The free YouTube downloaders for Mac, honestly
Written by someone who makes one, which is why it starts by telling you when to buy something else. Six options, what each is actually for, and the two questions that pick one in under a minute.
Every page ranking for this query is an affiliate listicle. Ten apps, each “best” at something, every link tracked. None of the authors has built a downloader and several have not run the apps they rank.
I build one, which is a different bias and not a smaller one. So here is the deal: this page tells you when to pay for something else, when to use a competitor, and where mine does not fit. Judge it on whether it does that.
Two questions
1. Do you download from more than YouTube? Yes → you want a paid app. Downie handles 1,200+ sites; that is the product, and no free single-site tool substitutes for it. Skip to the paid section.
2. Are you comfortable in Terminal? Yes → yt-dlp. It is the most capable thing on this page and it is free. No → a front-end, below.
Most people are answered by those two. The rest is detail.
yt-dlp — the engine under all of it
brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg
yt-dlp "URL"
Free, open source, more sites than any paid app, updated constantly. Downie, Pulltube, my app and most of this category are built on it or something like it. When a page tells you a paid app is “more powerful than yt-dlp”, the paid app is often calling yt-dlp.
Use it for: anything at scale. Channel archives, playlists that resume, clips without downloading the whole video, subtitles as SRT.
The honest cost: it is a command line, and it breaks in ways that require reading. When YouTube changes something you will be on a GitHub issue, not clicking Update. Its flags are a genuine learning curve.
cobalt — for one video, right now
Web-based. No ads, no tracking, nothing to install. The only online downloader I would name without a warning attached; almost every other site in that category is funded in ways worth understanding first.
Use it for: a video, once, on a machine that is not yours.
Cost: it runs on someone else’s server, so quality is capped by what they choose to offer and the link passes through them. Fine for one video, wrong as a habit.
IINA — not a downloader, but often the actual fix
A lot of people go looking for a downloader because a file they already have will not play. 4K downloads are VP9 or AV1, and QuickTime plays neither.
IINA plays everything, free. If your problem is playback rather than downloading, no downloader was ever going to fix it.
TBD — mine
Free, open source, macOS 13+. YouTube only. Apple Silicon only.
Read those limits before anything else — they disqualify it for a lot of people, including anyone on a pre-2020 Mac.
What it does that others do not: a small web server on your Wi-Fi, so a phone scanning a QR code can drive your Mac’s downloads from the phone’s browser with nothing installed on the phone. Beyond that it is a window on yt-dlp with opinionated defaults — H.264 so files open in QuickTime, M4A audio without re-encoding, a playlist picker, a queue, resume after quitting, engine updated daily.
Also true: not notarized by Apple, so installing takes a second command that lifts macOS’s quarantine flag on the app. Notarization requires a paid developer account. No browser extension, no converter, no trimming.
Other free front-ends
MacYTDL and yt-dlp app are free graphical front-ends for yt-dlp. If you want a window but not mine — or you are on Intel, where mine will not run — they are the alternatives, and yt-dlp app covers Windows and Linux too.
I have not used either enough to compare them fairly, which is the honest thing to say rather than ranking them from their websites.
When to pay
Free is not always right. Three cases where it is not:
More than one site. Downie, 1,200+ sites. Its licence is bound to a major version rather than a period, upgrades are discounted 50–75%, and Downie 5 is not expected before 2027 — so a purchase today has a long runway. Good software, fair price.
Clips, visually. Pulltube makes trimming its headline feature. The free command is faster — it never fetches the parts you cut — but you type timestamps instead of dragging handles.
Windows or Linux as well as a Mac. 4K Video Downloader Plus, €30 lifetime. It is the only cross-platform option here, and it has AI audio tools nothing free matches. Its free tier is permanent but its limit is never published.
Downloading for a client or employer → the commercial-use licence a free tool cannot give you.
The table
| Price | Sites | Interface | Runs on | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yt-dlp | Free | 1,000+ | Command line | Your Mac |
| cobalt | Free | Many | Website | Their server |
| TBD | Free | YouTube only | Mac app | Your Mac, Apple Silicon |
| MacYTDL / yt-dlp app | Free | 1,000+ | Mac app | Your Mac |
| Downie | One-time | 1,200+ | Mac app | Your Mac |
| Pulltube | From $19.99 | 1,000+ | Mac app | Your Mac |
| 4K Video Downloader Plus | Free tier / from €30 | Many | App | Your Mac |
Two things every one of these shares
They all break, periodically. YouTube changes something and every downloader stops working until it is updated. Downie’s own developer says so. The only real question is how fast the thing you chose gets fixed — which is why an abandoned free tool is worse than a maintained paid one, and a maintained free one is fine.
None of them decides what you are allowed to download. That is between you, YouTube’s terms, and your local copyright law, and any page that tells you it is simple in either direction is selling something.
If you want one sentence
Comfortable in a terminal, use yt-dlp. Need many sites, buy Downie. On an Apple Silicon Mac, only using YouTube, and you want a window — mine is free, so finding out costs you nothing but the download.