Best Screensavers for Mac in 2026

· Scanner Techs

Modern screens do not burn in, so a screensaver has no job to do any more. That is the fun part. It is one of the few bits of a Mac you choose purely because you like looking at it, and a Mac on a desk in a shared room spends a lot of its day showing it to people.

Here are the ones worth a look, grouped by whether they cost anything. Prices move around and licences change, so check before you pay for any of them.

The ones already on your Mac (free)

Before installing anything, go through the gallery in System Settings. Recent versions of macOS include long, slow aerial videos of cities, coastlines, deserts and underwater scenes, and they run at full resolution without a download.

Under those sit the older classics, which are still good: Drift, Shell, Hello, Word of the Day, Message, and a slideshow built from one of your photo albums. Several have an Options button with more in it than you would expect. The photo slideshows in particular are the cheapest way to make a Mac feel like it belongs to someone.

Cost: nothing, and nothing to install. Rule these out first.

Aerial (free)

Aerial is an open-source screensaver that plays Apple’s aerial footage, the same kind of thing the Apple TV shows between apps, with its own settings for which clips play and how they are picked.

It is the obvious upgrade if you like the built-in aerial videos but want more control over them. Its own options let you turn individual videos on and off, keep favourites, filter by category, and tie clips to the time of day.

Cost: free, and the source is public.

XScreenSaver (free)

XScreenSaver is a collection that has been going since the early nineties, and the Mac build brings the whole pile across. Spinning solids, mazes, simulations of hardware nobody has owned for thirty years, plus a good number of plain pretty ones.

Quality varies a lot across a set that large. Some look their age. A few are lovely, and there is more range here than anywhere else on this list.

Cost: free, and open source.

Fliqlo (free)

Fliqlo is the flip clock. Big split-flap digits, white on black, sitting still in the middle of the screen. It is the one most people picture when they picture a clock screensaver, and it reads clearly from across a room.

It is a free download from its own site. The current build wants macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and there is an older one for Ventura and earlier, so check which applies before you download.

If you like the idea but want the clock to move, that is the difference between Fliqlo and the Flip Clock screensaver in Nap, which drifts around and bounces off the edges instead of staying put.

Brooklyn (free)

Brooklyn is another open-source one: the animated logos from Apple’s October 2018 event, which was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It suits a Mac that is also a display for something else, where you want motion but nothing you have to read. Development looks quiet, so try it before relying on it.

Cost: free.

Nap (paid, with a two-day free trial)

Nap is ours, so treat this entry with the suspicion it deserves. It is several screensavers in one app:

  • Flip Clock, a split-flap clock that drifts across the screen and bounces off the edges, the way the old DVD logo did.
  • Football, a ball fired from a slingshot, which bounces until it runs out of energy and then gets fired somewhere else.
  • Paper Plane, which wanders about and can skywrite a message you give it.
  • Puzzle Cube, turning itself.
  • Pendulum Wave, the row of pendulums that falls in and out of step.
  • Plotter, which draws harmonograph figures.

Each one has its own settings and a live preview, so you adjust it and watch the change rather than saving and waiting. Every screensaver comes in every style and background, and the same style covers them all so they match.

Cost: $5 once, no subscription. A licence key covers one Mac at a time and can be moved to another Mac whenever you like. A two-day free trial starts the first time you open it, so you can see them all before paying. It needs macOS 13 or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel.

Installing a third-party screensaver

Whichever you pick from outside the built-in set, the awkward part is the same: macOS keeps screensavers in Screen Savers folders inside your Library, the gallery does not always notice a new one straight away, and anything downloaded from a browser gets checked by Gatekeeper before it will run. If a saver you installed never shows up in the list, that is usually why, and the walkthrough in our other post covers the fixes.

Nap puts its own screensavers in place for you, so there is no dragging files around. It is signed by Scanner Techs but not notarised by Apple, so a DMG download needs one trip to Privacy & Security to approve it. The one-line Terminal install skips that step.

So which one

  • Want something good with no effort? Use the aerial videos already on your Mac.
  • Want more of those? Aerial.
  • Want a clock you can read from the sofa? Fliqlo, or Flip Clock in Nap if you want it moving.
  • Want to lose an evening to a huge box of odd things? XScreenSaver.
  • Want several savers that match, with settings and a trial? Nap.

Most people are well served by what Apple ships. If you have looked at that gallery for a year and want something with a bit more going on, Nap has a two-day trial with every screensaver in it.

All posts · Nap is our own collection of screensavers for the Mac. Install it and the first two days are free.