Email Application For Mac 2018

Something's happening—you're having a sale, you're hosting an event, or you published a new blog post—and you want to tell everyone about it. Years ago, that might have required paying for a newspaper ad, publishing a press release, or printing and mailing a flyer. Today, reaching your customers and contacts is as easy as clicking a button in your email marketing software.

There are dozens of ways to send emails to lists of people, from the BCC field in Gmail to mail merge tools in Word. But your best option is email newsletter software: services designed specifically to send professional-looking emails to hundreds or thousands of subscribers at once.

Tuesday August 7, 2018 12:37 PM PDT by Juli Clover Newton, a popular email service for iOS and Mac, is shutting down on September 25, the company's founder Rohit Nadhani announced today.

We tested dozens of tools, and here we'll present our picks for the 10 best email newsletter services. If you're looking for an easy way to send emails to all of your contacts, one of these 10 tools should work for you.

What Makes Email Newsletter Software Great?

Email newsletter apps are the tools that power the bulk emails you receive from businesses every day. They're a great way to share news, announce new promotions, show off new product features, promote your new blog posts, and curate content for your subscribers.

We focused our testing on apps primarily used to send email newsletters. There's a lot of email marketing software that offers a full suite of marketing automation features in addition to email newsletter functionality. For example, Mailchimp is a popular email newsletter tool, but it also functions as a CRM, social media management tool, and ad manager. These kinds of email marketing services can be intimidating to the average user who just wants a quick way to build an email newsletter and send it to a list.

While some of the apps in this list offer additional features like transactional emails, drip marketing campaigns, and A/B testing, each app's primary focus is on email newsletters.

All of the apps we've selected include the following features:

Embeddable sign-up forms that make it easy for your website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter
A way to organize your contacts into lists
Professional-looking newsletter templates or content blocks
Performance reports

And when we could find third-party deliverability studies, we considered a tool's email deliverability rates as well. (Unfortunately, we couldn't find these for every tool we tested.)

Finally, we tested each app for usability. Creating and sending an email newsletter should be a simple process, so we excluded any tools that were so complex to use that we spent more time searching Google for solutions for how to use the tool than actually testing and using the tool.

The 10 Best Email Newsletter Services

MailerLite for deliverability and scalability
Constant Contact for automatically creating a newsletter template
Mailjet for collaborating on newsletters
Campaign Monitor for agencies who handle email marketing for multiple clients
Mad Mimi for simplicity
EmailOctopus for cheaper high-volume email sending
Revue for editorial and curated content newsletters
BombBomb for sending emails that include videos
Vision6 for detailed subscriber segmenting
VerticalResponse for nonprofit organizations

MailerLite (Web)

Best email newsletter software for deliverability and scalability

MailerLite is an email marketing tool that can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. Creating an email newsletter in the editor is simple: Choose from dozens of pre-designed content blocks for things like buttons, navigation menus, logos, images, videos, and text. When you're finished, choose a list, hit send, and you're done.

And while MailerLite makes it easy to build and send email newsletters, it also offers more advanced features like A/B split testing; built-in photo editing; email automation; contact list segmentation by demographics, interests, and/or behaviors; and click-map reports. You can even schedule your emails to be delivered at a specific time to subscribers in every timezone.

If you run an eCommerce site, you can import your product catalog to add products to your emails easily, and if you're using your newsletter to promote your blog content, you can use its RSS-to-email feature to build and send emails automatically. Plus, you can create both embeddable subscribe forms and pop-up forms that display after a certain amount of time, after a certain scroll depth, or on exit intent.

These more advanced features are available in MailerLite, but they don't get in the way if you don't need them.

MailerLite also has a higher deliverability rate than many other email marketing apps. In a recent study by EmailToolTester, MailerLite had the second highest deliverability of all of the tools tested.

MailerLite Price: The Free Plan includes up to 1,000 subscribers, 12,000 emails per month, and limited features; from $10/month for up to 1,000 subscribers, unlimited emails, and all features.

Connect MailerLite to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's MailerLite integrations.

