Ice is a free and open-source menu bar management tool for macOS that helps you tame a cluttered menu bar by hiding and revealing icons on demand. Designed as a modern, trustworthy alternative to paid utilities like Bartender, Ice offers a clean and native experience for organizing the icons that accumulate from third-party apps.

Key Features

Hide & Reveal Menu Bar Items – Drag icons into a hidden section and reveal them with a single click, hover, or scroll, keeping your menu bar clean and distraction-free.
Three-Section Layout – Organize icons into visible, hidden, and always-hidden sections for maximum control over what you see and when.
Ice Bar – Display hidden menu bar icons in a separate floating bar that appears beneath your actual menu bar, ideal for MacBooks with a notch.
Menu Bar Item Search – Quickly find and access any menu bar item without scrolling or clicking through clutter.
Drag-and-Drop Arrangement – Rearrange menu bar icons in any order with an intuitive drag-and-drop layout interface.
Visual Customization – Apply dynamic appearances, tinting, shadows, rounded corners, and shape changes to your menu bar for a personalized look.
Custom Spacing & Hotkeys – Adjust item spacing and set keyboard shortcuts to quickly toggle the hidden section or search your menu bar.
Free and Open Source – No cost, no subscriptions, no telemetry. The full codebase is available on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 license.

Who Is It For?

Ice is ideal for Mac power users, developers, and anyone who installs multiple third-party apps and wants to keep their menu bar organized without paying for a utility to do so.

Why Use Ice?

After Bartender — long the go-to menu bar manager — was silently acquired in 2024 and raised trust concerns over data handling, many users began looking for a transparent alternative. Ice emerged as the top recommendation: fully open-source, actively developed, and free. It now has over 30k GitHub stars and continues to grow its feature set, making it one of the most recommended menu bar utilities in the Mac community today.

Menu Bar Apps Mac Apps

Thaw

Bartender

Ice

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