We often call marketing or PR professionals “ninjas”. And there is a good reason for that. To keep up with the pace of business and technology environments, comms executives need to be fast, amazingly efficient, and focused.
- But if you’re planning to game on a Mac, you’ll have to make that compromise. That being said, it remains one of the best free Mac games you can play. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For a long time, CS:GO had to be kept off the list of free Mac games because it wasn’t a free-to-play title.
- A free Git client for Mac and Windows. This desktop app is designed to simplify how you interact with your Git repositories so you can focus on coding. What really stands out this Mac developer tool from other apps is a simple Git GUI helping developers visualize and manage hosted and local repositories.
- Cleaner is one free Mac cleaning app to offer Memory Optimization, Disk Cleaning and System Monitoring to keep your Mac optimized for the best performance. Smart and accurate selection for duplicates scan and remove on Mac with OS X 10.6.6 or later.
For that, we all need some cutting-edge tools that are both cross-platform and don’t cost a fortune. It is best if they are free, of course, so we can experiment with different combinations. Let’s review some of the best free apps available for Mac users. Installing and mastering these ten lightweight tools will allow you to get a hang of your emails, images, and tasks, and will definitely make your working experience faster and more enjoyable.
The majority of apps listed here are free and they’ll appeal to general Mac users, not just the techie crowd. The Best Mac Apps & Utilities. This collection of essential Mac Apps includes mostly lesser-known apps so the popular ones — like Evernote, Dropbox, Skype, OneNote, or Google Drive — aren’t listed here.
Spark Email
Category: Productivity
Description: Beautiful and Intelligent Email App.
Spark is the most advanced and beautiful email app. It allows you to store all your emails in one place, has a powerful search feature, and makes the emailing experience enjoyable and easy. A big relief for PR and marketing guys, right?
Spark has apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and even iWatch. It also supports numerous integrations like Dropbox, saving anyone who works with documents and/or files plenty of time.
Vectr
Category: Graphics & Design
Description: Free vector graphics software used to create graphics easily and intuitively.
Vectr is all you need if you’re working with vector graphics or images. All comms professionals often need to create social media graphics, edit or resize logotypes, and create flyers or brochures. Or, what if the boss asks to edit and print his or her new business cards? Vectr makes all those tasks simple as ABC.
Vectr’s app for Mac has a very intuitive interface and a low learning curve. It is also accessible both on the web and desktop app, syncing the designs between platforms.
Slack
Category: Business
Description: Slack brings team communication and collaboration into one place so you can get more work done, whether you belong to a large enterprise or a small business.
Slack is very well-known in the industry, and yet it is constantly adding new functionalities and integrations which reinvent the app for many of us.
The recently added calls functionality made Slack newly attractive for teams that use different forms of communication. Slack for Mac makes it much easier to work with the app rather than use it through the browser.
Do not forget about the selection of bots inside of Slack. Some of them are very powerful and customizable. Hubot is programmed using a simple script language and can automate many processes like daily stand-up or publishing reports.
Alfred
Category: Productivity
Description: Alfred is a keyboard-driven productivity application helping you launch apps and search your local computer as well as the web with great speed.
Alfred is available only for Mac OS and can be considered the ultimate productivity tool for any marketer or PR professional who is doing a lot of research and multitasking.
Alfred allows you to search your computer faster than ever using some simple shortcuts. Besides, it will make you a ninja of browsing: you just need to type `google [search term]` or `wikipedia [search term]` to open the browser tab with search results immediately. My personal favorites are shortcuts for restarting or shutting down the computer: `Sleep`, `Shutdown`, or `Empty Trash` commands make these operations easy and convenient.
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Dr.Cleaner
Category: Utilities
Description: A free app that offers Memory Optimization, Disk Cleaning, and System Monitoring to keep your Mac optimized for the best performance.
After opening the 21st tab in your browser, your Mac gets slow, then it freezes. Five minutes later you have to restart. I suppose such situations happen to all of us. What a waste of time.
Dr.Cleaner is a tiny free Mac app downloadable from the Mac App Store which prevents your computer from getting slow and cluttered with junk. It performs its job even better than any of the alternatives I’ve tried so far and has a friendly, easy to use interface.
