Comparison
AltTab is the best window switcher on the Mac. It's free, it's open source, and 8.5 million people have downloaded it for good reason. I used it for two years. This page is about the point where I stopped.
Starting here, because it's a longer list than the other direction.
AltTab shows you a live preview of every window. If you recognise your windows by what's in them — a diff, a design, a terminal that's still running — that is a faster way to think than reading a list of names. This app has no previews at all and isn't going to grow them. If that's how your memory works, AltTab is simply the better tool and it costs nothing.
GPL-3.0, developed in the open for years. You can read it, fork it, and it will outlive any decision I make about this app. Pro adds search-by-typing and up to nine independent shortcuts for $9.99, or $24.99 for lifetime updates — still less than most people expect.
Up to nine keyboard shortcuts, each with its own filter — one for this Space, one for everything, one for a single app. Three display styles. Trackpad gestures, window controls, and a preferences window with more switches in it than this app has features. If you like tuning your tools, you will have more fun there.
This app is at version 0.2.0 and I wrote it by myself. AltTab has years of edge cases already found and fixed. That's a real advantage and it would be strange to pretend otherwise.
AltTab switches windows, and a browser with forty tabs open is one window. On a normal day more than half the things I switch to are tabs — a PR, a localhost, a doc, a dashboard. AltTab gets me to Chrome. Finding the tab after that is a separate problem it was never trying to solve.
AltTab has real multi-monitor support in the sense that matters to most people: you can have a shortcut that only shows windows on the screen the switcher appeared on. That's genuinely useful and I used it.
But it's a filter. It narrows the list to what's already on a display. What I kept wanting was the opposite — the thing I want is on the wrong screen, and I want it over here, on the one I'm looking at, without letting go of the keyboard. AltTab doesn't move windows between displays, so that was always: switch to it, find the window-management shortcut, move it, and by then I'd lost the thread.
AltTab Pro added search by typing, and to be clear: it works. Type part of a window title or an app name and the list narrows. So "I can't find my window by name" was never the complaint.
The complaint is that a window title is a name I never chose and never read. I want to go back to GitHub; I have no idea GitHub called that window "Fix ranking on cold start by ron · Pull Request #42 · questionarc/switcher". Gmail's says "Inbox (47)". Searching titles means recalling a string you've never looked at. Here, a tab is matched on its hostname and path too — github, localhost, github/pull — which is the name that was already in my head.
And behind whatever you type, AltTab orders by recency, like every other switcher. With six editor windows all called Code, recency is close to noise — it tells you where you just were, which is the one place you already know you aren't going. So you type four or five characters to disambiguate. Every time. A small tax, paid several hundred times a day.
Every Chrome and Safari tab sits in the same list as every window, findable by hostname — type github or localhost rather than recalling a page title. One list, one keystroke, no second hunt after you arrive.
⌥ Space, type, then ← or → to open it on the display in that direction. If it's already there, nothing moves. Asking for the thing and saying where you want it is one gesture, not two.
The list is ordered by where you switched from. In the web project ⌥ Space offers that repo's PR and its localhost tab; from the iOS project the same keystrokes offer different ones. It learns the pairs you actually move between.
⌥ Tab goes straight to the most likely target with no palette at all — which is most of the day, because most switching is a loop between two or three things.
| Context Switcher | AltTab | |
|---|---|---|
| Individual windows | Yes | Yes |
| Windows on other Spaces | Yes | Yes |
| Window thumbnails and live previews | No | Yes — its best feature |
| Browser tabs as entries | Chrome and Safari | No |
| Filter the list by display | No | Yes |
| Send a window to another display while switching | Yes — ← → | No |
| Search by name | Yes | Yes, in Pro |
| What the search actually matches | Hostname, path, title, app | Window title and app name |
| Ranks by where you switched from | Yes | Recency |
| Configurability | Deliberately little | Extensive |
| Open source | No | Yes, GPL-3.0 |
| Price | $10 once, 14-day trial | Free · Pro $9.99, lifetime $24.99 |
Use AltTab if you switch by looking rather than typing, if your browser is one thing among many rather than half your working day, or if you want a mature tool with a community behind it that will still be here in five years. It's free. Try it first — I mean that, and there's no version of this page where I don't.
Use this if you're on two displays and keep wanting to pull things across them, if a serious share of what you switch to lives in a Chrome or Safari tab, and if you have enough near-identical windows that recency ordering has stopped meaning anything.
Both is fine too. They don't fight. Give them different keys and use whichever your hands reach for — that's what I did for a while before this one won.
No account, no sign-in. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel. 2.2 MB.
AltTab's features and pricing checked August 2026 against alt-tab.app and its GitHub repository. I have no affiliation with AltTab and there are no referral links on this page. It's actively developed, so if something here is out of date, tell me and I'll correct it.