Constant Contact (Web, iOS, Android)

Best email newsletter software for automatically creating a newsletter template

If you're not a designer, creating a template for your newsletter can be a time-consuming process. Constant Contact makes it easier by auto-generating a template for you. You plug in your website's address, it scans your site for colors and images, and then it plugs those things into various templates. Choose the template you like and use it for all of your newsletters. All in all, it took us about two minutes to set up.

Use the tool's drag-and-drop editor to add content blocks to your email. In addition to the typical content blocks for things like headings, text, buttons, and images, Constant Contact's Email Plus plan lets you import products from Shopify, include a coupon, and add blocks that let people RSVP for an event, make a donation, or answer a poll.

In-app tutorials and video explainers pop up whenever you visit a new feature section in the tool, making it easy to learn the ropes. Plus, Constant Contact has above-average deliverability rates in EmailToolTester's study, so you can feel confident that your subscribers will receive the newsletters you send them.

Constant Contact Price: From $20/month for the Email plan for unlimited emails to 500 subscribers; from $45/month for the Email Plus plan that includes content blocks for RSVP, Shopify, polls, and more.

Connect Constant Contact to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's Constant Contact integrations.

Mailjet (Web)

Best email newsletter software for collaborating on newsletters

If you need to collaborate with other people to create your email newsletters, Mailjet's Premium plan is a great option. Invite your team members, set roles or assign specific permissions, and then collaborate in real time (similar to collaborating in Google Docs) to build your newsletters. Leave comments, respond to comments, and create approval workflows so you can work together without overriding each other's changes.

Then, use Mailjet's email designer to customize your newsletter and build custom templates. Segment your lists and run A/B tests. And, if needed, you can also use Mailjet to create and send transactional emails for things like purchases and free plan sign-ups, and you can even purchase credits and send SMS messages using the tool.

It's a handy way to handle all of your company's emails from one service, letting your developers send messages from your app the way that's easiest for them, while also letting designers and writers update emails without having to dive into any code.

Mailjet Price: From $20.95/month for the Premium plan that includes 30,000 emails per month and team collaboration features.

Connect Mailjet to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's Mailjet integrations.

Campaign Monitor (Web, iOS)

Best email newsletter software for agencies who handle email marketing for multiple clients

If you manage email marketing for multiple clients, Campaign Monitor makes that process simple. You can add as many clients as you want; create custom templates, emails, and automations for each client; allow clients to access their campaigns through a white-label version of the tool; and lock specific sections of emails and templates so they can't be edited.

Then, either have clients pay for their usage themselves by reselling the product to them, or you can pay for all of your clients yourself as part of a single package. You can even pay individually for a specific campaign if you have a client who only wants to send emails occasionally to a large list of contacts.

Campaign Monitor's email editor includes fewer options than many other email design tools, but that makes it a far faster way to customize your messages. Start with pre-made templates and drag in new sections you want, or hand-code your own template using Campaign Monitor's simple email code snippets. On the Unlimited plan, you can even preview what your email will look like in 20 different inboxes, helping you ensure that your emails look great for everyone.

Campaign Monitor Price: From $9/month for the Basic plan to send up to 2,500 emails per month to 500 contacts; from $29/month for the Unlimited plan that includes inbox previews for 20 inboxes.

Connect Campaign Monitor to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's Campaign Monitor integrations.

Mad Mimi (Web)

Best email newsletter software for simplicity

When you log in to Mad Mimi, you'll see two tabs: Promotions and Audience. Promotions are your emails. That's the only unintuitive thing you'll run across in the tool—everything else is simple and straightforward. Create an email, add contacts to your list, and send a newsletter to your subscribers.

But that doesn't mean Mad Mimi doesn't offer some more advanced features. Rather, instead of being present by default, you can toggle them on as needed in a separate Add Things section of the tool. For example, turn on the Etsy integration to pull products from your Etsy account directly into your email newsletter. Or add additional users, collect IP addresses, or create drip campaigns—but only if you need to. If you don't, those features will stay out of your way.

Mad Mimi's simplicity delivers a lot of value if you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of features in the other email newsletter tools. The downside is that it doesn't offer a free trial, so you'll have to pay a minimum of $10 to create an account to play around with the tool and see if it's a good fit for you.

Mad Mimi Price: From $10/month for the Basic plan to send unlimited emails to up to 500 subscribers.

Connect Mad Mimi to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's Mad Mimi integrations.

