Comparison

Pulse for Mac vs Blip Stats

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Pulse for Mac

Features
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Monitor your Mac's system performance in real-time from your iPhone. Pulse for Mac displays CPU usage, GPU usage, temperatures, memory pressure, battery level, and fan speed — all streamed live over your local Wi-Fi network. Features: • Real-time CPU & GPU usage with temperature • Memory usage and pressure indicator • Battery level and charging status • Fan speed monitoring • Auto-discovery via Bonjour • Portrait and landscape layouts • Keep Screen On option for desk display Requirements: • MacPulse Server running on your Mac (free download at GitHub) • iPhone and Mac on the same Wi-Fi network

About

Blip Stats

Monitor your Mac's system performance with this lightweight utility. It provides detailed insights into CPU, memory, network, disk, GPU, battery, and thermal data directly from your menu bar. Offers built-in speed tests and traceroute functionality.

Highlights
  • Real-time CPU, memory, and network monitoring
  • Detailed disk and GPU utilization
  • Battery health and thermal data
  • Top processes by CPU and memory usage
  • Built-in drive speed tests and traceroute
  • Shortcuts app integration for automation
Features
Read full description

Blip is a featherlight system monitor that lives in your menu bar. One click shows everything happening inside your Mac — CPU load, memory pressure, disk activity, network speeds, and more. No clutter, no subscriptions, no bloat. Why people love Blip: Blip makes everything your Mac is doing visible without getting in the way. It polls every two seconds, uses about 42 MB of memory, and weighs roughly 2 MB on disk. Most system monitors use 200+ MB and ship features you'll never touch. What you get: CPU — Total usage bar in your menu bar. Click for per-core utilization, user/system/idle split, load averages, and P-core and E-core counts. Memory — Usage percentage at a glance. Drill into total RAM, active/wired/compressed/app breakdown, swap, and memory pressure. Network — Live connectivity in the menu bar. Tap for up/download speeds, bandwidth since boot, interfaces with IPs, VPN detection (Tailscale, WireGuard), tap-to-reveal public IP, and a history chart. Disk — Every mounted volume with space used and free, real-time read/write speeds, data transferred since boot, and a live I/O history chart.* GPU — Apple Silicon GPU utilization, renderer name, core count, and a historical chart. Optional menu bar readout.* Battery — Charge, health, cycle count, temperature, time remaining, charging status, power source, and condition.* Fans & Thermals — RPM per fan with min/max ranges, plus CPU and GPU temperatures read straight from the SMC. Shows "fanless Mac" gracefully on MacBook Air.* Top Processes — Top 5 by CPU and memory, with app icons and delta-based measurements that match Activity Monitor.* System — Mac model, macOS version, uptime, thermal state, and Blip's own memory footprint so you can verify it stays tiny. Metrics marked * need hardware-level access. Install the free Blip Helper companion app to unlock them, at github.com/blaineam/blip. Test and automate: Speed tests built in — benchmark any mounted drive with uncached sequential write/read plus random-read IOPS, and measure network throughput against OpenSpeedTest's public server or your own. Run a live traceroute (MTR) with per-hop loss and latency, mapped hop by hop. Shortcuts support — Get System Metric exposes 37 live metrics as chainable numbers. Run speed tests, start or stop a traceroute, open the Traceroute Map, and read or change Blip's settings — from the Shortcuts app. Designed to stay out of your way: Two menu bar layouts, horizontal or stacked. Hover any row for a live sub-panel. Customizable colors: category, monochrome, or your own — plus label toggles, optional colorization at high usage, and launch at login. Built right: Written in Swift with strict concurrency and zero external dependencies. Apple Silicon native, notarized by Apple. Blip Bench: Measure what your machine can actually do. Blip Bench scores CPU (single and all cores), memory bandwidth and latency, GPU, and Neural Engine throughput in fixed reference units — one scale shared by every Mac, iPhone, and iPad running Blip. The full profile adds a sustained phase showing how much performance thermal limits take back, against live fan and temperature data. Now on iPhone and iPad: Blip Stats 2.0 is one free app across your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The iOS app brings live device cards with drill-in details, Blip Bench, dual-curve speed tests with idle vs under-load latency and per-activity connection grades, ping and traceroute with an offline GeoIP hop map, disk speed tests, Home Screen widgets, Shortcuts, and one-file stats snapshots.

Screenshots

Pulse for Mac1 screens
Blip Stats4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: Pulse for Mac at daily against Blip Stats's every 3 weeks. Blip Stats's advantage is device support (3 vs 1). On price, ads, in-app purchases and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Pulse for Mac ships an update daily, Blip Stats every 3 weeks. Both last shipped on October 4, 2026.

Scorecard2 real differences · 8 level
Pulse for Mac versus Blip Stats: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPulse for MacBlip Stats
PriceFreeFree
Rating—5.0 (1 ratings) — better
Positive reviews—100.0% of reviews
Number of ratings—1 — better
Update frequencyDaily — betterEvery 3 weeks
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
Monetization—Free
DevicesiPhoneiPhone, iPad, Mac — better
Requires iOS17.017.0
Further details — not scored
Size0 MB3 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperInGyu RhoBlaine Miller

In-app purchases

None

Pulse for Mac

No in-app purchases

None

Blip Stats

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Pulse for Mac free?
Pulse for Mac is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Blip Stats free?
Blip Stats is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Pulse for Mac or Blip Stats have ads?
Neither Pulse for Mac nor Blip Stats shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Pulse for Mac or Blip Stats?
Pulse for Mac ships an update daily, and Blip Stats every 3 weeks. Most recently, Pulse for Mac was updated on October 4, 2026 and Blip Stats on October 4, 2026.

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