Two apps, one purchase
maXfolders is the sandboxed Mac App Store app, with one pane or two. It is free to use: everything is included for two months, and after that the free features stay while a one-time purchase brings back the rest. maXfolders Pro adds the embedded terminal, Finder integration, the Git Assistant and iCloud Photos. It is downloaded from this site, not the Store, since a couple of those capabilities can't live inside App Sandbox, and the maXfolders purchase includes its license. Each feature below carries a pill for every state that has it: FreemaXfoldersPRO — Free is what maXfolders keeps after the trial, maXfolders is the trial or the unlock, and a starred Free pill means part of it needs the trial or the unlock — hover it to see which.
Free, with everything for two months, then $9.99 once
Included with maXfolders
Prices are per major version. maXfolders and Pro are both free for two months; after that a single $9.99 purchase on the Mac App Store keeps both. How Pro licensing works.
Free in every state
Folder tabs with Back and Forward history, and a native path bar with predictive typing.
A compact Favourites sidebar for the places you go back to: home, your disks and standard folders to start, your own collapsible groups, a star by each path to add the folder, reordered by dragging, shared by every tab and window.
A resumable Transfers queue and a side-by-side File Comparator for text and binary files.
Wildcard/content/regex search, zip and tar browsed like folders, and Save File List to CSV.
A Quick-Look-style window that follows Source, plus paged browsing for oversized text files.
A Go menu shortcut jumps straight to your iCloud Drive folder, and Download Now materializes a cloud-only file in the background.
A branch badge, a live status column, and Show Diff in Preview for a changed file.
System, Light, or Dark, and a choice of color themes from Native to Retro to Xcode.
Nine built-in utilities — Base64, URL and HTML encode/decode, OCR, JSON/XML formatting, text escaping, QR codes, and a cron parser.
Copy, Move, Create Archive, Extract Archive, and Find as actions you can chain into your own shortcuts.
A sidebar in the main window — or a floating window, one click away — that collects files from either pane, Finder, or another app's Share menu, then copies or moves them all at once — ⌃J, the toolbar, or Add to Shelf. Add to Shelf also works on a local or plain-FTP remote pane in both editions.
New in 2.1.9: the Shelf sits on the right of the main window, beside one pane or both, with a tray button on the window's edge. Detach it into a floating window and dock it back without losing what's on it.
New in 2.1.9: a Tools button beside each pane's path lists the tools for that pane's selection or folder — Inspect & Edit, Organize, Media and Understand This Folder. The menu bar's Tools menu has the same groups, plus Utilities.
Blocks Delete/Move on your home folder, system directories, and network-share roots outright, plus your own marked protected folders and a confirmation for large bulk jobs.
A window with a video or audio file's technical details — container, duration, and per-track codec, resolution, frame rate, sample rate, and channels — exportable as Text, JSON, or XML. Several files get one table; Summarise, which says which ones differ, needs the trial or the unlock.
Folder sizes worked out in the background and kept current, plus sortable Date Taken, camera, dimensions, duration, codec, PDF pages, checksum and Days Since Opened columns. The list never waits for them.
A soft bar in each Size cell shows the item's share of the folder, like a treemap you don't have to open.
⌘V in a pane saves the clipboard as a file: an image as PNG, a link as .webloc, text as .txt or .md.
⌘C and ⌘X put files on the clipboard as real files that Finder, Mail and Terminal can paste; ⌘V, Move Item Here and ⌘D copy, move and duplicate.
Keep the Shelf docked in the main window, as a floating window or as a menu bar icon you can drop files on. Items show their size, can be previewed or trashed, and Remove Missing clears the ones that are gone.
Open in maXfolders from Finder's toolbar, and Send to maXfolders Shelf from any Share menu.
Choose what F1–F12 do: Classic, Commander, Navigator, Organizer or Compare & Sync, or any command on any key. The key bar, toolbar tips and Shortcut Guide follow.
Source and Destination side by side, Flip and Swap, and Copy and Move straight to the other pane. With one pane shown, Copy… and Move… ask for a folder instead. The first launch asks one pane or two; Panes in the toolbar switches at any time.