EmailOctopus (Web)

Best email newsletter software for cheaper high-volume email sending

You typically don't have to think about how your email newsletters are sent; you click Send and the magic happens. But with EmailOctopus, it's worth taking a bit of time to set up both an email newsletter app and a transactional email service for a far cheaper way to send your newsletters, particularly if you have a lot of subscribers.

With EmailOctopus, you'll connect/create an Amazon SES account first to send your emails through Amazon's transactional service. Then, design your email newsletters in EmailOctopus's rich editor, and add contacts to your lists. EmailOctopus sends the email, tracks stats, and helps you grow your list just like any other email tool. Only this time, it's using another service to send the emails and passing the savings on to you.

For example, say you have 30,000 subscribers and send an average of one email per week. On EmailOctopus, you'll pay for both a monthly subscription to EmailOctopus and a per-email fee to Amazon SES: The total monthly cost for both would be around $44.80. The cost for the same thing on Campaign Monitor, on the other hand, would be at least $299/month; for MailerLite, at least $140/month.

EmailOctopus Price: Free for 62,000 emails through Amazon SES and up to 2,500 subscribers in EmailOctopus; from $19/month for the Tuna plan (plus the cost of sending messages through Amazon SES) for 10,000 subscribers and custom branding.

Connect EmailOctopus to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's EmailOctopus integrations.

Two other lower-cost alternatives include MailUp, which lets you send your emails at a slower rate for lower costs, and Sendy, which lets you purchase a Sendy license for a one-time fee of $59 and then send your emails through Amazon SES for around $0.0001 per email. MailUp doesn't require a separate transactional email service but costs more than EmailOctopus. Sendy is less expensive than EmailOctopus, but you have to self-host the newsletter software.

Revue (Web, iOS, Chrome, Safari)

Best email newsletter software for editorial and curated content newsletters

Revue is to email newsletters as Medium is to most content management systems. Its simple newsletter builder is content-focused and displays to you in editing form exactly as your subscribers will see it in their inboxes. Unlike other tools, Revue doesn't offer highly designed templates and content blocks. Instead, it's all about the text.

That makes it a great option for editorial and curated content newsletters since content is what you're really looking to share. You don't have to spend a ton of time finding and creating images to make your newsletter look good in a template that's designed more for showing off products, food, or travel destinations. Instead, you just write and add pictures if needed—and your newsletter still looks great.

You can compose an email newsletter in the same way you'd write a blog post on your site, with section headers, links, and images. You can even embed a Tweet if you'd like. You can write each newsletter from scratch, or you can connect Twitter, Facebook, an RSS feed, Dribble, Product Hunt, Instagram, and more to import content from another site to Revue.

Revue also simplifies the process of curating content from around the web and adding it to your newsletter. Connect your Pocket account or install its Chrome or Safari extensions to add content to your newsletter in just a few clicks. You can also connect Revue to Stripe to add a paid version of your newsletter or upgrade to the Publisher plan to include and manage ads.

Revue Price: The Free plan lets you send unlimited newsletters to up to 50 subscribers; from $5/month for the Pro plan to send unlimited emails to up to 200 subscribers, customize the design of your newsletter, and use a custom domain and email address.

Connect Revue to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's Revue integrations.

BombBomb (Web, iOS, Android)

Best email newsletter software for sending emails that include videos

The vast majority of emails are essentially digital letters. They may have professionally designed templates, but they're focused on text and images. BombBomb breaks the mold with video-powered emails. You can shoot videos in BombBomb's app, upload pre-created videos, or pull in YouTube or Animoto videos, then send them out as email newsletters with text and any other details you want.

To help you send professional-looking video email newsletters, BombBomb offers more than 100 pre-designed templates—all of which prominently feature videos. Plus, it provides in-app video tutorials that walk you through how to use just about every feature in the tool.

For recipients, videos appear in your newsletter as a GIF that BombBomb generates for you, including a play icon and video duration overlay. You can include video GIFs with these overlays in other tools, but BombBomb stands out because it automates this process for you. When recipients click the GIF, it takes them to the online version of your email where they can watch the video.

BombBomb Price: From $468/year for the Individual plan that includes unlimited emails to up to 2,500 contacts.

