A caffeinate alternative for macOS with a real menu-bar app

If you have been keeping your Mac awake with the caffeinate command in Terminal, or looking for an Amphetamine alternative, Keepresso is the menu-bar app you want. It uses the same macOS technology as caffeinate under the hood, then adds the things a one-line command cannot do.

Same foundation as caffeinate

The caffeinate command and Keepresso both use macOS power assertions (the IOPMAssertion API) to tell the system not to sleep. So you get the same reliable, Apple-supported behavior. The difference is everything around it.

What you get on top of a command

• A menu-bar switch. Flip keep-awake on or off in one click, no Terminal, no remembering flags.
• Timed sessions. 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, a custom duration, or "until 18:00". caffeinate -t only takes seconds.
• Smart triggers. Stay awake only while a condition holds: on power, on a Wi-Fi network, while an app runs, during a call, while audio plays, while the CPU is busy, and more. See smart triggers.
• Keep system awake but let the screen sleep. Independent controls for system sleep and display sleep, which caffeinate bundles into separate flags.
• Lid-closed mode. Keep working with the lid shut, on battery, with the screen off. See keep your MacBook awake with the lid closed.
• "Why is my Mac awake?" A readable view of every app's power assertions, so you can see what is holding sleep off, yours or anyone else's.

If you still want a command for scripts and pipelines, Keepresso ships one too: the keepresso command-line tool does everything caffeinate does, plus start, stop, toggle, and status against the app.

For a side-by-side with Amphetamine and KeepingYouAwake, see Keepresso vs Amphetamine, KeepingYouAwake, and caffeinate.

Free and open source

Keepresso is free and GPL-3.0-licensed, for macOS 14 and newer. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens normally. It is not on the Mac App Store on purpose: the App Store sandbox blocks the power APIs that keep a Mac awake.

Install it in one command, brew install --cask gyorgysh/keepresso/keepresso, or grab the DMG. Full steps: Install Keepresso and keep your Mac awake.