Mac makes for an excellent work machine with powerful performance and great software support. However, the apps you using can directly affect your overall productivity. To get the most value out of a Mac, or any device, you need tools that suit your workflow. Whether you’re a student, freelancer, or a working professional, here are the top five productivity apps to keep you on top of your game in 2025.
5 Best Productivity Apps for macOS
1. Craft – Note-taking and Project Management
Craft has to be one of the best productivity apps for macOS in 2025. It provides multiple features in a single package. You can jot down notes, create to-do lists, and manage projects without relying on separate apps. Craft features a wide array of templates that can turn your notes into something useful. Moreover, it organizes your notes into rearrangeable blocks that can be stylized however you want.
You can quickly export documents in popular formats like PDF or markdown or share them with anyone to co-edit in real time. There’s even an option to publish a document online and share its link. Besides that, Craft offers a calendar view that organizes your documents, to-do lists, and events by their date.
2. Paste – Smart Clipboard Manager
The absence of a proper clipboard manager in macOS can severely affect your productivity, especially if you’re a content writer or a graphic designer. However, thanks to Paste, this doesn’t have to be the case anymore. Paste is a smart clipboard manager that automatically saves everything you copy in an easily accessible menu. You can summon Paste with the Cmd + Shift + V shortcut to copy and paste multiple items at once, organize items into pinboards, and quickly search for anything you’ve copied earlier.
Paste isn’t just limited to macOS. It’s also available on the iPhone and iPad. With iCloud sync, Paste can automatically synchronize your Clipboard History and Pinboards across all your devices. And for those concerned about privacy, Paste stores all data locally on your device. Additionally, it allows you to set up custom rules to exclude password managers and other apps that may hold sensitive credentials.
3. Raycast – Great Spotlight Replacement
Raycast is an excellent productivity app that supercharges Spotlight. Beyond launching apps and searching files, Raycast can be used to view your clipboard history, rearrange app windows, check your calendar, calculate formulas, search the web, translate text, and more. Despite its features, Raycast is pretty snappy compared to other Spotlight alternatives.
That’s not even the best part. Raycast offers a community-driven extension store, which allows you to add additional features that suit your specific workflow. If you’re a developer, you can find extensions to use Raycast with GitHub, Visual Studio Code, Jira, and more. If you’re a student, you can find extensions to access AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT or manage tasks in Todoist. The possibilities are endless.
4. ProNotes – Get More Out of Apple Notes
Apple Notes is a great note-taking app, but it doesn’t cut it for advanced users looking for a markdown editor. Luckily, ProNotes changes this by adding markdown support and several other useful features to Apple Notes. This completely eliminates the learning curve associated with third-party note-taking apps.
ProNotes takes the options from the toolbar and places them above the cursor in a formatting bar when highlighting text. Meanwhile, support for markdown and slash commands lets you format your notes for compatibility with WordPress. If that isn’t good enough, you can use AskAI to get ChatGPT in Notes on Macs that don’t support Apple Intelligence or use the backlink feature to see all notes linking to a note.
5. LookAway – Prevent Eye Strain
LookAway is an app designed to prevent eye strain and boost productivity by reminding you to take short breaks at regular intervals. It blurs the screen and plays a satisfying sound to nudge you into resting your eyes, ensuring it doesn’t feel intrusive. LookAway stays in the menu bar for quick access to break status. It even sends you Wellness Reminders that remind you to blink your eyes and maintain a good posture.
Although you can still configure it to run on certain days and times of the week, LookAway is smart on its own. It pauses ongoing timers when you’re using certain apps or during high-engagement activities such as video calls, video playback, and gaming. Beyond that, it allows you to replace the wallpaper blur effect with a gradient or a custom image and create custom shortcuts to trigger, pause, or restart a short break.