Connect BombBomb to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's BombBomb integrations.

Vision6 (Web)

Best email newsletter software for detailed subscriber segmenting

One of the easiest ways to manipulate data is by throwing it into a spreadsheet. Almost anyone can then easily sort the data and quickly find similar segments. Vision6 lets you do this with your contacts, with a spreadsheet-like interface for viewing and filtering. Instead of having to set filters and hope they pick the right people, you can see every field in your contact details, sort by the item you want, then select contacts and turn them into a new segment in seconds.

Then, you can use Vision6 to reach those contacts wherever they are. Right along with your email updates, you can create and send bulk SMS messages with Vision6's Twilio integration. Create your text message, preview it, and choose an opt-out keyword, then send SMS messages to all of your opted-in subscribers to reach people wherever they are.

For your newsletter, Vision6 offers dozens of templates that are simple to edit, or you can build your own with its drag-and-drop content blocks for things like images, text, buttons, headers, and footers. You can even create automatic social updates that post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to promote your newsletter to your followers once it's sent and live.

Vision6 Price: From $9/month for the Starter plan to send 2,500 emails per month to 500 subscribers.

Connect Vision6 to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's Vision6 integrations.

VerticalResponse (Web)

Best email newsletter software for nonprofit organizations

VerticalResponse has a clean, simple interface that makes it easy to create beautiful emails and send them to your contacts. It's a great email newsletter app for any business, but it's particularly noteworthy for nonprofits because they can send up to 10,000 emails per month through VerticalResponse without spending a dime on an email marketing tool.

VerticalResponse offers 18 pre-built templates for newsletters as well as a drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to create the exact design you want. Grow your list with embeddable and pop-up subscription forms, and segment your subscribers into different groups. You can even create unlimited landing pages for specific promos or offers on any VerticalResponse plan.

Another interesting feature of VerticalResponse is that you can resend your campaigns to people who didn't open them the first time around. Just adjust the subject line and hit send to get your email viewed by more of your audience without pestering people who already opened it the first time around.

VerticalResponse Price: Free for up to 10,000 emails per month for nonprofit organizations; from $11/month for the Basic plan to send unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts.

Connect VerticalResponse to 1,500+ other apps with Zapier's VerticalResponse integrations.

Automate Your Email Marketing Activities

Now that you've picked an app to send your email newsletter, it's time to make it a part of your workflow. There's no reason to copy/paste your contacts into your email lists or export your email lists to your CRM later. Instead, app automation tool Zapier can connect all of your apps, making sure everyone gets added to your email lists and more.

All of the apps in this list integrate with Zapier. Here are some of the best ways to pair your new email newsletter software with Zapier to supercharge your email marketing.

Gather Subscribers from Everywhere

New contacts can come from anywhere: a form, a Facebook ad, a spreadsheet, emails. These integrations are the best way to get all of your contacts onto your list regardless of where those contacts first interacted with you.

Add Customers to Your Email Lists

Someone just bought your product. Add them to your email newsletter with these Zaps, and you can teach them how to use your product and let them know about new features automatically.

Send Subscribers to Your CRM

If you want to inform your sales team about new newsletter subscribers so they can determine if those subscribers qualify as leads, use these Zaps to send new subscribers to your CRM automatically.

Need more automations? Check out Zapier's email newsletter integrations to find the most popular Zaps for your app—or build your own Zaps to streamline any part of your email marketing workflow.

How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Software

If you send similar emails to groups of people regularly, you need an email newsletter app. You might not need all the features of an advanced email marketing app, with automated sending schedules and landing page builders and personalization tools. Not yet, anyhow. But as your lists and marketing ambitions grow, you might.

That's the great thing about the wide variety of email newsletter apps available. Whether you want to send a curated set of articles weekly to build a following around a topic or need to send thousands of personalized messages for your multinational corporation daily, there are email apps to fit your needs.

You can start simple—even with a free email marketing app—then grow into the advanced email marketing features the top newsletter apps offer.

Start with the apps that feel most like they fit your needs today. Don't worry: When you need more features, you can always switch to another app—or keep your original, simple newsletter tool alongside a more advanced marketing automation app if you need.

In the next chapter, we'll look at tips to help you grow your email lists, along with ways to automate your email lists and ensure your messages don't get marked as spam.

