6 Tools to Turn any Webpage into Desktop Mac App
I love having lots of open browser tabs!
I may have a few hundred open tabs between 5–6 browser windows.
Keeping track of all these tabs is hard, and finding any given tab is even harder. To work around this issue and put my most used web apps to a more distinctive place, I decided it would be nice to have some web pages as regular Mac desktop apps.
I spend virtually the whole day with Gmail, JIRA, Github and Metatask open in a browser since I work on a few development projects but also manage some operations. After converting all these websites to Mac apps my life got a little bit better, at least I can quickly pick these apps from the Dock when I need to.
Below is a list of tools you can use to quickly convert any web page to a real desktop app on Mac.
1. Unite 2 ⭐⭐⭐️⭐⭐
- Website: https://www.bzgapps.com/unite
- Price: Starting at $10 for a single-user license. Has options for family and office. Also available on SetApp
- Highlights: Unite is using a WebKit engine, while most other tools rely on Chrome. Supports notifications (in selected apps), status bar apps.
2. Fluid ⭐⭐
- Website: https://fluidapp.com/
- Price: Free or $5
Fluid is free. You can download Fluid for free and create as many Fluid Apps as you like. However, for $5, you can purchase a Fluid License which unlocks a few extra features:
- Pin Fluid Apps to the Mac OS X Status Bar.
- Use Userscripts or Userstyles in your Fluid Apps.
- Use Full Screen mode in your Fluid Apps.
- Highlights: Based on Twitter activity and website this maybe not actively developed anymore.
3. Coherence 6 and Coherence Pro 2.0 ⭐⭐⭐
- Website: https://www.bzgapps.com/coherence6
- Price: $5 and $15 for normal and Pro version.
- Highlights: Coherence is using Google Chrome internally. Pro version has some pretty advanced features like bulk operations, enterprise licenses, tabbed apps, support of Chrome extensions (like 1Password) and profiles.
Coherence doesn’t support notifications.
4. Web2Desk ⭐⭐
- Website: https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/
- Price: Free with their branding. $19 without.
- Highlights: It’s an online service, not an app. You can give your page URL, add some parameters and download the newly created app. Supports not only Mac but also Linux and Windows. It uses Nativefier internally to create apps.
5. Nativefier ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Website: https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier
- Price: Free
- Highlights: It’s a free, open-source command-line utility.
Nativefier is a command-line tool to easily create a desktop application for any web site with succinct and minimal configuration. Apps are wrapped by Electron in an OS executable (.app, .exe, etc.) for use on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
6. Macify ⭐
- Website: https://www.macify.co/
- Price: “call us”
- Highlights: Macify is not an app but a service, from the same company which sells Unite. They offer to create a Mac app from the website. Created app can be distributed on the Apple App Store or directly as a download.
I’m currently using Unite 2 and so far it is good. Please share your experience in comments if you know other tools or a long-time user of one of the tools from my list.
