[2025] Top 4 macOS Spotlight Alternatives Worth Trying

Spotlight is one of the most useful Mac tools that you can use to access files, apps, and data. However, if you want more advanced features, such as customization, clipboard management, automation, or deeper integration with other third-party applications, you may look for a macOS Spotlight alternative. Some users also complain that the research is slow and the results are inaccurate.

For these reasons, we’ve collected the best 4 macOS Spotlight alternatives for 2025. These alternatives can give you a more tailored experience than Spotlight does. With these tools, you can better manage your workflows and access your files, applications, and data.

1. Alfred

Alfred is a powerful Mac search tool with many customisation options. It can search files, web search within your browsing history, and track your clipboard history. The free version is adequate, but the Powerpack brings more advanced features in the form of workflows to automate tasks, personal text snippets, and system-wide shortcuts. It also includes custom web searching and terminal support.

Key Features:

• Find files, applications, and documents quickly.
• Create custom workflows via scripts to automate complex tasks. These workflows can manage files, the system, and everything in between.
• Alfred is like a super clipboard manager, as it stores your copied content, text, and images for easy access.
• Control system settings and actions like putting your Mac to sleep, quitting all apps, or shutting down your Mac with simple commands.
• Search the web directly from the search bar, as Alfred integrates with many search engines.

Editor’s Review:

In general, Alfred is an excellent utility to enhance productivity on macOS. Advanced searching, custom workflows, and system control make it a perfect alternative to macOS Spotlight. But it's noted that you may have a steep learning curve to make the most of the advanced features.

2. LaunchBar

LaunchBar is one of the oldest macOS productivity software programs. It’s designed to find files and launch applications on your Mac. Moreover, it brings much automation potential, like scripting actions for ultimate customization. It can search items by entering short acronyms of their names and even probe file metadata to provide more data on some files.

Key Features

• Quickly locate files and documents across your system.
• LaunchBar has automation capabilities, such as scripting actions for ultimate customizability. You can create custom actions and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks.
• Look at file metadata to provide additional information about specific files, making it easier to find and manage your documents.
• Set up custom keyboard shortcuts to launch applications, open files, or trigger specific actions to enhance your workflow productivity.
• LaunchBar keeps track of your clipboard history so that you can call up and reuse what you just copied or dragged some time ago in a flash.
• LaunchBar is compatible with most third-party applications so that you can send emails and add calendar events.

Editor’s Review:

If you're looking for a more powerful and customizable alternative to macOS Spotlight, you can give LaunchBar a try. This tool will make your Mac more automated, effective, and productive.

3. Raycast

Raycast is a lightweight productivity app for macOS. You’re able to personalize commands and play with services like GitHub, Notion, and Slack. It’s light and fast, and it doesn’t take up much disk space. You’re able to launch apps, manage your Mac with minimal keystrokes, and build shortcuts for common phrases or responses. In addition, it contains system commands and comes with an intrinsic plugin store with hundreds of extensions.

Key Features:

• You can quickly search and locate files, apps, and documents.
• Raycast has developed many plugins. These plugins allow integration with third-party services like GitHub, Notion, and Jira.
• You can author custom scripts and commands in Shell, Python, and Node.js.
• The functionality allows you to automate repetitive tasks and enables customized workflows.
• The AI capabilities are integrated into Raycast Pro. They are used to summarize text, translate text, and generate responses.
• Raycast supports clipboard history management. You can recover and reuse the copied text.
• Raycast offers window management, so that you can resize and arrange windows.

Editor’s Review:

Raycast is an excellent alternative to macOS Spotlight. However, if you need to use Raycast on multiple devices, you need to upgrade to the Pro version. Besides, you fail to use the AI features on the free version. Additionally, there is also a steep learning curve with this tool.

4. Quicksilver

Quicksilver is an open-source and powerful launcher for macOS. It focuses on extensibility and customization, and it allows you to chain commands and automate complex tasks. With Quicksilver, you can launch, catalog, script apps, and work on advanced file management.

Key Features:

• Quicksilver enables instant search and launching of applications, files, and documents from the keyboard. It also has fuzzy matching and can learn your search history to produce more accurate results as time goes by.
• Quicksilver has extremely comprehensive plugin support. The plugins enable more features such as system control, clipboard, and third-party application integration.
• You can create customized actions and triggers to automate routine operations. The feature accommodates considerable personalization and can automate most workflows.
• Quicksilver is AppleScript-enabled, which allows users to set triggers for scripts and automate additional workflows.
• Adaptive Abbreviation Search: Quicksilver can detect and utilize abbreviations to accelerate searches and provide an easier way of accessing objects with fewer keystrokes.

Editor’s Review:

It’s worth trying Quicksilver if you seek to explore more features on Mac. Like other search tools, Quicksilver requires an initial setup and indexing process. It can take a large amount of time if you’re processing a large volume of files and applications. Besides, you may struggle with compatibility issues when you update to the new macOS. Particularly, this happens when there are changes to system settings and indexing mechanisms.

Bonus Tip: How to Improve Your Mac's Performance with Simple Clicks?

While using macOS Spotlight to open apps and files, you can improve the performance of macOS even more using the BuhoCleaner Menu Bar app. You can track CPU load, temperature, fan speed, RAM usage, network speed, and usage of disk space based on real-time system monitoring.

Specifically, when you've got a list of programs running at the same time, you can easily identify and address performance problems. For instance, if you notice that the CPU usage is high, you can close resource-intensive applications to prevent slowdowns. Similarly, if your RAM is almost full, you can click to free it.

Besides, you can also use BuhoCleaner's Flash Clean option to delete additional files and system garbage rapidly and make more disk space available, and enhance overall performance. Using these features routinely keeps your Mac running perfectly as new.

Conclusion

In summary, choosing a macOS Spotlight alternative depends on what you need and prefer. If you want lots of customization and workflow options, Alfred is a great choice. Raycast is perfect if you want easy access to many plugins and third-party integrations. LaunchBar is good for managing files and automation. Quicksilver, which is open-source, offers deep customization through plugins. Each of these alternatives has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s a good idea to try them out and see which one fits your workflow best.