There are a bunch of great apps you can install on your Mac—no question there. Separating amazing apps from must-have apps is the hard part, and we don’t want you to spend hours analyzing the Mac App Store (or scouring the web) to find the very best and most useful apps. We’ve made a list of champions across four categories: productivity; Internet and communications; music, photos, and video; and utilities.

The Lifehacker Pack is an annual snapshot of our favorite, essential applications for each of our favorite platforms. For our always-updating directory of all the best apps, be sure to bookmark our App Directory, where we profile amazing apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS each week—browser extensions, too.

Personal finance software can help you master the basics, become more efficient at managing your money, and even help you discover ways to meet your long-term financial goals. Choosing the best personal finance software is based on your current financial needs. 13 rows We spent over 60 hours testing 20 personal finance apps and programs to find the best. Best Personal Finance Software – The Top Money Apps for 2018 Personal finance software has been around for several decades. Since the internet was invented, we’ve looked for ways to manage our household and investment accounts in an uncomplicated way. The Best Personal Finance Software Personal finance software can help bolster your financial literacy, track spending and savings, and help you set short- and long-term goals. We spent a week compiling a list of every finance app we could find (a total of 48), and whittled it down based on security, convenience, tools, and customer support. Personal financial software for mac 2018 reviews. Oct 28, 2017 Top 10 Best Personal Finance Software for Mac| 2018 5 (100%) 1 vote Personal Finance Software refers to a financial tool that enables you to prepare a budget, track your expenses, and check your overall finances.

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Productivity

Alfred (free-ish)

You can do a lot with Spotlight in macOS, but Alfred is still our favorite application launcher for yourMac. This easy-to-use tool can do so much more than pull up apps, files, and and keyword-driven automation. Plunk down £19 for the Powerpack, and you’ll get a clipboard history, access to workflows (that you can use to combine different actions, hotkeys, and keywords to do even more), hotkeys, 1Password integration, and even text expansion. In other words, paying for Alfred covers a number of activities that you’d have to download separate apps for—some featured in this very Lifehacker Pack. If you’re a new Alfred buyer and feeling little overwhelmed, be sure to check out our beginner’s guide to the app to get a handle on all the amazing things you can do with it.

If you don’t want to pay anything for an app launcher that has similar (but fewer) features under the hood, check out LaunchBar 6: free, if you don’t mind a little bother here and there. That, or consider tricking out Spotlight.

Bear (free-ish)

This cutely named app is one of the best note-taking apps you can get, with one small caveat—to synchronize notes between your devices or use custom themes, you’ll need to pony up $15/year for the app’s subscription. Otherwise, Bear is completely free to use (and looks great).

Best Email App For Mac 2018

Within the app, you organize your notes by hashtags rather than unwieldy folders. You can also link notes to one another, which makes it a lot easier to chain together related thoughts instead of having to dump everything into one giant Super Note or remember that you had a few things to say, split into different notes, about a particular topic. Install Bear’s browser extension for Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you’ll be able to create new notes from whatever portion of a webpage you select. Also, Bear makes it easy to import notes from other services, including Apple Notes, so you really have no reason to not give it a spin.

If you need to sync notes and don’t feel like paying for it, consider apps like OneNote, Google Keep, or Simplenote—all good choices, but none that can beat our Bear for usability and looks.

aText ($5)

Who would have thought that text expansion, otherwise known as typing shortcuts, would be so expensive? While it’s true that you can create these kinds of shortcuts yourself directly within macOS, a full-fledged text expansion app is going to save you a lot of time and trouble. We like aText if for nothing else than its price—$5—given that much-loved alternatives like Textexpander ($3.33/mo on an annual plan; $45 for an older standalone) and TypeIt4Me 6 ($20) are anywhere from a bit to a lot more expensive.

As for aText, using it is simple. You set it up so that whenever you enter little words or phrases, the app drops in something else. So, you can finally correct that annoying “ducking” issue forevermore,

Text expansion, also known as typing shortcuts, can save you hours of typing each day. You type a small word or combination of characters and it’ll expand into full, complex sentences that you often use. We love aText because it offers so many great features and only costs $5. If you haven’t yet jumped on the text expansion train, it’s time.

