole source is published under the MIT licence at github.com/antonyshakirov/hop, and the permissions page in the app lists every one it asks for and why. you do not have to take the privacy claim on trust; you can go and look at whether the code that would collect anything exists.

for Brow we could not find the same thing. its site points at github.com/brow-app, and on 10 September 2026 that account returned nothing — no organisation, no brow-app/brow repository. the only Brow presence we found on GitHub was a Homebrew tap under Mac-Brow-App, which is how a cask is distributed, not where source lives.

what that does and does not mean

it does not mean Brow is hiding anything or is doing something with your clipboard. a closed-source Mac app is the normal case, its privacy statement may be entirely true, and an earlier version of this very page repeated the open-source claim without checking it.

it means one of the two claims is checkable and the other is a promise. if that distinction does not move you, it does not move you — plenty of good software is closed, and this is the only place where we are ahead.

why an app that only moves windows needs the permission that can also read every keystroke is a question worth its own answer. why Mac apps ask for accessibility

a Brow alternative when the tool count is not the point

eighteen tools behind an icon you can see, rather than forty behind a shortcut you type into. that suits glance-and-point work — watching a download, checking a temperature, picking a colour off the screen — where naming the tool is a detour.

the clipboard here keeps whole files as well as text, and pastes them back as real files rather than as their names. clipboard history in hop

removing an app takes what it left in about thirty places, and the same module cleans without removing anything. the app uninstaller

two of those rows are small and we are not going to pretend otherwise. six megabytes against twenty is a rounding error on any Mac made this decade, and «no paid tier» matters mainly if a Pro button inside an app you use daily is the kind of thing that nags at you. the row that carries weight is the source one.

how to decide without running both for a month

1. write down the tools you actually reach for in a week — most people name four or five, not forty
2. if two of them are on Brow's list and not on ours, install Brow and stop here: it is free and it wins
3. if the overlap is the ordinary set — clipboard, windows, timer, converter, uninstaller — then the feature count is not deciding anything, and the questions left are the door and the source
4. run both if you like: they do not conflict, and a launcher and a menu bar panel are not the same habit

the eighteen, each with what it does and what it deliberately does not. everything in hop

and if what you are really weighing is one subscription against a shelf of separate apps, that arithmetic is a different comparison. a Setapp alternative

frequently asked questions

is Brow free?

yes, and not in the crippled sense: all 40+ ordinary tools are in the free tier. the Pro tier at $4.99 a month or $49 a year holds only the AI features — agent, grammar, translation, dictation, workflows. checked 10 September 2026.

which has more tools?

Brow, by a distance — 40+ against eighteen, and at least fifteen of them have no answer in hop at all. whether that matters depends on whether you would use them.

is Brow open source?

we could not confirm it. the site points at github.com/brow-app, and on 10 September 2026 there was no such account and no brow-app/brow repository — only a Homebrew tap under Mac-Brow-App, which distributes the app rather than its source. hop's source is published under MIT.

does hop have a paid tier?

no, none at all, and none planned. that also means no AI features, which is where Brow's paid tier lives.

does either of them bring back Launchpad?

no. Launchpad is gone from macOS 26 — it is not in /System/Applications any more — and neither app restores it. Brow answers with a searchable launcher, hop with a grid of the apps you pick.

is hop smaller?

yes, about six megabytes against twenty. it is a real difference and a small one; nobody should switch toolkits over fourteen megabytes.

can i run both?

yes. they do not conflict, and a launcher on a hotkey and a panel behind a menu bar icon answer different habits.

the hop side of this

app launcher — the apps you open all day, one click away.