htop Equivalent for Mac: Same Second, 7.2 to 14 GB Used

macOS doesn't ship htop. It ships top, which is a different program with the same job, and Activity Monitor, which is a window. The usual answer to "what's the htop equivalent for Mac" is brew install htop, plus a list of alternatives. I wanted to know what those tools actually disagree about, so I installed htop 3.5.3 and btop 1.4.7 from Homebrew on the M4 Mac mini that runs this business (Mac16,10, 16 GiB, macOS 26.4.1) and read all of them at 16:30:55 KST on October 5.

They disagreed by 6.8 GiB about how much memory was in use. Two of the three process viewers also showed every root-owned process as using nothing, because I didn't run them with sudo.

Same Mac, same second, four answers

The machine had been up 7 days and 6 hours, with 747 processes and no swap in use. I captured htop and btop from tmux panes and ran top, vm_stat and memory_pressure straight after:

None of these is wrong. They add up different page types from the same kernel counters. With 16,384-byte pages, vm_stat said: anonymous 445,874, purgeable 18,675, wired 120,996, occupied by compressor 121,892, active 351,254, file-backed 264,132, free 60,872, speculative 28,527.

• htop 3.5.3 uses wired + (anonymous − purgeable) + compressed. That is the same set Activity Monitor splits into App Memory, Wired Memory and Compressed, and on these counts it comes to 10.22 GiB. macmon's 10.24 GiB, read a second later, matches.
• btop 1.4.7 uses active + wired, which gives 7.22 GiB, and it calls the rest "Available". Compressed memory isn't in its Used figure at all.
• top counts everything except free and speculative pages, so the file cache is included. Its "1394M unused" is close to those two counts added together, which come to 1,397 MiB.

htop's agreement with Activity Monitor is recent. Version 3.5.1 (April 2026) fixed an unsigned underflow that showed about 64 TB used on 16K-page Apple silicon. Then a user reported 49G against Activity Monitor's 9G on a 192 GB M2 Ultra, and PR #1976 stopped counting inactive and speculative pages as used. That shipped in 3.5.2 on July 18, 2026. If an older htop on your Mac shows a memory figure that looks absurd, check htop --version before reading anything into it.

Without sudo, htop and btop can't see 325 processes

Homebrew's install prints a caveat that htop "requires root privileges to correctly display all running processes". I didn't use sudo, to see what that means in practice. Of 747 processes, 325 belong to root or a system account such as _windowserver. In htop every one of them shows RES 0, CPU 0.0, TIME 0:00.00 and state ?. In btop, filtered to syspolicyd and WindowServer, both show 0 threads and 0B.

top sees them with no sudo. It listed syspolicyd at 51M and 19:10:32 of CPU time, and kernel_task at 6:10:25. The reason is in the file modes:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/top /bin/ps
-r-sr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  241264 Apr  6 17:10 /usr/bin/top
-rwsr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  170816 Apr  6 17:10 /bin/ps

Apple ships top and ps setuid root. Homebrew's htop and btop run as you, so the per-process calls fail for anyone else's processes. The accepted answer to a 2015 Ask Different question about htop and Activity Monitor disagreeing gives the same reason. The alternatives are sudo htop, or setting the suid bit yourself, which that answer offers with a "trust your local users" warning. I didn't test either, since this Mac's scheduled jobs run without sudo. On a machine where your own processes are what matters, the zeros don't hurt. If you're hunting a runaway system daemon, they hide exactly what you're looking for.

GPU: two of the four now have a meter

top has no GPU column. Activity Monitor has %GPU and GPU Time columns, which you add from View → Columns, as an answer on Ask Different's "top/htop for GPU?" question points out. htop got a macOS GPU meter in 3.5.0, but it's off by default. I turned it on with a config file:

mkdir -p /tmp/htopcfg/htop
cat > /tmp/htopcfg/htop/htoprc <<'EOF'
htop_version=3.5.3
column_meters_0=LeftCPUs Memory Swap GPU
column_meter_modes_0=1 1 1 2
column_meters_1=RightCPUs Tasks LoadAverage Uptime
column_meter_modes_1=1 2 2 2
EOF
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp/htopcfg htop

Interactively, it's F2 → Meters → GPU. btop added Apple Silicon GPU support through IOReport in 1.4.7 and shows it by default. To check the readings I ran macmon stress gpu for ten seconds. htop showed GPU:100.0%, btop's GPU bar showed 100%, and macmon reported 100% at 1,578 MHz and 14.9 W of GPU power. The stress process didn't make top's top three by CPU (syspolicyd was first at 5.7%), so in top a GPU-bound job looks idle. None of the three terminal tools shows GPU use per process. For that you need Activity Monitor or sudo powermetrics. This is the same problem I hit measuring Ollama on the Mac mini M4: inference load shows up on the GPU, not in CPU columns.

Which one to install

If you want htop because your hands already know it, install it, but make sure it's 3.5.2 or later and use sudo htop when you need system processes. If you want one screen with CPU, memory, disk, network and GPU, btop is the closer fit, as long as you remember its "Used" leaves out compressed memory. On a machine you reach over SSH and can't install on, top -o cpu and top -o mem are already there and see more than either of them without sudo. Neither htop nor btop labels efficiency and performance cores. Both number the M4's ten cores 0 to 9, which is the gap I found in lscpu on Mac, and macmon is the one that splits them. For memory in a script rather than a dashboard, free command on Mac covers the counters and the 4096-byte-page trap, and vm_stat swap usage on Mac covers swap.

FAQ

Is there an htop equivalent for Mac?

htop itself runs on macOS: install it with brew install htop. The built-in equivalent is top, sorted with top -o cpu or top -o mem. btop (brew install btop) adds disk, network and Apple Silicon GPU panels. Without sudo, htop and btop show root-owned processes with zero CPU and memory, while the built-in top sees them because it is setuid root.

Why does htop show different memory than Activity Monitor on Mac?

Before htop 3.5.2 (July 2026), htop counted inactive and speculative pages as used, which inflated the figure on Apple silicon. Version 3.5.1 also fixed an underflow that could show about 64 TB used. htop 3.5.3 reports wired + app + compressed memory, the same breakdown Activity Monitor shows, and on a 16 GiB M4 Mac mini it read 10.2G against 10.22 GiB computed from vm_stat.

Can htop show GPU usage on a Mac?

Yes, from htop 3.5.0, but the GPU meter is off by default. Add it with F2, Meters, GPU. It shows whole-GPU utilization, not usage per process. btop 1.4.7 and later show Apple Silicon GPU usage by default. For per-process GPU use, open Activity Monitor and enable the %GPU column.

Method: on 2026-10-05 I installed htop 3.5.3 and btop 1.4.7 with Homebrew 7.0.7 (auto-update off) on a Mac mini M4 (Mac16,10, macOS 26.4.1 build 25E253, 16 GiB, 7 days uptime, no swap). I ran both in 200-column tmux panes as my normal user and captured them with tmux capture-pane at 16:30:55 KST, then ran top, vm_stat, memory_pressure and sysctl straight after. macmon was already installed. I didn't open Activity Monitor, because this Mac has no display attached: its row is computed from vm_stat using the categories on Apple's help page. Each tool's formula comes from its source (htop darwin/Platform.c, btop src/osx/btop_collect.cpp), and the version history from the htop ChangeLog, PR #1976 and btop's CHANGELOG. The GPU check was ten seconds of macmon stress gpu. I didn't test sudo, older htop builds or Intel Macs. The Ask Different threads were read through the Stack Exchange API.