Vitals Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Vitals is a Mac activity monitor that folds a thousand helper processes into about 60 app rows, with 30 days of history and alerts. It is the best Activity Monitor upgrade we have tried, but only a week old. Best for: Mac users hunting the app that slows things down. Price: from $29 one-time, free plan no. Rating: 7.5/10.

What is Vitals?

We found Vitals on Product Hunt, where it launched on 28 September 2026 from a two-person team. It is a paid Mac app that replaces the view you get in Apple’s Activity Monitor. Instead of one row per process, it groups every helper under the app that launched it, so Google Chrome shows as one line with 96 processes inside rather than 96 lines you have to add up.

The app is young. Its changelog starts with version 1.0.0 on 21 September 2026 and had reached 1.1.1 by 27 September, eleven builds in seven days. It is sold by Fore Studio, which the terms describe as the trading name of a sole trader, with Paddle as merchant of record. The same studio makes a few other apps, including Flit, which it bundles with Vitals as a promotion.

What Are Vitals’ Key Features?

Processes grouped by app

This is the whole pitch, and it works as described. Activity Monitor on a busy Mac lists around a thousand processes, with names like Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) repeated dozens of times. Vitals adds each helper to its parent app and gives that app one figure each for memory, CPU, energy, disk and network. You can still expand an app to see its processes and their IDs, and quit or force quit either the whole app or one process, always after a confirmation.

30 days of history and misbehaviour alerts

Activity Monitor shows the present, plus 12 hours of energy data. Vitals keeps 12 hours, 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days for every metric, per app, stored in one small file under Application Support. It also sends a notification when an app holds the CPU high for a while, keeps growing in memory, or hammers the disk or network. The example on the vendor’s site is Slack gaining 1.4 GB in an hour, which is exactly the sort of slow leak you never catch live.

A menu bar you arrange yourself

Version 1.1 turned the menu bar into something near iStat Menus territory. CPU, memory, GPU, network, disk, temperature and battery can each be their own item, shown as a value, a graph or both, and reordered by holding the Command key and dragging. The dropdown behind them shows every metric, the busiest apps right now, and a tab per metric. The icon swaps to a warning sign when the Mac is under strain.

Dev servers and open ports by project

The Projects tab is the feature developers will buy it for. Vitals groups processes by the project folder they run in, lists their listening ports, and calls out the node or python server that has sat idle for three days holding 450 MB and port 4322. It offers to stop it, asks first, and can quit a whole project at once. Nothing in Activity Monitor does this without a trip to the terminal.

What Is It Like to Use Vitals?

There is no trial and no account. You pay, get a download link on the page after checkout, and receive a license key by email. You enter the key once per Mac, and moving to a new Mac is a Deactivate button in Settings or a self-serve page on the vendor’s license server.

Out of the gate Vitals can only measure processes you started, because macOS limits what a normal app can read. To include system processes you turn on Full System Metrics, which installs a small helper with administrator rights. The privacy page says it only answers how much a list of process IDs is using, takes no commands and quits when Vitals closes. We would still like that level of access documented in more technical depth.

The vendor says Vitals samples every five seconds with no window open, using about a tenth of a percent of one core. The 1.0.8 changelog entry admits the open window was rebuilding its whole process list every second until then, so performance claims are recent and self-reported.

Smaller extras fill out the package: a per-app volume mixer, CPU and GPU temperatures and fan speed, Bluetooth accessory batteries, units in Celsius or Fahrenheit, and a share card export at 1200 by 630 pixels.

Where Does Vitals Fall Short?

It is a week old. Eleven releases in seven days shows an active developer, but it also means the version you install today has had very little time in the wild. License state was already a bug once: 1.0.9 fixed Macs being asked for their key again after an update.

Deep diagnostics are missing on purpose. The FAQ says plainly that Activity Monitor’s sample process and spindump tools are not copied, so you will keep the built-in app for the rare hard case.

It needs macOS 15 Sequoia or later. iStat Menus runs back to macOS 11 and Stats to macOS 12, so owners of older Macs are out. Power and temperature figures are also described as most detailed on Apple silicon, which makes Intel support a little thinner than the headline suggests.

