Floodtide updates your apps. Version Tracker updates your Mac.
Floodtide is a good, inexpensive, one-time-purchase updater for Mac applications. If that is all you need, buy it and stop reading. This page is for the other case: when your Mac is also a development machine, and half of what goes out of date never arrives as an app bundle at all.
What Floodtide is, honestly.
Floodtide, from Bhop Studio, positions itself as the successor to MacUpdater, which stopped selling on 1 January 2026. It scans the applications installed on your Mac, shows what is outdated, and installs the updates you approve. It keeps a copy of the version it replaced so you can go back. It can run on a schedule, count pending updates in the menu bar, respect quiet hours, and leave major versions alone unless you say otherwise.
It costs 12,99 € once for three Macs, with every 1.x update included and nothing renewing. There is a 14-day full trial with no card and no account, and after the trial the scanner keeps working for free while the install buttons lock. It runs on macOS 13 and later, and ships in English and German.
None of that is praise we are reluctantly handing out. It is a well-built tool at a fair price, and for a lot of Macs it is the right answer. The question this page settles is narrower: what does it not see?
Four sources, or fifty-one.
Floodtide's own site lists its coverage: Sparkle, Homebrew, GitHub Releases and Electron, across 4,795 verified app bundles. Those four channels carry the Mac applications most people install, and Floodtide handles them well.
Version Tracker reads 51 sources and tracks over a million packages. The four above are among them. The other forty-seven are where the two products stop overlapping.
- Language package managers: npm, pip, RubyGems, Cargo, Go, Composer, Conda, uv, Yarn, pnpm. A globally installed command-line tool three major versions behind is invisible to an app updater, because it is not an app.
- Runtimes and system managers: MacPorts, Nix, Mise, Docker, Deno, Bun, Flutter, TeX Live, .NET global tools, R packages from CRAN.
- Editor and tool ecosystems: VS Code extensions, Obsidian community plugins, audio plugins including CLAP, and the Mac App Store.
- Security intelligence: Version Tracker cross-references what you have installed against published CVEs and Apple's SOFA feed, so an outdated package is flagged as a known vulnerability, not just an old number.
- Seven languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch, interface and manual alike. Floodtide ships in English and German.
Side by side.
Checked against each product's own website on 8 October 2026. The rows where Floodtide is ahead say so.
The questions worth asking.
Because the two products cover different amounts of ground. Floodtide watches Mac applications through four channels. Version Tracker watches 51 sources, which includes those four plus npm, pip, Cargo, RubyGems, Go, Docker, Deno, Bun, Composer, MacPorts, Nix, Conda, VS Code extensions, Obsidian plugins, .NET global tools, R packages and audio plugins.
If your Mac only runs applications, you would be paying Version Tracker for sources you will never use, and Floodtide is the better value. If your Mac is also a development machine, those extra sources are the whole reason to pay more.
Open Terminal and run these three commands:
npm ls -g --depth=0 · pip list --outdated · cargo install --list
If they return things you care about keeping current, Version Tracker tracks them and Floodtide does not. If they return nothing or an error, Floodtide will very likely do everything you need, for a one-time 12,99 €.
No. Floodtide's own site lists its sources as Sparkle, Homebrew, GitHub Releases and Electron, covering 4,795 verified app bundles. Language package managers are outside its scope. That is a deliberate design choice on their side, not an oversight, and it keeps their product simple.
No. Version Tracker requires macOS 15.6 or later. Floodtide runs on macOS 13 and later, so on an older Mac it is the one that will actually install. This is a real advantage for Floodtide and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Yes, nothing prevents it, but there is little point: both read the same update feeds for the applications they share, so you would get the same notification twice.
If you are trying both to decide, Version Tracker's Free tier scans all 51 sources forever at no cost, and Floodtide offers a 14-day full trial. You can compare them on your own Mac before paying either of us.
See what is actually out of date.
The Free tier scans all 51 sources, forever, at no cost. Then decide whether the other forty-seven are worth anything to you.
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