Todoist (free-ish)

For simple note-taking and note-organizing, you can’t go wrong with Todoist. The app is completely free—unless you want to pay $39/yearly for more advanced features like automatic reminders, backups, themes, and an activity overview, to name a few features. Otherwise, the basics are great. It’s easy to create and synchronize tasks (and subtasks) across all of your Todoist-using devices, and browser extensions (including a Gmail addon) will help you make Todoist, and your growing task list, an ever-present part of your daily life. You won’t have that same kind of experience with plain ol’ Notes, especially if you’re trying to access your items on multiple platforms.

If you’re a big Google fan, we also love Google Tasks, which you’ll find directly integrated into the latest version of Gmail (and as a direct app for iOS and Android). You can also add to-do items into our note-taking app, Bear. The app Things 3 is a super-comprehensive task manager, but it costs quite a bit: $50 for Mac, $10 for iPhone, and $20 for your iPad. If the first item on your to-do list is “rob a bank,” however, it’s a gorgeous, fully featured app. And if you want to harass yourself about things you have to get done on your Mac, consider giving the quicky Effortless a try—which drops a countdown timer for your tasks directly into your Mac’s menu bar.

Google Drive and Office Online (free)

We don’t really have to introduce Google Drive, because Google’s offerings should be pretty well-known by everyone at this point. Docs and Sheets are great, free tools for creating and collaborating on documents and spreadsheets (of course), so much so, that a number of businesses solely rely on Google’s offerings instead of anything fancier or pricier.

If you’re a Microsoft convert, or you really love Word and Excel, you can access basic, online versions of both programs directly from Microsoft—no Office 365 subscription needed. If you’d rather work offline, Apple’s Pages and Numbers are the obvious, free choices, and LibreOffice is still the best open-source office app around.

Airmail ($5)

If you really don’t feel like fussing around with Mail, which is fine enough for most macOS users, consider giving Airmail a try. It’s been our favorite third-party mail app for some time given its low price and ample customization. It also hooks into a ton of other third-party apps and services, including Trello, Evernote, your favorite cloud storage service, and Apple’s mighty Workflow app (on iOS, that is).

If you don’t need power options and want easy, simple email, the free Spark is definitely worth checking out—especially since it can help you automatically sort your inbox to make it feel less like an ever-growing pile of things you’ll never read. Boxy 2 is great if you’re a Gmail user who wants the powers of its Inbox app on your desktop (and don’t mind paying $5 for it), and Mailplane 4 ($30) is a solid app if you prefer an interface that looks like the regular ol’ Gmail. Power users might want to investigate Wavebox ($20/year), which lets you access Gmail, Inbox, Outlook, and all sorts of other amazing web apps directly from one, easy-to-use interface.

Internet and Communications

Google Chrome and Firefox Quantum (free)

The browser you use is likely going to be dictated by the browser you’ve been using. In other words, if you’re a Google Chrome loyalist, it’ll probably take a lot to get you to switch over to Firefox Quantum (if you’re at all intrigued). And if you’ve been with Firefox from day one, you’re probably a lot less likely to want to move all of your bookmarks, extensions, and other settings over to Chrome.

So, which browser is best? It’s not so much that one excels over the other; it’s more important to say that both, finally, are pretty competitive. Depending on the benchmarks you look at—here are a bunch from ZDNet, for example—the browsers appear evenly matched for speed. I haven’t gone through and assessed the most-recent version of each, but I have used both Firefox Quantum and Google Chrome, and they both feel, well, fast. That said, Chrome still feels a bit like a hog when you’re trying to load a ton of tabs at once, but it’s pretty good about using less of your CPU and memory than other browsers.

Best Email Application For Mac

Free Application For Mac

If you don’t like either, Opera is a viable alternative that’s actually pretty speedy in its own right—and we can’t complain about its built-in VPN, either, nor its awesome integration of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram directly into an easy-to-launch sidebar.

Goofy and Franz (free)

Years ago, it felt like everyone used one chat client to cover a bunch of services (ICQ, AIM, IRC, Jabber, et cetera). Most people nowadays probably have their favorites locked in: Messages for texting, Facebook Messenger for everything else, WhatsApp for sending government secrets or expiring pictures of your booty, Discord for any and all things gaming, Slack for all things not-gaming, et cetera. So, rather than go into detail with all the more obvious apps, we’ll highlight two unique ones.

