Activity Monitor
Default system monitor in macOS.
- Free • Proprietary
- Network Monitor
- System Information Utility
- Process Monitoring Tool
- Mac
What is Activity Monitor?
Activity Monitor displays information about all the processes running on your Mac, including CPU, disk, memory, and network usage. You can see exactly how your computer’s resources are being used via a searchable table, helpful graphs, or even directly in the Dock icon. You can view the processes organized in different groupings, quickly search for processes, and quit processes. Activity Monitor also makes it easy to see how your memory is being used and how much memory is available, as well as disk activity and data transferred over the network.
Activity Monitor Screenshots
Activity Monitor Features
Activity Monitor information
Supported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- Network Monitor
- process-list
Recent user activities on Activity Monitor
Paul added Activity Monitor as alternative(s) to Mission Center
Bob Henry doesn't think RunCat is an alternative to Activity MonitorThis application is not related to Activity Monitor in any way.
Bob Henry thinks TaskExplorer is an alternative to Activity Monitor
Apple's "Activity Monitor" is a pitiful attempt by Apple to provide a process manager for macOS.
If you a familiar with the built-in Windows tools, "Activity Monitor" is more of a "Resource Monitor" equivalent, than a "Task Manager" equivalent. Though the Windows "Resource Monitor" is a far superior tool in that can show more detailed information, has more features and the interface has arguably a better usability experience than Apple's "Activity Monitor".
It is disappointing that "Activity Monitor" is the best Apple could come up with. Even if Apple was lacking inspiration for designing an activity/process/task monitor/manager, the Linux world has some amazing tools that could be ported to macOS with minimal effort. Apple could have a tool that is on par, or even something that surpasses what is built-in to Windows, but instead they have tool that is nearly useless.
The layout at first glance looks useful, having tabs for CPU, Disk... but upon use you find out that each tab is just a different view of essentially the same columns.
The viewable information is limited, missing details that I expect to find in even the most basic tools of this type, and I often find it to be useless when troubleshooting performance issues.