Agents Never Sleep vs Port Radar for macOS: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Agents Never Sleep and Port Radar for macOS — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Agents Never Sleep
Agents Never Sleep
A tiny $4.99 Mac menu bar app that keeps long-running AI agents alive with the laptop lid closed, using one three-level slider.
Key features
- Closed-Lid Operation: Keeps agents and background jobs running with the MacBook lid shut, which the built-in caffeinate command cannot do.
- Three-Level Slider: One control with Sleepy, Awake, and Never sleeps settings, so changing sleep behavior takes a single drag rather than a terminal command.
- Menu Bar Only: Lives entirely in the menu bar with no window, dock icon, or configuration screens to manage.
- Native and Tiny: A small native macOS binary rather than a wrapped web app, minimizing overhead on a machine already running agents.
- Zero Data Collection: No telemetry, analytics, or tracking; what runs on the machine stays on the machine.
- Safe Revert: Toggling back down restores normal sleep behavior, avoiding the common mistake of leaving sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 permanently enabled.
- No-Questions Refund: A 14-day money-back guarantee with no form to fill in and no reason required.
Best for
- Overnight Agent Runs: Letting a coding agent work through a long task while the laptop is closed and put away.
- Long Builds and Tests: Preventing a multi-hour build, test suite, or data job from being interrupted mid-run by sleep.
- Mobile Working: Carrying a MacBook between rooms or offices without propping the lid open to keep a job alive.
- Model Downloads and Training: Keeping large model downloads or local fine-tuning runs going unattended.
- Avoiding pmset Mistakes: Replacing manual sudo pmset toggles that are easy to enable and easy to forget to undo.
- Remote Sessions: Keeping a Mac reachable and working for a remote session or background service while it sits closed on a desk.
Port Radar for macOS
Juan Sebastian Solano
Free open-source Mac menu bar app that lists every listening localhost port and uses on-device Apple Intelligence to explain what each process is.
Key features
- Menu Bar Port Scanner: Lists every listening localhost port in the menu bar with port number, PID, owning project, runtime, and the exact command line.
- Apple Intelligence Explanations: Ask in plain language what a process is, why it has been running, and whether stopping it is safe; answers are generated on-device with no cloud call.
- Project Grouping: Groups processes by the project directory that owns them and flags shared or orphaned processes with no obvious parent.
- One-Click Cloudflare Tunnels: Share any local port as a public URL through a Cloudflare quick tunnel, auto-installing cloudflared with no CLI, ngrok, or account setup.
- Clean Process Control: Stop a process gracefully or force-quit it with a confirmation step, directly from the menu bar.
- Live Tunnel Management: See which tunnels are currently live and public, copy their URLs, and stop them at any time.
- Fully On-Device Privacy: All inspection and AI explanation happens locally; no process data or command lines are sent off the machine.
- Open Source Under Apache 2.0: The full source is published on GitHub, so the app can be audited or built from source.
Best for
- Port Conflict Debugging: Finding out which forgotten process is holding port 3000 before starting a new dev server.
- Runaway Process Triage: Identifying a Node or Python process quietly eating CPU and deciding whether it is safe to kill.
- Preview Sharing: Handing a teammate or client a live public URL for a work-in-progress local app in seconds.
- Multi-Project Development: Keeping track of which of several simultaneously running projects owns each active port.
- Onboarding and Handover: Letting a developer new to a codebase understand what the local stack actually starts up.
- Privacy-Sensitive Environments: Getting AI assistance about local processes in settings where sending command lines to a cloud model is unacceptable.