Facebook Messenger, as you know, requires you to be on Facebook to use it. If I’m correct, you used to be able to essentially connect Facebook’s service to Messages itself, so you could send and receive your Facebook chats without having to have your browser open all the time. And if I’m right (again), you can no longer do that. Instead, you’ll want an app like Goofy, which basically drops the Facebook Messenger interface into a simple application that you can access from your desktop.

We’re also fans of Franz, which offers the same treatment for a variety of other services (as well as Facebook Messenger). If you don’t want to keep 20 programs open to chat with people, Franz lets you access apps like Slack, WeChat, WhatsApp, Skype, Google Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger all from one, single interface.

Skype (free)

Everyone also probably has a video chat app they love to use. And there are plenty to pick from: FaceTime, which comes baked into macOS by default; the aforementioned WhatsApp; Google Hangouts; Houseparty; and even good ol’ Facebook Messenger itself.

If you’re looking for a standalone messaging app that can do it all—for personal and business use, too—we still recommend Skype, which Microsoft recently overhauled. Its interface feels cleaner (and comes with a dark mode), it’s still as easy as ever to send text messages, video messages, and files to contacts, and you can even @ message your friends to get their attention.

That said, we live in an time where most messaging apps have some kind of video or calling component—or so it feels. So if you need that human contact beyond simple texting and emoji, odds are good that you can already do it in the chat app you love.

Music, Photos, and Video

VLC (free)

VLC is the best media player you can put on your Mac, period. It works perfectly with minimal fuss once you install it, and it can play almost any file you throw at it. If you’re a power user, it has a sea of options that would take the entire rest of this article to describe to you.

We enjoy all the improvements VideoLAN tosses VLC’s way, including its new support for 10-bit color depth and HDR, 360 videos, and improved decoding that allows less-powerful systems to play full 4K videos—even if that’s overkill for your Mac’s display resolution. You can drop a number of plug-ins and extensions into VLC to extend its functionality, and you can even use the app to stream videos to your Chromecast, if you’ve allowed Google to get a foothold into your Apple-only household.

HandBrake (free)

HandBrake is a free video conversion tool that, when coupled with an app like MakeMKV, will turn you into a ripping and converting powerhouse. HandBrake is pretty easy to use, but there are still plenty of settings that might give you a little anxiety when you first load the app. We have a guide to help out with that. Once you’ve mastered the basics, queuing up multiple videos and converting them to all kinds of different formats will feel second-nature. Also, don’t forget to grab VLC, mentioned above, so you can actually watch all of your creations.

Adobe Bridge CC, digiKam, and Google Backup and Sync (free)

Apple’s standard Photos app does a pretty decent job organizing your sprawling photo, thanks to collections, tags, and the ability to view photos by when (and where) they were taken. You can even do a little light editing, too.

If you need a little more organizational oomph, consider Adobe Bridge CC—completely free to use, even though you might have assumed it was a paid app. You can’t do a lot of editing in Bridge (well, any retouching, really), but what it lacks in tools, it makes up for in data. You can easily see all sorts of compelling metadata about the images you’ve taken, and organizing them via ratings, keywords, and labels is easy. Well, setting it up is easy. Actually organizing your sprawling photo library might take a little time, but it’ll be worth it in the end, trust me.

The open-source app digiKam has organizing, editing, and a UI that’s fairly similar to what you’d find in Adobe Bridge CC. If you’re not used apps like Adobe’s Lightroom, digiKam might feel a bit advanced—possibly even overkill for your needs—but it’s a powerful app for pro users that would rather spend their cash on camera hardware than more software.

Google Backup and Sync isn’t a photo organizing app itself, but it’s what you’ll want to use to get your photos uploaded into Google Photos—a great online tool and compelling alternative to iCloud as a result of the unlimited storage space you get for photos. It’s easy to create collections and share photos with others (Google will even make suggestions for you based around where and when you’ve taken your shots). And we also like that you can get pretty creative with your searches when sorting and organizing your sprawling photo library.

