Comparison
coconutBattery vs MacBookBatteryMonitor
coconutBattery has been the go-to tool for a quick battery-health number since the PowerPC era. Here is how it compares with MacBookBatteryMonitor, which started from the opposite question: what is draining the battery.
What coconutBattery does
coconutBattery is a free Mac utility that reads your battery and prints out its vitals: health percentage, cycle count, current and design capacity in milliamp-hours, temperature, voltage, and amperage. It also reads the same data from a connected iPhone or iPad over USB. The Plus tier, a one-time $12.95 to $17.95, adds Wi-Fi sync for iOS devices, low-battery alerts, and a "Lifetime Analyzer" that summarises temperature, voltage, and charge rate over the battery’s life. The free version is a window you open when you want a number, then close. There is no process list, no charge control, and no menu-bar-first design in the free tier. It runs on macOS 12 and up, including Intel Macs, and it has been the recommended tool for "what is my battery health" for roughly two decades. For that specific question, it remains the right answer.
What MacBookBatteryMonitor does
MacBookBatteryMonitor started from the question coconutBattery does not ask: why is my battery draining. It lives in the menu bar and shows, in real time, how many watts each running app is pulling, plus a system total and a breakdown by component (CPU, GPU, RAM, display, USB). It also surfaces hidden drain from Docker containers, cloudflared tunnels, and launchd agents, which rarely show up cleanly elsewhere. On the battery-health side it shows the same vitals coconutBattery does, plus the design-cycle limit so you have a target to compare against. Where it diverges is control: a charge limit slider from 50% to 100% over SMC, a Sailing Mode that discharges the battery to your limit while plugged in, Low Power Mode that switches itself on below a threshold you set, and per-app actions including a CPU throttle, an E-core offload toggle, and a one-click kill for runaway processes. It is Apple-Silicon-only on macOS 14.6 and up, and it is a paid one-time purchase with a 7-day trial. There is no subscription.
Feature comparison
MacBookBatteryMonitorTry MacBookBatteryMonitor on your own Mac
It runs a free 7-day trial with no card and no subscription.
Which one should you pick?
These tools answer different questions. coconutBattery tells you how healthy your battery is, for free, including on iPhones, iPads, and Intel Macs. It is hard to beat for that job. MacBookBatteryMonitor assumes you already know the health number and want to do something about battery life: see which apps are drawing power, cap or steer the charge, and throttle or kill the things draining you. If you want a quick health reading, coconutBattery. If you want to understand and act on drain, MacBookBatteryMonitor. Plenty of people will reasonably keep both installed.
Frequently asked questions
Is MacBookBatteryMonitor a replacement for coconutBattery?
For active battery management, yes. It adds live per-app wattage, charge limiting, Sailing Mode, and per-app controls that coconutBattery does not have. For a free, read-only health check of an iPhone or iPad, coconutBattery is still worth keeping around.
Does coconutBattery show per-app power draw?
No. coconutBattery is a health-statistics tool with no process-level monitoring. If you want to know which app is burning watts, that is what MacBookBatteryMonitor is built for.
Why is MacBookBatteryMonitor not free?
Because the features that actually change battery life cost real engineering to build. Per-app power instrumentation, SMC charge control, Sailing Mode, and a reboot-surviving enforcement daemon are not things macOS exposes for free. coconutBattery is free because it only reads data the system already prints out.