WattMate vs MacBookBatteryMonitor: which per-app watts to trust

What WattMate does

WattMate is a menu bar app from solo developer Vitali Staradubau. Version 1.0 shipped on 12 August 2026 and version 1.5 on 16 October 2026. It lists apps by battery watts with helpers grouped, splits the Mac into CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and system, reads battery health, logs overnight wakes, and prints a "receipt" that re-measures the Mac 2 minutes after you quit an app. Its "How we count" page explains the per-app number: every joule of processor energy an app's kernel counter records is counted as 2 joules from the battery. WattMate calls the factor of 2 "a rounded compromise", says the real ratio was mostly below 2 on the Macs it tested, and applies the same rate on every Mac without measuring yours. By its own description the GPU split between apps is approximate, Neural Engine and video energy are never assigned to an app, and the display has no line of its own. Its counters refresh about once a minute, every figure is an average over about 6 minutes, and the process list is polled every 10 to 30 seconds. History is recorded only on battery, and detailed measurements are kept for 48 hours. WattMate cannot limit an app's power, move it to the efficiency cores, or limit charging. As of October 2026, Pro costs $9.99 a year or $29 once. The Mac App Store edition is free with a $9.99 Pro upgrade, and it cannot close apps, read the sleep log, or count helpers after they quit.

What MacBookBatteryMonitor does

MacBookBatteryMonitor starts from your whole Mac's measured power. 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. Helpers roll up into their app, short-lived build and test workers are counted, and Docker containers, 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 at full resolution, on battery and on the charger. Then it acts on what it finds: 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. It also sets a 50% to 100% charge limit with Sailing Mode. As of October 2026, it costs $9 once, with lifetime updates.

Which one should you pick?

For per-app watts you can trust, pick MacBookBatteryMonitor. Doubling CPU power leaves most of a MacBook's draw uncounted. In a real working session on a 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, WattMate's method saw 33.05% of the energy the Mac used, and MacBookBatteryMonitor saw 99.52%. Across all our lab runs, the doubling method saw 61.31%, and MacBookBatteryMonitor's power readings were 99.63% accurate. MacBookBatteryMonitor also reads your Mac's power every second where WattMate averages over about 6 minutes, keeps 30 days of every-process data on battery and on the charger where WattMate keeps 48 hours of detail from battery runs only, and limits an app's power, which WattMate cannot do at all. At $9 against WattMate's $29 lifetime license as of October 2026, it costs less too.

Related guides

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