Meet Bartender 6

We've re-built Bartender from the ground up to be beautiful, performant, and reliable. Bartender has been a staple of Mac users for years, and that brought with it lots of old hacks & tricks. We've modernised everything, from the algorithms used to move your items, through to the design of the entire app.

We've also brought our new movement system to Bartender 5, so you'll get all the speed & reliability improvements for free on Sequoia. And yes, we've fixed the Apple menu bug.

Whilst we were in here, we're also localizing Bartender, starting with French, Spanish and Chinese. More languages are coming too - and we expect to add all the most popular languages shortly after launch.

If you're running on macOS Tahoe, we've also updated the app to be compatible with Apple's brand new menu bar. If you don't like the new bar, you can restore the old look from Sequoia (with more coming soon 😉) There's also plenty of Liquid Glass sprinkled around to fit right in with the new look.

We've maintained a strict commitment to privacy throughout the new Bartender. We know that granting screen recording permissions can be intimidating, so we've maintained our policy of the app not sending anything anywhere. Your menu item images are stored in memory to show them in Bartender Bar or the layout screen, and they aren't persisted. We've also reduced the amount of times Bartender has to capture the bar too, so you'll see the purple dot even less. For people who don't want this at all, you can re-arrange your items once, then disable screen recording permissions and use Bartender in a locked-down mode.

Finally, we've redesigned the layout screen to scale seamlessly, feel smoother, and better match the rest of the preferences pages.

The price of Bartender 6 is exactly the same as 5, and if you bought 5 in 2025, you'll get 6 for free. If you bought it earlier, you can get a discount upgrade.

There's loads more exciting updates coming to Bartender to really take it up a notch in the coming months, and we'll start sharing those shortly.

Sincerely,

Bartender Team