Colour-coded folder compare, then Keep Source or Keep Destination to bring the two folders in step. Compare Subfolders lists and explains what differs in every subfolder.
WebDAV, S3 (and S3-compatible services like MinIO, Backblaze B2, and DigitalOcean Spaces), and Dropbox, browsed like a local folder, with checksum-verified transfers. They need only the outbound network entitlement the App Store edition already has.
With the trial or the unlock
Describe what you want — “PDFs from last spring over 5 MB that mention Hilton” — and Apple Intelligence fills in Find or Bulk Rename on your Mac, for you to check before anything runs. macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence.
Right-click a folder for a dedicated window that previews every matching file before anything runs, locally or over plain FTP. With Apple Intelligence, describe the new names — “date taken, then camera, then a 3-digit counter” — and Bulk Rename fills in its own rules.
HEIC to JPEG or PNG, resize and re-compress, strip EXIF and GPS, merge, split or rotate PDFs, remux and trim video, and convert audio — over a whole folder tree, previewed first, using only macOS's own frameworks. Or describe it — “merge them into one PDF” — and Apple Intelligence fills in the settings.
Before every copy or move, checks free space, collisions, names and sizes the destination disk can't hold, and metadata that won't survive the trip — and only stops you when something's wrong.
Ask a question of the documents in a folder and get an answer that names the file and page — click it and Preview opens at the passage. Spotlight does the finding; Apple Intelligence reads the passages on your Mac. macOS 27.
Ask about the PDFs and text files in the current pane — “which invoice is from March?” — and get the documents it means, matched by the dates and amounts maXfolders reads from them. Text already read isn't read again.
File Comparator, Version History and Compare Folders turn a comparison into a short plain-language changelog, with every number checked against the diff.
Two lines about a document, PDF or code file, with its key dates and names, above the preview. Scanned PDFs read with text recognition.
What an unfamiliar folder is, what can be regenerated and where the newest work is — from the listing alone.
Say what you want on Bulk Convert, Preflight, Compare and Copy Template too — “into Clients/{year}/{project name}” — and check the filled-in form before anything runs.
One line (⇧⌘P) opens the right window and fills it in, by Apple Intelligence tool calling. Nothing runs until you press Run.
A PDF grid of photo and video thumbnails with names and frame numbers, made with Quick Look and PDFKit — ready to send to a client.
A dark viewer for a folder's photos, videos and audio: pinch-zoom, play, per-file info, and one click to the Shelf.
A small themed editor for text and code files: coloured code, Markdown and HTML preview, encoding fixes, and the previous version kept in Version History when you save.
Groups a log's warnings and errors by message, with counts, times and the first line of each, and explains what went wrong or answers “what failed around 14:00?”. Works on logs of any size.
The editor checks sudoers, sshd_config, nginx.conf, property lists, launchd jobs, crontabs and systemd units before saving, warns before a change that could lock you out, and explains when you lack permission to change a file.
Quick Edit shows the open file's permissions, owner and group, changes them with a click when you save, and warns before a save would change the owner or mode. Owner changes need maXfolders Pro.
Quick Edit shows a file's bytes as offset, hex and ASCII and lets you edit them in place, with a warning before a save that could leave the file unreadable. A Structure panel names the parts of certificates, property lists and PNG images, and Apple Intelligence can explain a part in plain language. Files that aren't text open straight in it.
Open a .pem, .crt, .cer or .der file in Quick Edit and Preview shows its subject, issuer and expiry, serial, key, alternative names and fingerprints. Check for Problems flags expired or weak certificates, and Format tidies the PEM.
Quick Edit underlines passwords, tokens and private keys, and Copy with Secrets Masked copies the text with each one replaced by [REDACTED], ready to paste into a ticket.
Insert snippets in the editor with blanks to Tab through, decode or encode a JWT, Base64, URL or hex string in place, and hover a Unix timestamp to see the date.
A small swatch after every #hex, rgb(), hsl(), CSS and SwiftUI colour in the editor; click it to change the colour with the system colour panel, written back in the same notation.
A query bar in JSONPath or jq spelling, Sort Keys, conversion between JSON, YAML and TOML, and a collapsible tree in Preview.
Several cursors with ⌘D and ⌥-drag, folding for long blocks, and Go to Line and Go to Symbol in Quick Edit.
