The best Moom alternative for Mac (and when to keep Moom)
Moom has been on Macs since 2011, and Many Tricks have kept it alive through a decade of macOS rewrites — the current release is Moom 4.5.1, at $15 with a free trial. So if you're looking for a Moom alternative, it's rarely because Moom is bad. It's usually one of three things: the good stuff lives behind the mouse, there's more app there than you needed, or you bought it for saved layouts and never actually saved any. Here's an honest read on where Moom still wins, what to switch to, and how to tell which camp you're in.
Why people look for a Moom alternative
Moom's signature interaction is hovering the green traffic-light button to pop up a palette of window actions. In Moom 4 that palette is fully customisable and can hold up to 61 actions, organised into folders, layouts and grids. It's genuinely clever. It's also a pointer interaction, and that's where most of the friction starts.
- The headline feature needs your cursor. To use the palette you have to put the mouse on a specific 12-pixel button on a specific window. If you're building a keyboard-first workflow, every window placement becomes a mouse round-trip.
- Keyboard mode is a mode. Moom does have full keyboard control — but you set a "Control active window via hot key" shortcut, press it to enter keyboard mode, and then press keys inside it. To get the on-screen grid you press that trigger twice (or tick "Start with grid" first). It works, and Moom will even show you a cheat sheet while you're in there. It's just two decisions where a dedicated keyboard tiler asks for one.
- The surface area is large. Snap zones, drop zones, window chaining, custom actions, folders, per-display grid sizes. Power users love this; a lot of buyers use three of the sixty-one actions and pay for the other fifty-eight in settings-screen confusion. The most common complaint in Moom reviews isn't the features — it's that the documentation hasn't kept up with them.
- Updates aren't included forever. Your licence is valid forever, but Many Tricks commit to at least one year of updates; Moom 3 owners paid $8 to move to Moom 4. That's far more generous than a subscription, and worth knowing before you assume $15 is the last time you'll pay.
- There are two Mooms. "Moom Classic" on the Mac App Store is the older version 3; Moom 4 is a direct download. If you bought from the App Store years ago, the upgrade path is a migration, not a button.
If none of that describes you, keep Moom. Especially if you use the one feature nothing else on this list really replaces.
Where Moom is still the right answer
Saved layouts. Arrange five windows exactly how you want them, save the arrangement, and restore it with a trigger — including automatically when you plug into an external display, with the layout scaled to fit whatever size that display is. If your actual problem is "my windows scatter every time I undock," that is Moom's job and it does it well. Most keyboard tilers, including ours, are placers rather than snapshot-restorers. We wrote about the whole category in saving window layouts on a Mac.
The licence terms. Many Tricks run an honour-system family licence: one licence covers your family across your Macs, and they don't track installs. That's an unusually decent way to sell software, and it deserves credit in a market full of Apple-ID locks.
Old hardware. Moom 4 runs on macOS 10.13 High Sierra and later. Most modern window managers, ours included, need something far newer.
The best Moom alternatives at a glance
| Moom | Rectangle | Magnet | Loop | Let's Tile | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $15 one-time ($8 upgrade) | Free (Pro ~$9.99) | One-time, App Store | Free | Free tier + $9.99 Pro |
| Licence | Proprietary; family, honour system | Open source (MIT) | Proprietary; tied to Apple ID | Open source (GPL-3.0) | Proprietary; free tier forever |
| How you choose a layout | Hover the green button, or enter keyboard mode | Memorise a shortcut | Memorise a shortcut | Flick a radial menu at the cursor | Summon a visible grid, steer with arrows |
| Hands stay on keyboard | Partly | Yes | Yes | Partly | Yes |
| Saved, restorable layouts | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Arbitrary grid regions | Yes | Some (Pro) | No | Compass directions + custom frames | Yes — full grid in Pro |
| Minimum macOS | 10.13 (High Sierra) | 13 (Ventura) | 13 (Ventura) | 13 (Ventura) | 14 (Sonoma) |
Let's Tile — the visible grid, without the green button
If what you liked about Moom was seeing your options laid out and what wore you down was pointing at them, Let's Tile is the direct trade.
Press one shortcut (⌘↵ by default) and a grid drops over the window you're already using. Steer the highlight with the arrow keys, hold ⇧ and press an arrow to stretch the window across more cells, then hit ↵ to snap it. Same virtue as Moom's palette — nothing to memorise, because the choices are on screen — except there's no mode to enter first and no button to find with the mouse. One shortcut covers every layout the grid can describe, instead of one action per layout.
Being fair about the trade: Let's Tile is much newer than Moom, it's not open source, it needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and it does not save and restore layouts. If you bought Moom for that last one, stop here — nothing below replaces it.
What you get instead is a keyboard-only path and friendly licensing. The free tier is a 3 × 2 grid — halves, thirds, two-thirds, quarters and full screen — permanently, not as a trial. Pro is $9.99, paid once: any grid shape you like (4 × 3, 6 × 2, whatever your ultrawide wants), a different grid per display remembered automatically, ⌘⇧ + arrows to throw a window to another display mid-tile, ⌥ + arrows to reshape the grid on the fly, and margins between cells in pixels. No account, no subscription, no telemetry, and one key covers up to 20 devices.
The other alternatives, briefly
Rectangle is the free, open-source, MIT-licensed standard. Pure keyboard, no palette, no cursor. The catch is that you memorise a shortcut per region and most people stall at halves and quarters — see our Rectangle alternative guide.
Magnet is the "install it and never think about it" App Store buy: sensible defaults, halves, quarters, thirds, almost nothing to configure. No saved layouts, and the licence rides on your Apple ID. More in the Magnet alternative post.
Loop keeps the "show me the options" idea but puts them on a radial wheel at your pointer. Free, open source, and genuinely pretty — and still a cursor interaction, which is the thing you may be leaving Moom over. See the Loop alternative guide.
yabai or AeroSpace if you'd rather windows arranged themselves and you never placed one by hand. That's a real config commitment; we compared them in yabai vs AeroSpace.
Which should you pick?
Stay on Moom if saved layouts are the reason you opened it this week, if you're on an older macOS, or if the green-button palette suits how you work. Pick Rectangle if free and open source is the priority, Magnet for App Store simplicity, Loop if you want the wheel, and yabai/AeroSpace if you want automatic tiling.
And if the thing that got old was reaching for the pointer to place every window, try Let's Tile — the free tier has no clock on it, so a couple of days will tell you. If you want to stop touching the Dock as well, Let's Switch does the other half: hold Option-Tab to jump straight to a window rather than an app.
One practical note whichever way you go: don't run two window managers at once. Their triggers will fight and you'll blame the wrong app — quit and remove the old one first. For the wider category, see our best macOS window manager guide or the free window manager roundup.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Moom cost?
Moom 4 is $15 as a one-time purchase, with a free trial. Moom 3 owners upgrade for $8. The licence is valid forever and includes at least a year of updates, so a future major version may cost again — it is not a subscription.
Is there a free Moom alternative?
Yes. Rectangle (MIT-licensed) and Loop (GPL-3.0) are both free and open source, and Let's Tile has a free 3 × 2 grid with no time limit. None of them save and restore window layouts the way Moom does.
What's the best keyboard-only alternative to Moom?
Rectangle if you're happy memorising a shortcut per region, or Let's Tile if you'd rather see a grid and steer it with the arrow keys. Both skip Moom's keyboard-mode step entirely.
Does anything replace Moom's saved layouts?
Not cleanly. Snapshot-and-restore is a different feature from window placement, and most keyboard tilers don't attempt it. If that's your core need, Moom remains a reasonable purchase — our save window layout guide covers the options.