Vitals presents Mac system performance through an app-centric view, reducing the complexity of monitoring resource usage. Rather than displaying individual processes, it groups all child processes under their parent application, producing approximately 60 rows where Activity Monitor would show over 1,000.
Each app row shows combined CPU, memory, GPU, disk, and network usage, making it straightforward to identify which application is the source of high resource consumption without navigating nested process lists. The consolidated view extends to 30 days of history, enabling trend analysis across extended periods rather than only the current state.
Alert functionality notifies users when an application exceeds CPU, memory, disk, or network thresholds. This is useful for monitoring long-running tasks or identifying background processes that unexpectedly consume resources.
Developer-oriented features include identification of running development servers, open ports, and idle processes. This helps developers find forgotten local servers, unused background services, or processes that continue consuming resources after tasks complete.
The menu bar component displays customizable real-time metrics, with options for temperature, fan speed, battery health, per-app volume control, and Bluetooth device battery levels in addition to the standard CPU, memory, and network indicators.
System requirements: macOS 15 Sequoia or later. Compatible with Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
Pricing: Launch price $9 (limited licenses), regular price $29 as a one-time payment with lifetime updates included. No subscription or account required.
Limitations: Requires macOS 15, excluding users on earlier macOS versions. The one-time pricing may represent higher upfront cost compared to subscription alternatives. App-level grouping may obscure individual process-level detail required for low-level debugging.
Alternatives: iStatistica, iStat Menus, and MenuMeters provide system monitoring with varying depth. Activity Monitor remains free and included with macOS. Stats is a free open-source menu bar monitor.
Suitable for users who find Activity Monitor overwhelming, developers managing multiple running services, or anyone wanting to track which applications consume the most resources across a 30-day history.