The Unarchiver
Category: Utilities
Description: The Unarchiver is a small and easy to use program that can unarchive many different kinds of archive files.
Some archives can be especially hard to deal with on your Mac. Especially if you are used to handling them without trouble on a Windows computer. Unarchiver relieves you from that burden—it is very handy, reliable, and user-friendly. It deals with Zip, RAR, 7-zip, Tar, Gzip, and Bzip2 archive formats.
Todoist: To Do List
Category: Productivity
Description: If your goal is to spend as little time as possible organizing and more time doing, Todoist offers the simplicity you’re looking for.
Sometimes marketing and public relations require us to complete dozens of tasks every day, and keeping track of all of them can be pretty challenging. Especially if you have a whole bunch of people working on one thing.
Todoist is a simple and very powerful app built to solve that struggle. It has seamless workflows for organizing tasks into groups and execution plans, collaborating on them, and staying productive while working. Todoist also supports a number of integrations: Google Drive, Cloud Magic, Sunrise Calendar, Toggl, IFTTT, and Zapier (just to name a few).
LastPass Password Manager
Category: Productivity
Description: From your LastPass Vault, you can store passwords and logins, create online shopping profiles, generate strong passwords, track personal information in photo and audio notes, and more.
LastPass eliminates another problem so many organizations are sick of—passwords to shared services. Storing passwords written down somewhere or kept in a Google Doc is not only inconvenient, but also insanely risky.
LastPass allows you to create folders of passwords accessible to different people, and provides a seamless way to log in to your apps. It is free for personal use, but you have to pay up if you are using it as a company.
GIPHY Capture
Category: Video
Description: GIPHY Capture is the best way to create GIFs on your Mac.
A solid app for capturing GIFs is a must-have in every marketer’s toolkit. GIFs are much more engaging than just images when it comes to social media or blog posts. Capturing high-quality GIFs and managing them requires a special app—and the developers at Giphy.com were kind and amazing enough to create one!
It’s user-friendly and very neat. Once you capture a GIF, be sure to check the settings and adjust them to the maximum size and number of frames per second—so your GIFs look best possible wherever you post them.
Chat for Facebook Messenger
Category: Social Networking
Description: Facebook Messenger app from the Mac App Store.
Facebook may be a distraction for most people, but not for PR executives. Perhaps, after email, Facebook is the largest and most valuable channel of communication in the industry. But there is usually one problem—messaging someone on Facebook in the browser inevitably results in scrolling the feed, at least sometimes.
Installing the Messenger app will eliminate the inefficiency—now you can focus solely on messaging people and ignore the messages you want to leave for later.
Mac apps allow you to unclutter your browser tabs, increase the productivity, and save plenty of time. It is worth remembering, though, that the main tools of every marketer or PR professional are they themselves, and these little helpers can only add some shine to all their hard work.
Most users looking for a Mac office suite will probably have one option in mind—Microsoft Office. It’s still one of the best office suites out there, regardless of the platform, but there are other options available that you might not have considered (or even be aware of) for macOS.
Choosing the best office suite for Mac will depend on your budget, but there are plenty of free office suites for Mac that you can install without cost. To help you, here’s a look at eight of the best free Mac office suites available to install or use today.
Also, feel free to check out our YouTube channel from our sister site that goes through all the office suite options mentioned below in a quick video.
Apple iWork
After Microsoft Office, the next and best office suite for Mac users to immediately start using is the Apple iWork suite. Originally a paid-for product, the three Apple iWork office apps have been freely available for Mac devices since 2013.
Pages is a Word processor, with ready-made templates for common documents like letters available, as well as the ability to insert tables, charts, images, and other objects. Apple also has a basic spreadsheet app called Numbers that supports multiple sheets and, like Pages, comes with pre-made templates.
Finally, Keynote works as a PowerPoint replacement, with similar features like transitions and animations included. You can download all three iWork apps from the App Store.
Google Docs (Docs/Sheets/Slides)
While iCloud offers iWork apps online, it isn’t the best office suite for Mac. If you want Microsoft Office features online without paying for Office 365, then you’ll need to give try the Google Docs suite.
Freely available for Google account users, the Google Docs suite comes in a package of three (four if you count Google Forms, too). Docs is a word processor, Sheets is a spreadsheet tool, while Slides is a presentation tool to rival PowerPoint and Apple Keynote.