The privacy story is good but not quite as clean as the marketing. The marketing site promises two network requests, updates and license. The privacy policy lists a third: once per launch, until you send a review, Vitals asks the vendor’s server with your key, to learn if you have reviewed it yet. None of that includes what you run, but it is a call the pitch leaves out.

The license also checks in about once a week, and a refunded key stops working within about a week. The site does not say how long Vitals runs offline before a failed check matters, which is worth knowing for a laptop that travels.

How Much Does Vitals Cost?

Vitals costs $29 one-time for one Mac, with no subscription and no free plan. The terms and FAQ both say every future update is included, with no paid upgrades and no renewal, which is a stronger promise than most one-time Mac apps offer.

The $5 launch price is real but nearly gone. It has no deadline; it is capped by count. When we queried the vendor’s own pricing endpoint on 28 September, 933 of the first 1,000 licenses at $5 had sold, leaving 67. The same feed lists a ladder behind it: 50 at $9, 50 at $14, 50 at $19 and 50 at $25, then the regular $29. The site only says the price rises in steps, so expect to pay somewhere in that range rather than $5.

More Macs cost more. Two Macs cost twice the single price. Bundles are one key with several seats: $99 for 5 Macs, $179 for 10, $399 for 25 and $699 for 50. During the launch, a bundle costs the launch price per Mac when that works out cheaper.

There is a 14-day refund through Paddle with no reason required. There is also an unusual cash-back offer: post a video about Vitals, and at 2,000 views you get half your money back, or all of it at 20,000. On X the bar is 10,000 and 50,000 impressions.

Against the field, $29 sits at the top. Activity Monitor is free with macOS. Stats is free and open source. iStat Menus 7 is $11.99 for one license or $14.99 for a family pack of five, on Bjango’s own Paddle checkout. App Tamer is $14.95. Vitals is charging for the app-grouped window, the history and the Projects tab, not for menu bar numbers.

Who is Vitals Best For?

Use Vitals if you open Activity Monitor more than once a week and end up adding helper processes in your head. It suits people on 16 GB Macs who keep asking where the memory went, and anyone who wants to know which app drained the battery yesterday rather than which one is busy now.

Use it too if you are a developer who leaves dev servers running. The Projects tab alone can pay for itself the first time it finds a forgotten node process holding a port and half a gigabyte.

Skip Vitals if you only want numbers in the menu bar. Stats does that for nothing and iStat Menus does more of it for less money. Skip it if you are on macOS 14 or older, if you need sample and spindump, or if you would rather wait for a product with more than a week of history behind it.

Best Vitals Alternatives

iStat Menus

The long-running menu bar monitor from Bjango, now at version 7. It puts more figures in the menu bar than anything else, with alert rules, fan control, weather and clocks. It is $11.99 for one license or $14.99 for a family pack covering five people, with a 14-day trial, and it is also in Setapp at $9.99 a month. It runs on macOS 11 and later. It does not group processes into apps or keep 30 days of per-app history.

Stats

A free, open-source menu bar monitor under the MIT license, with about 42,000 stars on GitHub and a release on 27 September 2026. It covers CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network, battery and sensors, runs on macOS 12 and later, and installs with Homebrew. If free menu bar figures are all you need, it is the obvious pick. It will not tell you which app caused a spike last Tuesday.

App Tamer

A different angle from St. Clair Software. Rather than showing you which app is busy, it throttles apps that hog the CPU in the background, pausing or slowing them automatically. It costs $14.95 for a single-user license, or $12.45 each for two or more, and supports macOS 10.13 through 27. Pair it with Activity Monitor if your problem is runaway CPU rather than working out where memory went.

Final Verdict: Is Vitals Worth It?

Vitals solves a real annoyance. Grouping helpers under their parent app turns Activity Monitor’s thousand rows into a list you can read, and the 30-day history plus alerts answer the question most people actually have: what slowed my Mac down, and when. The Projects tab is a clever extra for developers, and the no-analytics privacy stance is clearly written and mostly borne out by the policy.

At $29 it is a fair price for what it does, and a bargain at any launch step below that, backed by a 14-day refund and free updates for life. The risks are age and the macOS 15 floor. We would buy it for a Sequoia Mac today and keep Activity Monitor around for the rare deep dive. Our rating is 7.5 out of 10, with room to climb once it has a few months of stable releases.