BetterTouchTool alternative: a focused radial menu for Mac

BetterTouchTool is a genuinely great piece of software. It has been around for over a decade, it is maintained by one person who cares, and if you have ever needed to rebind a three-finger swipe to resize a window or write a conditional trigger that runs a shell script when a specific app is frontmost, BTT will cheerfully do that for you.

It will also do several hundred other things. That is the problem you run into if you installed BTT for one reason.

Most people who buy BTT for its pie menu feature discover two things within a month. First, the pie menu editor is buried inside a settings window that has to accommodate Touch Bar scripting, trackpad gestures, keyboard remapping, window snapping, and about fifteen other surfaces. Second, the pie menu itself is solid but clearly a side feature — because it is.

What BTT is actually built around

If you look at what BTT markets itself on, pie menus are somewhere on page three. The headline features are trackpad and Magic Mouse gestures, Touch Bar customization, keyboard shortcut extensions, window management presets, and the action chaining engine that lets you glue all of that together.

That is not a criticism. It is a product positioning decision. BTT is the Swiss army knife of macOS input customization, and it is extremely good at being that. If your use case sprawls across multiple input surfaces, BTT is almost certainly the right tool — nothing else covers that breadth for $22.

But a Swiss army knife has a small blade, a small saw, a small screwdriver. Each tool is fine. None of them is the tool you would pick if the job were only sawing.

When radial is the whole job

Swik is the sawblade. The entire app is a radial menu launcher. That is all it does. The trade-offs look like this:

Notice what is missing from the Swik column. There is no Touch Bar scripting. There is no window manager. There is no gesture recorder for pinch-to-mission-control. If you want any of that, Swik will not help you.

The sub-menu problem

The single biggest difference in practice is how each tool handles the moment you have more than ten things you want to launch.

Most pie menu features — BTT's included — assume you will keep the top level flat. You end up picking your ten most important actions and living with hotkey fallbacks for the rest. Which was the whole reason you installed a pie menu tool in the first place.

Swik was designed around the assumption that people want to launch twenty to thirty things, not eight. A parent wedge like "Meetings" opens a secondary ring. A parent wedge like "Writing" opens its own. An outer ring extends from any wedge that represents an app, exposing that app's most-used documents without a second trigger. The geometry was built for this from day one — the math that calculates hit testing for the extended ring is in RadialSelectionCalculator.extendedSelectionIndex(), not a plugin.

Context profiles vs conditional triggers

BTT has excellent per-app conditions. If you want a gesture to do one thing in Photoshop and another in Final Cut, BTT handles that.

Swik's version of "context" operates one level up: the entire menu can swap based on which Wi-Fi network you are on, which display is connected, or what time it is. The "Home" profile loads when you join your home Wi-Fi. The "Office" profile loads when the external display is plugged in. The "Evening" profile loads after 6 p.m. and swaps your work apps out for music controls and HomeKit scenes.

These are different philosophies, not competing ones. BTT asks "what app is open?" Swik asks "where are you and when is it?" Both are useful. Only one ships in the box.

Pricing, honestly

BTT costs $10 for a two-year license or $22 for lifetime. That is a fair price for the surface area it covers. If you use half of what BTT can do, it is probably the best $22 you will spend on your Mac.

Swik is free for five wedges and one profile, and $9 one-time for unlimited wedges, unlimited profiles, and the full extended ring. No subscription. No renewal. There is no scenario in which Swik is cheaper than BTT by feature — BTT is a better deal per utility. Swik is only a better deal if the utility you actually need is the pie menu.

When BTT is the right call

Stay on BetterTouchTool if any of these apply:

• You use the Touch Bar and want to script it.
• You have built a window-management layout you rely on.
• You want four-finger gestures on the trackpad mapped to app-specific actions.
• You have a macro library with conditional logic (if frontmost app is X and time is before noon, then…).
• You already own BTT and its pie menu covers your needs.

In all those cases BTT is doing work Swik is not even trying to do. A dedicated radial menu app is not going to replace a scripting engine.

When a dedicated radial menu wins

Consider Swik if the pie menu was the reason you opened BTT in the first place, and the rest of the app feels like weight you carry around.

• You want hold-and-release to feel instant, not as one activation style among ten.
• You have more than ten things you want to launch and want sub-menus to be a first-class concept.
• You want the menu to change when you move between home, office, and coffee shop without opening any settings.
• You want a $9 one-time price for a tool that does one thing.

The honest framing is this: BTT is the right tool if you want every input surface on your Mac customized from one app. Swik is the right tool if the radial menu is the only customization you ever planned to make.