BatteryBud vs MacBookBatteryMonitor: per-app watts beyond the CPU

What BatteryBud does

BatteryBud, from Climactic Infotech Private Limited, is a menu bar monitor for every battery you own: this Mac, your other Macs, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, keyboard, and mouse, with history, health, and charge cycles. Version 1.0 shipped on 2 October 2026, and version 1.3.0 added Power flow for MacBooks on 14 October 2026. Power flow maps the draw from the battery or adapter to Apps, Devices, System, and Charging, in two modes. Measured shows the processor energy macOS records for each app and puts everything else in System. As BatteryBud's own page puts it, "Display, graphics and radios are in System." The second mode splits the rest of the draw between apps in proportion to Activity Monitor's energy score, which has no unit. Neither mode attributes GPU energy to an app, and there is no CPU or GPU component breakdown. In BatteryBud's own light-load test, the apps' processor energy came to 0.5 W of a total of about 15 W. BatteryBud calls itself a monitor that reads batteries and does not control them: it has no charge limit, no battery temperature, and no way to limit an app. As of October 2026, it costs $19 once for one Mac with a year of updates, then $9 a year for further updates, and there is no free trial. It needs macOS 14 and Apple silicon, and Power flow works on MacBooks only.

What MacBookBatteryMonitor does

MacBookBatteryMonitor is built around one question: which app is using power, and how much. It measures your whole Mac's power every second, breaks it into 16 parts (CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, memory, display, SSD, network, USB and more) that add up to the total, and splits it between your apps by how much work each one does, so every app's share adds up to what your Mac actually drew. Its adaptive algorithm tunes itself to your exact Mac in the first 15 minutes, and from then on its power readings are 99.63% accurate across our lab runs on an M1 Max MacBook Pro and an M2 Mac mini, checked against power measured at the battery and at the device. Each app's share counts its CPU and its graphics work, so a game or a video editor carries its graphics load on its own row. Helpers roll up into their app, short-lived build workers are counted, and Docker, cloudflared, and launchd services are tied to the process hosting them. Per-app charts run from 1 hour to 7 days, and 30 days of every-process data stay on the Mac, on battery and on the charger. It also acts: cap any app's CPU from 10% to 100%, push it onto the efficiency cores, apply the rule always, only on battery, or below a battery level you pick, or quit a runaway app in one click. A 50% to 100% charge limit and Sailing Mode cover the battery itself. As of October 2026, it costs $9 once, with lifetime updates.

Which one should you pick?

If you want one menu bar list of every battery you own, from AirPods to an iPad, BatteryBud does that job. For which app is draining your MacBook, and by how many watts, MacBookBatteryMonitor is the clear pick. BatteryBud's app figures stop at processor energy, which its own test put at 0.5 W of a 15 W draw. A CPU-only figure sees less than chip readings like Apple's powermetrics, which saw 26.06% of the energy a 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro used in a real working session, and 44.81% across all our lab runs. MacBookBatteryMonitor saw 99.52% on that MacBook Pro, and its power readings are 99.63% accurate across every run. Add per-app GPU watts, a 16-component breakdown, per-app power limits, and a charge limit, all for $9 once against BatteryBud's $19 plus $9 a year for updates, as of October 2026.

Related guides

• MacBook battery usage by app
• How to see what is draining your MacBook battery
• Best battery apps for Mac