In recent years more and more companies are changing the methods of charging for their products, in order to make them more accessible to all consumers. Major industry names, such as Adobe or Microsoft, went from using a single payment system to a system based on a monthly or annual subscription, for one or more applications, and the latter method is also used by Setapp, the app for Mac that serves as the command center for a large catalog of programs, with excellent features and benefits that I want to talk to you about in this Setapp review.
What is Setapp?
Setapp is a project that brings together a large number of very good applications for Mac, which have a higher price if you purchase them individually in the App Store.
It is developed by MacPaw, the creators of the world-famous CleanmyMac application for Apple computers. They have a very clear objective with this project: to offer the Mac user the highest quality applications and the best design, in order to make the Mac an even more powerful and productive tool. Let’s continue this Setapp Review with the apps.
The apps
Setapp currently has more than 150 available applications, all of the excellent quality, which together adds up to a value of more than $1,500 in the App Store. The catalog includes applications of the highest quality and high demand among users such as:
- CleanmyMac: Allows you to keep your Mac completely clean and get rid of all those large system files that are useless and slow down the system. It’s an essential application for almost any user of Apple devices and it is considered by many people the best app in Setapp.
- Bartender: Allows you to choose which applications appear on the top bar of the mac, to have it much more organized and provide information about what really matters to us. Ideal for people who love order or personalization.
- Gemini: Allows to detect those files that are duplicated in our Mac in order to proceed to eliminate them and free the so precious space that they occupy unnecessarily.
- iStat Menus: Globally known to be the best application to provide internal statistics of the performance of our machine, while informing us about temperatures, percentage, and health of batteries of our Mac, and even of the devices linked by Bluetooth.
- Folx: Application that automatically detects the torrents we download from our browser and puts them to download an extreme speed, while intrinsically incorporates a search engine to perform our searches from within the application itself.
- IM+: It consists of a messaging application that allows us to bring together all those social networks such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Slack and many more in a single application so that only by opening one app we have all of the above.
In this Setapp review, we look only on just a few examples among the more than 150 applications available on Setapp, which you can see in their entirety on the manufacturer’s page, where they offer a detailed list of each of them.
How does Setapp work?
Its operative system is very simple, once you subscribe from the website you can download the application, install it in your Mac, register and enjoy its catalog of applications, which is extensive and versatile, as it offers solutions for all types of needs with a very similar appearance to that found in the App Store.
One of the advantages of Setapp is that they are adding more and more applications, but without increasing the cost of the product: for the same price that a year ago was paid per 100 apps, today you can have more than 150. This helps a lot to keep your Mac in good condition, because it is extremely important to always have the applications in their original version and in their latest version available, to ensure its proper functioning and a much better and longer life to your Mac.
Payment methods
Setapp, instead of forcing us to make an individual payment for each of its applications, allows us to link to a monthly subscription of $9.99 per month, $8.99 per month if you choose a 1-year plan and offer a Setapp discount of 50% if you are a student. For this price, you can have Setapp on 2 Mac devices, and if two devices are too few, for $19.99 you find the family plan, which in addition allows you to use it in 3 more devices.
If you want to add more devices to any of the plans, you can do it for $4.99 for each extra Mac.
Is Setapp safe?
There are 2 types of applications available in Setapp, those created by MacPaw, the company responsible for the application, and those created by other Mac developers.
MacPaw has been in the market for years, offering different apps as the mentioned above, all of them aimed at maintaining and improving the performance of the Mac, as well as offering various solutions for users’ needs. Thousands of users use Setapp daily, and you can get different positive opinions about it, so security is guaranteed.
In the case of apps created by third parties, MacPaw has a “Review Team” that is responsible for conducting a thorough review of applications to verify that they meet the quality, security, performance and privacy standards of the company, ensuring to only offer the best and most reliable applications in Setapp.
So, is Setapp safe? If you’re reading this Setapp Review for this answer then here it is. Yes, Settap is totally safe!
Pros and cons of Setapp
Pros
- Easy installation/uninstallation: Setapp allows you to install and uninstall applications quickly and easily, so if you want to save space, you can install an app, use it and uninstall it later. It is not necessary to have installed the 150+ applications available in Setapp at the same time, you can install the ones you need to use.
- Same Price, more apps: Setapp adds new apps from time to time, but without increasing the price.
- High-quality apps: The apps offered by Setapp go through rigorous quality control.
- Low-cost: the price of Setapp is very low in comparison to the purchase of the apps separately, since everything you can get in the app would cost around $1500 if you buy it individually.
Cons
- Same Price even if you don’t use it: It doesn’t matter if you use all the applications exhaustively during the month or if you only opened one for 2 days: you must always pay the same fee.
- It doesn’t have all the apps on the market: Although Setapp’s app catalog is huge, there are still applications available on the internet that aren’t in the app.
- You won’t always use everything: there are applications that, although very useful, you may use very little if you know how to properly care for your Mac.
Setapp is an indispensable application for the average Mac user, and the benefits it offers far outweigh its negatives. Ideal for Freelancers, students, home users and professionals who want multiple apps and a variety of digital instruments on their Mac.
For more on multimedia software reviews that will be great for your Mac, check out our article Top 10 Best Photo Editing Software.