The versions macOS auto-saved of a document, each opened side by side with the current file in File Comparator.
Connect to Server opens a plain FTP connection you browse, drag, upload, and download like a local folder.
Password or private-key authentication, with SFTP host keys pinned. Plain FTP is in both editions too; SFTP is the encrypted variant. The App Store edition reads a private key you pick with Choose…, since the sandbox hides ~/.ssh.
Mirror navigation between two panes locally, or pair a local folder with an SFTP, S3, WebDAV, or Dropbox connection, or two of them with each other.
Bulk Delete, Rename, Copy, and Move run locally and over FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, and Dropbox, with a dry run first.
Stage a file on the Shelf from a local folder, or from an FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, or Dropbox connection, and copy or move it from there as a background job.
Control-click a folder for a sunburst breakdown of where its space goes, with size presets, a switch for each kind of file, and Apple Intelligence to describe a filter or say what looks safe to delete — and, only if you choose, Move to Trash or Add to Shelf.
Apple Intelligence proposes folders for the loose files in Downloads or Desktop from their names alone, shows the plan as a tree you can edit, and sorts them in one step that Undo takes back.
maXfolders Pro adds
Everything below is either something App Sandbox — the container every Mac App Store app runs inside — genuinely won't allow, or a capability kept on the paid side deliberately. Either way, none of it is in either App Store edition today.
A colored, resizable shell right below the file list, following your path as you navigate. A sandboxed child process can't reach outside its own container, which would make an in-pane shell mostly useless there.
Get Info opens the real Finder window; a Comments column reads and writes Finder comments. Both work by asking Finder directly, which needs an Automation entitlement the App Store edition doesn't request.
No credentials needed — connects to your Mac's own Photos library, which mirrors iCloud Photos when that's turned on. Browse albums or All Photos, with Bulk Delete/Copy/Move by album, media type, date, or size, and Add to Shelf. The other cloud providers are in maXfolders too.
Pro shows what's new in each release and installs it with one click, checking that it's signed by maxfolders.com first. The App Store edition gets its updates from the App Store.
Pack into a new .7z, and open, browse, and extract .7z and .rar archives like any other folder. RAR is extract-only — its compressor is proprietary. Both use bundled command-line tools that can't run inside App Sandbox.
Undo Last Operation (⌥⌘Z) reverses a finished Copy, Move, Delete, or Bulk job — including Bulk Convert, whose outputs go to the Trash and originals come back. Before a destructive job runs, Pro also takes a local APFS snapshot, so a job's files can be restored from it even after later changes.
Copying or moving a file with companions beside it — subtitles, XMP sidecars, the other half of a RAW+JPEG pair, a project's asset folder, a checksum — lists them in Preflight to include, and Bulk Rename renames them to match. The pairings are editable, and you can add your own.
Quick Edit opens and saves system files, such as the hosts file, sudoers and LaunchDaemon property lists, through the macOS administrator prompt. sudoers and property lists are checked before they are written, and the old contents are backed up.
Control-click a disk to analyse all of it, with every mounted volume and its free space listed. In the App Store edition a disk’s root is analysed as a folder.
Stage files or single hunks, check and commit with a message Apple Intelligence drafts in your repository's style — or split mixed work into focused commits; fetch, pull and push in one click; branches, stashes and clean-up; merge conflicts settled side by side with an explanation; release notes and tagged releases; pull requests checked, updated, squashed and created; and Ask Git, which turns a sentence into the right git command.
A morning of mixed changes becomes focused commits in Git Assistant — code with its tests and the docs about it together, junk files left out — each with a message Apple Intelligence writes from its own changes, for you to check before anything is committed.
Show in Destination lists any commit, tag or branch in the other pane, read-only and without checking it out — open a file, compare it with today's or copy an old one out. Open Beside puts another branch in a worktree next to your folder.
Fixup, Reword, Move Older and Move Newer for commits you haven't pushed, with Undo; drag a commit out as a patch or drop one on a pane to apply it; restore a lost commit from the reflog; stage just the lines you select.
Apple Intelligence reads what you've staged and points out a likely bug, a missing test or a change that doesn't match the message — before it goes in.
