Caffeine is a cup you click.
Midnight Oil is the rest of the night.
Caffeine is the app that started this category: click the cup, your Mac stays awake. Two decades on it's still free and still tiny, and for a lot of people that's exactly enough. If you need it to run for a set time, react to what's happening, or keep a closed laptop working, you've outgrown it.
The short version
Keep Caffeine if all you ever do is click the cup. Get Midnight Oil for sessions that end on their own, triggers, closed-lid mode, and battery safety. Both are free, and both publish their source.
What Caffeine does, and where it stops
Caffeine has one control: a coffee cup in the menu bar. Full cup, your Mac won't sleep. Empty cup, it will. Right-click for a handful of preferences: activate at launch, start at login, a default duration. Under a megabyte, free, and after a 2025 handoff to IntelliScape it runs natively on Apple Silicon and macOS Tahoe.
That simplicity is the product. It's also the ceiling.
No visible timer
You can set a default duration in preferences, but there's no countdown, no “until 7 AM,” and no way to extend a running session. You click the cup and hope you remember to click it again.
No triggers
Caffeine can't turn itself on when you plug in a display, join your office Wi-Fi, or launch Terminal, and it can't turn itself off when a build finishes or an app quits. It's manual, always.
No closed-lid mode
Close the MacBook and it sleeps, cup or no cup. For a download or a render at your desk that's fine. For an agent run you want to carry to the next room, it isn't.
Three apps, one name
At least three projects call themselves Caffeine for Mac and use the same cup icon: IntelliScape's, a fork at caffeine-app.net, and another on GitHub. Reviews and Homebrew point at different ones. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's confusing when something breaks.
The analytics ping
A 2023 MacUpdate reviewer asked why the app “pings analytics.intelliscapesolutions.com every 2 minutes.” Midnight Oil makes no network calls except to check for updates, and you can turn that off.
Midnight Oil vs Caffeine
| Midnight Oil | Caffeine | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free (donations) |
| Source code public | Yes (FSL, MIT after 2 years) | Yes, MIT |
| One-click on and off | Yes | Yes |
| Timed sessions with a visible countdown | Yes | Default duration only, no countdown |
| Keep awake until a time | Yes | No |
| While an app is running / while a file downloads | Yes | No |
| Triggers (display, power, Wi-Fi, app, …) | Yes | No |
| Weekly schedules, like work hours | Yes | No |
| Closed-lid mode | Yes | No |
| End on low battery or unplug | Yes | No |
| Hot keys | Yes | No |
| Network activity | Update check only, can be disabled | Analytics ping reported by users |
| Download size | 3 MB | Under 1 MB |
| Minimum macOS | 14 Sonoma | 11.5 Big Sur |
What Caffeine does better
It's smaller (under 1 MB), it runs back to macOS 11, and there's nothing to learn. If your whole use case is “don't sleep during this presentation,” Caffeine is the right amount of app.
What Midnight Oil does better
Everything that happens after the click. Sessions that end at a time or when an app quits, a countdown in the menu bar, triggers that start sessions on their own, closed-lid mode, and battery rules so a laptop never cooks in a bag.
Switching
- Install Midnight Oil.
brew install --cask coreyhaines31/tap/midnightoil, or the DMG from GitHub. - Click the flame instead of the cup. “Keep Awake Indefinitely” is the same thing Caffeine did. The menu also offers minutes, hours, a clock time, or while an app runs.
- Quit Caffeine. Two keep-awake apps at once is harmless but pointless.
Who should stay on Caffeine
Anyone on macOS 11–13, and anyone who wants the smallest possible app with no options. There's no shame in a cup.
Other ways people keep a Mac awake
More than a cup.
Free. No account, no subscription.
macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon and Intel · brew install --cask coreyhaines31/tap/midnightoil