A free Downie alternative — and when you should just buy Downie
An honest comparison from someone who builds a competing app. What Downie does that free tools do not, where the free options genuinely win, and the question that decides it in one line.
I build a free Mac downloader, so treat everything here accordingly. That is also why this page opens with the part most comparison pages bury:
If you download from more than YouTube, buy Downie. Downie handles more than 1,200 sites. My app handles one. No amount of anything else makes up for that if you need Vimeo, Instagram, Bilibili or a university lecture portal.
If YouTube is genuinely all you use, keep reading — there are free options that do that job as well or better, and I will be specific about where they do not.
The one question that decides it
Do you download from more than one site?
Yes → Downie, or another paid app with broad site coverage. Stop here. No → a free tool does the job, and this page is about which.
Almost everything else in this comparison is secondary to that. The reason is structural: supporting 1,200 sites means maintaining 1,200 integrations that break whenever a site changes its layout. That is continuous work, it is what you are paying for, and it is not something a free single-site tool is pretending to do.
Downie’s own developer says this plainly — that site integrations “can stop working over time without the updates.” That is honest, and it is the actual product: not the download button, the upkeep behind it.
What Downie costs, and what you get
Checked 2026-07-31.
| Sites | 1,200+ |
| macOS | 11.0 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon |
| Licence | One-time, tied to the major version |
| Via Setapp | From $4.99/month for Downie alone; $14.99/month for all of Setapp |
| Trial | Yes |
The licence model is more generous than people assume, and it is worth being accurate about it because it changes the maths:
- A licence is bound to a major version, not a period. Buy Downie 4 and every Downie 4 update is included indefinitely.
- Upgrades are never forced, and are discounted 50–75% when you want them.
- Downie 5 is not expected before 2027, possibly 2028. So a licence bought today has a long runway ahead of it.
That is a one-time purchase behaving like a one-time purchase, which is rarer than it should be. It is not a subscription, and pages that describe it as one are wrong.
The free options, honestly
yt-dlp — the engine under everything
The command-line tool that Downie, my app, and most of this category use underneath in one form or another. It is free, open source, supports more sites than Downie, and is updated constantly.
brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg
yt-dlp "URL"
It is genuinely the most capable option here, and the honest caveat is that it is a command line. Not “a bit technical” — you will be reading about format selectors, and when YouTube changes something you will be reading a GitHub issue rather than clicking Update.
For some people that is fine or even preferable. For most it is not, and pretending otherwise is how these comparisons go wrong.
TBD — mine, so read this sceptically
Free, open source, macOS 13+, Apple Silicon only, YouTube only.
What it does that is not just a wrapper: it runs a small web server on your Wi-Fi, so a phone on the same network can scan a QR code and drive your Mac’s download from the phone’s browser, with nothing installed on the phone. As far as I know nothing else in this category does that.
Also: H.264 by default so files open in QuickTime, audio extracted to M4A without re-encoding, a playlist picker, a queue, resume after quitting, and yt-dlp updated daily on its own.
Where it loses to Downie, plainly:
- YouTube only. The big one.
- Apple Silicon only. No Intel build. Downie runs on both.
- Not notarized by Apple, so installing means a second command that lifts macOS’s quarantine flag — a step Downie’s users never think about, because notarization needs a paid developer account.
- No browser extension, no format converter, no trimming.
Others worth naming
- cobalt — web-based, no ads, no tracking. The only online downloader I would name without qualification.
- MacYTDL, yt-dlp app — other free front-ends for yt-dlp, if you want a window rather than a terminal but not my particular window.
- IINA — not a downloader. The player that opens the VP9 and AV1 files QuickTime refuses, which removes a problem people often try to solve by buying a downloader.
Where the free tools genuinely win
Not everywhere. But not nowhere either.
Nothing runs on someone else’s computer. With a local tool the video goes from YouTube to your Mac. True of Downie too — the distinction that matters here is against online downloaders, not against Downie.
You can read the source. For a program you point at arbitrary URLs, that is not a small thing. Downie is closed source; you are trusting the developer, which is a reasonable thing to do and still a different thing from checking.
No licence to manage. No key to lose, nothing tied to a machine you might replace.
--download-sections beats the paid trimming features. Both Downie and
Pulltube can give you part of a video; they generally download the whole thing
first. yt-dlp fetches only the bytes for the range you
asked — ten seconds out of a long 4K
video came out at 93 KB in about two seconds in testing.
Where Downie wins, plainly
Site coverage. Said three times because it decides most cases.
It is maintained by someone whose income depends on it. A free project is maintained while its author is interested. yt-dlp has been going for years and shows no sign of stopping, but the difference in guarantee is real and worth paying for if this is work rather than a hobby.
Postprocessing that actually works, and a browser extension, and a polished interface with a decade of edge cases handled.
Intel Macs. If your Mac is from before 2020, my app is not an option at all.
Notarized. It installs the way Mac software is supposed to install.
The comparison in one table
Not a feature grid with ticks in my column. The rows are the ones that decide the choice.
| Downie | yt-dlp | TBD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sites | 1,200+ | 1,000+ | YouTube only |
| Price | One-time, per major version | Free | Free |
| Interface | Mac app | Command line | Mac app |
| Source | Closed | Open | Open |
| Intel Macs | Yes | Yes | No |
| Notarized | Yes | n/a | No |
| Trimming | Yes, after downloading | Yes, without downloading the rest | No |
| Phone control | No | No | Yes, over Wi-Fi |
| Maintained by | A paid developer | A large volunteer project | Me |
What I would actually tell a friend
More than one site, or an Intel Mac → buy Downie. It is good software at a fair price with an unusually decent licence, and the trial is there to check.
YouTube only, and comfortable in a terminal → yt-dlp. It is the most capable thing on this page and it costs nothing.
YouTube only, Apple Silicon, and you want a window → try mine, then. It is free, so the cost of finding out is your time.
You just want one video right now → cobalt, in a browser, and close the tab.
The category is full of pages telling you the free option is always better. It is not. It is better for a specific set of people, and being clear about which set is the only reason to trust anything else on this site.
More in this series: Pulltube and what you are paying for, what 4K Video Downloader’s free tier actually limits, and the free Mac downloaders, honestly.