Comparison
Contexts is the app this one owes the most to. It got window-level switching and fuzzy search right years before I started, and its Sidebar is still the most original idea in this whole category. The similar name is a coincidence I'd undo if I could.
Non-consecutive character matching with acronym matches prioritised — so ppt finds "Project Planning Tracker" without you thinking about it. There's also a Fast Search mode where you hold a modifier and type one or two characters. As pure fuzzy matching over window titles, it's better than what this app does.
An auto-hiding strip listing your windows grouped by Space, and each display can have its own. Nudge the cursor over, click, done — no keystroke at all. It's a genuinely different idea about how switching should work, and if you're mouse-inclined rather than keyboard-inclined there is nothing else like it. This app has no answer to it.
The switcher panel can show on all displays at once, so you don't have to turn your head to read a list. That's a considered piece of multi-monitor design and more than most switchers manage. You can also filter by Space and sort by Importance rather than pure recency.
$9.99 against $10, and years of stability behind it versus my version 0.2.0.
Contexts switches windows, and it does it well. But a browser with forty tabs is one window to it, and on most days more than half of what I switch to is a tab. Contexts gets me to the browser; the rest is on me.
There's a second half to this. Contexts matches window titles, and a browser window's title is just whatever its active tab decided to call itself. I want to go back to GitHub — I never knew the page was titled "Fix ranking on cold start by ron · Pull Request #42 · questionarc/switcher", and Gmail's just says "Inbox (47)". Fuzzy matching that well is still matching against a string I never read.
This is the near-miss that bothered me most, because Contexts clearly had the second monitor in mind. Putting the panel on all displays solves "I can't read the list from here." It doesn't solve "the window is over there and I want it here."
Every time I used it I'd find the window I wanted, land on it, and then be looking at the wrong screen. The switch was solved; the geometry wasn't.
Contexts lets you sort by Importance instead of recency, which is a real acknowledgement that recency isn't good enough. But it's a rule you configure, not something the app works out. Ordering that I have to maintain is ordering I will stop maintaining by the second week — and it can't express the thing I actually needed, which is that the right answer is different depending on which project I'm currently sitting in.
Chrome and Safari tabs are entries, findable by hostname — github, localhost — so you don't switch to a browser and then start a second search inside it.
← or → during the switch opens the target on the display in that direction. If it's already there, nothing moves. The panel doesn't need to be on both screens, because the window comes to you.
No importance rules to configure. Ranking is built from where you switch from, so the web project surfaces its own PR and localhost, and the iOS project surfaces different ones — without you telling it anything.
⌥ Tab jumps to the most likely target with no palette at all, for the two or three things you bounce between all day.
| Context Switcher | Contexts | |
|---|---|---|
| Individual windows | Yes | Yes |
| Fuzzy search over titles | Yes | Yes, best in class |
| Find a tab by hostname or URL | Host, path and title | No tabs at all |
| Browser tabs | Chrome and Safari | No |
| Windows on other Spaces | Yes | Yes, grouped by Space |
| Panel visible on all displays | No | Yes |
| Send it to a display while switching | Yes — ← → | No |
| Mouse-driven sidebar | No | Yes, unique to it |
| Ordering | Learned, from where you switched | Recency, or manual Importance |
| Price | $10 once, 14-day trial | $9.99, free trial |
Use Contexts if the Sidebar appeals to you, if you want the sharpest fuzzy matching available, or if your switching is mostly between application windows and the browser is just one of them. It's a dollar cheaper and considerably more proven.
Use this if your tabs are as much a part of your work as your windows, and if you're on two displays and keep wanting to pull things across.
Try Contexts first if you're unsure. It has a free trial too, and it's a better-established app. If it turns out you never miss the tabs and never want to move a window, you've saved yourself ten dollars and I've lost nothing worth keeping.
No account, no sign-in. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel. 2.2 MB.
Contexts' features and pricing checked August 2026 against contexts.co. No affiliation, no referral links. Corrections to support@questionarc.com.