Alternatives to Growl
macOS notifications before Notification Center
None of its 9 checklist rows are verified yet.
macOS notifications before Notification Center. Growl has been discontinued; the active alternatives listed here are maintained products you can switch to.
Mac (and later Windows) users who wanted a single, customizable way to see alerts from multiple applications, and the developers who integrated notifications into their apps before the OS provided one.
Growl provided a unified pop-up notification system that any Growl-enabled application could send alerts to, with a public API/SDK for developers to hook into. Users could choose from different visual display styles and configure which notifications appeared, sounded, or logged, and manage settings per application. It ran as a menu bar utility with a paid Mac App Store version and a free/open-source build, plus a Growl for Windows port.
Applications sent notification requests to the Growl daemon running in the background, which displayed them using the user's chosen visual style and per-app preferences. Development ended around 2020 as Apple's built-in Notification Center made a third-party system unnecessary.
Why people leave Growl
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Ranked alternatives
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FAQ
Yes. btop, CrystalDiskInfo and Glances have a free tier or are fully free. Free-tier limits in the comparison table are verified and dated.
btop, CrystalDiskInfo and Glances — every license claim links its source.