Dynamic Notch vs Boring Notch

Checked on 20 September 2026. Prices and features change — verify the other app yourself before deciding.

Boring Notch is free, open source under the GPL, and has 10.8k stars on GitHub. If the price is what decides this for you, stop reading and go install it — it is a good piece of work by people who gave it away, and nothing below is an argument against that.

What follows is where the two actually differ, including the places where Boring Notch is the better choice.

Where Boring Notch is the better pick

It is free, and that is not a small thing. A notch utility is a convenience, not a necessity, and paying nothing for a convenience is a perfectly rational position.

It replaces the macOS HUD. The volume and brightness overlays that land in the middle of your screen get redrawn into the notch. Dynamic Notch does not do this, and if that particular annoyance is what sent you looking, Boring Notch solves it and we do not.

It is open source, with a real community. Ten thousand stars means bugs get found by people who are not us, and you can read every line before you run it. If a developer disappears, GPL code does not.

The install is genuinely different

Boring Notch does not have an Apple Developer account, so its builds are not signed or notarized. On first launch macOS refuses to open it, and the documented fix is to run a command in Terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/boringNotch.app

That command strips the quarantine flag — it tells macOS to stop checking. It works, thousands of people do it, and for an open-source app whose code you can read it is a reasonable trade. But it is worth being clear about what it is: you are switching off the check that exists to stop you running something you did not mean to run.

Dynamic Notch is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens by double-clicking it. That costs €14.99 and an Apple developer subscription on our side. It buys you nothing in features — it buys you not having to think about it.

What Dynamic Notch does that Boring Notch does not

Clipboard history that refuses passwords. The last 50 things you copied, kept locally. It skips what macOS marks as concealed, and — because macOS does not always mark them — it also refuses to record anything copied while a password manager is the frontmost app. That second rule exists because measurement showed the first one was not enough.

Voice memos that come back as text. Record a thought and get a transcription, in English, Italian or Spanish. The audio is normalised first, so a memo taken at arm's length from the built-in mic is still readable.

A focus timer that interrupts you properly. A Pomodoro that counts down in the notch, and when it expires the panel opens by itself.

A browser video, moved into the notch. A YouTube video playing in Safari, Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi or Arc can be lifted into a small player under the notch, resuming at the exact second the tab had reached, and handed back when you are done. No screen recording permission involved.

So which one

Take Boring Notch if the price is the point, if you want the HUD replaced, or if you would rather run code you can read.

Take Dynamic Notch if you want the clipboard, the voice memos, the timer and the browser video in the same place, and if you would rather not open Terminal to install an app.

It runs for seven days first, with everything unlocked and no account, so the question answers itself on your own Mac rather than on this page.

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