Google Docs is well-equipped with many of the features you’d expect to see in a fully-fledged Office alternative, along with extensive collaboration features that allow you to share and edit documents in real-time with others.
LibreOffice
Few open-source projects have the size and polish to compete against the billion-dollar Microsoft Office suite like LibreOffice. Thanks to a community of volunteers helping to build it, LibreOffice has grown into one of the best office suites available for Mac.
This fork of the once-popular OpenOffice has products to match the typical Microsoft Office collection, with a word processor, spreadsheet tool, presentation designer, and database manager. It also takes things two steps further, with a vector graphics design tool and formulae designer for mathematicians.
Best of all, LibreOffice supports Office file formats such as DOC and DOCX perfectly. LibreOffice is a fully-fledged replacement with many similar features compared to Microsoft Office, plus a few extras to sink your teeth into.
FreeOffice
As the name suggests, FreeOffice is a free Office suite available for Mac, Linux, and Windows users. Like other free Office alternatives, it focuses on the big three Office products, with Excel (PlanMaker), PowerPoint (Presentations) and Word (TextMaker) style products.
If you want an Office-like experience, FreeOffice gives it. It looks a lot like its Microsoft counterpart, with a ribbon bar interface, basic features, and support for common Office file formats like DOCX.
Some features, such as mail merge and high-quality spell checking, require a paid-for upgrade to the SoftMaker Office suite. If that’s a deal-breaker, look elsewhere.
Calligra
Another free and open-source Office replacement is the KDE-created Calligra suite. Originally designed for Linux users, Calligra is a cross-platform office suite for macOS, Linux, and Windows PCs. To install it on Mac, you’ll need the Homebrew package manager installed first.
There are no less than ten Calligra apps for you to try, from a standard word processor (Words) and spreadsheet tool (Sheets) to more specialist apps, including a mind mapping tool (Braindump).
We won’t pretend that Calligra is the most polished Mac office suite—it isn’t. What it is, however, is functional, well-rounded and free, with more built-in tools than some of its more appealing (and costly) competitors.
Apache OpenOffice
Apache OpenOffice is the spiritual successor to the previously popular (but now discontinued) OpenOffice.org suite. It shares a common code base to LibreOffice, with similar features, although some important differences exist between them.
Top Free Mac Apps 2020
Unfortunately, the biggest difference is active development. LibreOffice has a vibrant community behind it, while things are a little slower for Apache OpenOffice, with releases happening roughly once-a-year. In recent years, those have largely focused on bug fixes, rather than significant new features or upgrades.
There are better Mac office suites out there, but if you want a solid, old-school experience on Mac, Apache OpenOffice could be the option for you.
WPS Office Free
Free Apps For Imac Desktop
As a free version of the paid-for WPS Office, WPS Office Free acts as a freemium, ad-supported taster for Mac users. That isn’t a criticism—WPS Office Free is still a good Mac office suite in its own right.
WPS Office looks like it was built with Mac in mind with an appealing and modern interface that blows some of its older competitors like LibreOffice out of the water. Like iWork and FreeOffice, WPS Office Free targets the Microsoft Office market with presentation, word processing, and spreadsheet creation tools.
It supports Office file formats, as well as support for PDF editing and creation. You can download WPS Office Free from the App Store or from the WPS Office website.
Dropbox Paper
Dropbox Paper is a quick document collaboration and editing tool built-in to the Dropbox cloud storage interface. It’s also the only app on this list that isn’t a full-fledged Office replacement, but Dropbox Paper is still a worthy and honourable mention.
You can use Paper to build more unusual types of documents for project planning, note taking, portfolio building, and more. Like Google Docs, you can also collaborate in real-time with other Dropbox Paper users.
It might not be the Word replacement you’re after, but if you have a Dropbox account already, give it a try.
Choosing The Best Office Suite For Mac
If you want the best Office suite for Mac, you don’t need to pay. Microsoft Office is still a great Mac office suite, but it isn’t essential—you can create documents on macOS for free without it using Apple iWork or one of the other free or open-source alternatives we’ve mentioned.
Whether it’s Google Docs or Microsoft Office itself, let us know your favorite Mac office suite in the comments below.