Spotify ($10) and Amazon Music Unlimited ($8)

Which music streaming service you pick is largely a matter of preference: one might carry your favorite band, one might have an app interface you greatly prefer, one might have all your friends on it. If you aren’t into Apple Music for these, or any other valid reasons, Spotify is the next obvious choice (sorry Tidal). It has a huge library, its social features are great, and we love the thought it puts into its playlists—human-curated and automatically generated.

If you’re already an Amazon Prime subscriber, you should also consider checking out the company’s Amazon Music Unlimited service. You’ll have to pay $8 on top of your Prime subscription, but that still makes it slightly cheaper than an Apple Music ($10) or Spotify Premium ($10).

Pixelmator ($30) and Affinity Photo ($50)

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Pixelmator is one of the best image editors on the Mac, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Though its $30 asking price might seem high, it’s a bargain considering all the incredible editing tools you get to play with—rivaling more comprehensive apps like Adobe’s Photoshop CC for a fraction of the price. (And if you want features like Touch Bar support, automatic color adjustments, and advanced compression—as well as HEIF exporting—you’ll want to pick up the pricier Pixelmator Pro for $60)

Affinity Photo is a compelling, albeit costlier alternative to Pixelmator that’ll set you back $50 for a professional-grade suite of tools, including full RAW editing and a UI that looks a lot like the Photoshop you might prefer (but don’t want to pay a subscription to get). That includes support for “Personas,” which mimics Photoshop’s Workspaces feature by allowing you to set your screen’s many options and buttons based on whatever it is you’re working on—if you prefer one set of tools for a simple editing and another set of tools for something more complex, like pre-processing images for print.

If you’re looking for basic image editing and your Mac’s built-in Photos app isn’t enough, you can always give the open-source app GIMP a try. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in price.

Utilities

Dropbox, Google Drive, and Mega (free-ish)

These cloud storage services should all be household names at this point. We’ve covered their costs, and their peers’ pricing models, pretty extensively. Which one you go with depends on your budget, preferences, and needs. Dropbox is a great, all-encompassing solution for cloud storage, but you’ll need to get creative to get more than 2GB of free space with the service. Google Drive is a no-brainer, since you get 15GB of space and can easily synchronize files to your laptop or desktop to work on them offline.

With Mega, you get 50GB of free cloud storage to play with and a handy app (MEGAsync) that you can use across your Windows and Mac computers. Mega does have an annoying transfer quota of around 1GB or so in a 24-hour time span, but that’s a small price to pay for a free 50 gigs. Take that, thumbdrives

qBittorrent or Deluge (free)

Ever since Transmission had all those malware issues some time ago, and uTorrent filled its installer full of crap and cryptocurrency miners, we’ve been on the hunt for a simple BitTorrent app, and we’ve settled on qBittorrent. It’s an open-source downloading tool that should look pretty familiar for anyone who has used an app like uTorrent or Transmission previously. No big surprises with qBittorrent’s UI or features. We like that the app is ad- and crap-free, is completely open source, and can automatically quit or shut down your PC when your download is done. https://omgbits.netlify.app/how-to-format-an-external-ssd-for-mac-to-have-os-on-it-2018.html. Deluge is a good BitTorrent app alternative, but the app hasn’t been updated since May of 2017 (when we wrote this), and we prefer something with more active development.

Backblaze ($5/mo)

If you want to keep your important files on the cloud, rather than a Time Machine backup, that’s fine—you might not have spare storage sitting around, after all. Backblaze is our new top pick for backup services, since it costs half the price of Crashplan (previously great) and does all the same things. Install the app, pick the files and folders you want to back up (encrypted, no less), and hope you never have to use the service’s restoration features.

The Unarchiver (free)

If you have file archives that your Mac can’t open, give The Unarchiver a shot at them. It’s free, it’s quick, and it does a good job of opening that which your Mac cannot open itself. It also works directly out of Finder, so you won’t have to (annoyingly) open up a separate app before you take a crack at your archives.

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A good alternative is Keka, which is also free, also opens a bunch of different archive formats, and can even be faster than The Unarchiver depending on the archive format and size. If you have issues with one app, try the other, and you might find that it does a better job extracting your files.

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(This story originally ran in July 2016, written by Alan Henry. It was updated in July 2018 by David Murphy.)