The best free Mac screensavers

Screensavers stopped being necessary when CRTs died, and became decorative instead. macOS ships good ones now, and a small number of free third-party ones are still worth installing. Here is what actually works on Apple Silicon in 2026.

The built-in ones

Start here, because they cost nothing and carry no risk. macOS ships aerial video screensavers — slow drone footage of cities, coastlines and landscapes — that continue into the desktop wallpaper when you log in. They are genuinely the nicest thing in the category, and they are already on your Mac.

Find them in System Settings → Screen Saver. The trade-off is disk: the videos are downloaded on demand and a full set runs to several gigabytes. If space is tight, stick to two or three.

Also built in: Shuffle, which rotates categories; the classic Message and Word of the Day; and the photo-based ones that pull from your own library.

Aerial

Free, open source, actively maintained. Aerial predates Apple's own implementation and is still better than it. It plays Apple's aerial videos with far more control: pick locations, filter by time of day, show a clock, show the location name, cache videos for offline use, and run different videos on different displays.

It is the one to install if you like the built-in aerials but want them to behave. Being open source, it is also the one you can actually audit — relevant given the point below about screensavers being executable code.

Note it needs a reasonable amount of disk for its cache, and the first run downloads a lot.

Fliqlo

Free, closed source, still going. Fliqlo is a giant flip clock — white digits on black, nothing else. It is probably the most installed third-party Mac screensaver ever made, and its appeal is unchanged: it turns a laptop on a desk into a bedside clock.

The thing to know is that the original was Flash-based. Flash is gone, and the current Fliqlo is a native rebuild. Make sure you are getting the current version from the developer's own site rather than an archived copy, which will not run on Apple Silicon.

If you want the same idea with alternatives, see minimal clock screensavers for Mac.

Brooklyn

Free, open source. Brooklyn recreates the animation Apple played on the wall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music event — abstract shapes and colour, quite loud visually. It is a nice contrast to the aerials if you want something graphic rather than photographic, and it is lightweight.

Installing and changing them

A Mac screensaver is a .saver bundle. To install one:

1. Download and unzip it.
2. Double-click the .saver file. macOS offers to install it for you, or for all users.
3. It appears in System Settings → Screen Saver.

If you prefer to place it by hand, per-user screensavers live in ~/Library/Screen Savers and system-wide ones in /Library/Screen Savers.

To change the screensaver: System Settings → Screen Saver, then click one. To change when it starts: that control is not on the same screen — it is under Lock Screen, as "Start Screen Saver when inactive". This split catches everybody.

The safety part people skip

A .saver bundle is not an image or a video. It is a compiled plug-in that macOS loads and runs. It executes code on your machine with your user account's access.

That is not a reason for alarm — it is a reason to be ordinary about where you get them. Prefer open source ones you or someone else can read. Prefer developers with a real presence. macOS requires screensavers to be signed and notarised, and Gatekeeper will block unsigned ones by default; if a download tells you to right-click and Open to bypass that warning, treat the instruction as the warning.

The screensavers listed above are all either open source or from long-established developers, which is why they are the ones listed.