Crest vs MediaMate: which one fixes what is bothering you?

MediaMate is small, cheap and well aimed. It replaces the old macOS volume, display and keyboard brightness HUDs with compact ones and tucks a Now Playing HUD into the notch, for €6.99. Crest hangs a whole panel there for $24.99 once, or $2.99 a month. If the HUDs are the thing that has been bothering you, this comparison is shorter than you expected.

Last updated: July 2026

Full disclosure: this page is published by the makers of Crest. MediaMate's prices and limits below are taken from MediaMate's own pages, checked in July 2026.

Side by side

The comparison table is at the top of this page.

Where Crest is better

• The free tier is a real app, not a demo mode. Now Playing with lyrics and the queue, the Shelf, the Clipboard and window snapping, fully working, and the free tier never expires.
• It answers more than the volume key. The meeting you are about to be late for with a one-tap join, todos and notes, CPU, memory, disk, network and battery, and your clipboard history. Every one of those is a window you stop opening.
• It answers your coding agents. A Claude Code permission prompt pins to the notch until you allow or deny it, on whichever display you are looking at. Nothing else in this category does that.
• Pages of widgets you arrange, and swipe between. Home, Work and Code, and Auto follows what you are doing: a meeting coming up flips it to Work, your editor in front flips it to Code.
• It works on Macs with no notch. An external display or an older Mac gets a tidy floating pill in the same place.

Where MediaMate fits

• It costs a third as much. €6.99, for one job: better system HUDs.
• It runs on older Macs. macOS 13 and up, against Crest's macOS 14.
• Keyboard backlight. A HUD for it and a shortcut to drive it. Crest shows volume and display brightness only.
• Four HUD themes and Focus filters. iOS-styled, circular, notch and classic, and the HUDs can hide in a Focus mode. Crest's HUD flash has one look and one setting.
• A demo with no clock. The download runs in demo mode instead of a timed trial.

The pricing math

MediaMate is €6.99 on its Gumroad page, one payment, with the option to pay more, and there is a demo mode in the free download. Crest Pro, with Take and Minutes, is $24.99 once, two Macs, updates through Crest 7, or $2.99 a month with every update, with a free tier under it.

MediaMate is cheaper and it should be. It replaces four HUDs and does it well. The only question worth asking is whether the HUDs were the problem, or whether they were just the part of the problem you noticed first.

They overlap on exactly one thing

Both apps draw a volume level, so running them together means two things reacting to the same key press. Pick one for HUD duty. Everything else Crest does sits in a panel MediaMate never opens, and everything MediaMate does to the keyboard backlight is a place Crest never goes, so the overlap really is that narrow.

FAQ