Pull, push and sync in one click, with password prompts in the embedded terminal; switch branch and bring your changes or leave them for later; new branches named from a description or your changes; Clean Up for merged and deleted branches; stashes — all with Undo.
When a merge, rebase or stash stops, each conflict side by side with Keep Current, Incoming or Both, suggestions where the rules are sure, and Explain Conflict to hear what each side changed — then Continue, Skip or Abort.
The next version worked out from the commits, tagged with the release notes, plus an optional CHANGELOG.md entry, pushed tag and GitHub release.
Three more Function Keys layouts — Developer, Media and Remote & Cloud — put Git Assistant, the embedded terminal, Media Info, Undo Last Operation and cloud providers on F1–F12, and any of those on a single key.
Side by side
Every feature, grouped the way the app itself is, plus the sandbox permissions Pro needs that the App Store app simply doesn't request. Each panel opens expanded — click the yellow dot to collapse a section or the green dot to expand it, just like minimizing and maximizing a window.
means partly included. Hover or tap the symbol to see what is free and what needs the trial or the unlock. included, – not included.
| Feature | Free | Trial or unlock | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two panes — Source & Destination, Flip and Swap | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Folder tabs | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Favourites sidebar | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Copy, Move & Transfers queue | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Folder Compare — compare two folders, then keep what you want Apple Intelligence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| File Comparator — text and binary files side by side Apple Intelligence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Find — wildcard, content & regex Apple Intelligence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Archives browsed like folders (zip, tar) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save File List to CSV | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Preview window & Large File Viewer Apple Intelligence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Git branch, status & diff | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ten built-in themes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tools — Base64, URL/HTML, OCR, JSON/XML, QR, cron | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shortcuts.app actions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Default editor — choose the app Edit (F4) uses, for all files or per file kind | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Function Keys — five layouts for F1–F12, or any command on any key | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Markdown preview — formatted, with working links and local images | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Find results saved as a CSV or a linked Markdown list | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Copy Path — the selection's full paths, or the pane's folder | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open in Terminal.app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| iCloud Drive — Go menu shortcut & Download Now | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| The Shelf — stage files anywhere, then Copy/Move at once | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Docked Shelf — beside the panes in the main window, detach and dock again | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tools menu beside each pane — the tools for that pane's selection or folder | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk Convert — images, PDF, video & audio Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Copy Template — copy while leaving out saved name patterns Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Permissions & Finder tags | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Windows disks — NTFS & read-only volumes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Danger-Zone Guards — protected paths & large-bulk-job confirmation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Preflight — free space, collisions, names, sizes & metadata checked before every copy or move Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sidecar awareness — companion files offered on copy/move and renamed to match PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Save as Administrator — edit system files such as /etc/hosts and sudoers through the macOS password prompt PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Folder sizes & computed columns — EXIF, media, PDF pages, checksum & days since opened, all sortable | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Media Info (technical file details, a table for several files, Summarise with Apple Intelligence) Apple Intelligence | ◐ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ask This Folder — questions answered from a folder's documents, linked to the passage (macOS 27) Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ask These Documents — questions about the PDFs and text files in a pane, matched by their dates and amounts Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| What Changed? — plain-language changelog in File Comparator, Version History & Compare Folders Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Summaries in Preview — two lines, key dates & names above documents Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Explain This Folder — what a folder is, from its listing Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Describe fields — Bulk Convert, Preflight, Compare & Copy Template filled in from your words Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Do… command bar — one line opens the right window, filled in Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Disk analysis — break down a whole disk, not just a folder Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git Assistant — commits, branches, sync, conflicts, releases, pull requests & Ask Git Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git Assistant: Split into Commits — mixed work as focused commits, each message written for you Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git Assistant: branches, stashes & sync — pull, push and switch without losing changes; Clean Up Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git Assistant: merge conflicts — side by side, with suggestions and Explain Conflict Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git Assistant: Tag Release — the next version, release notes, CHANGELOG and GitHub release Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git: any version beside your folder — a commit, tag or branch in the other pane, without checking it out PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git: tidy unpushed commits — Fixup, Reword and reorder, with Undo PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Git Assistant: review before you commit — comment on the staged diff Apple Intelligence PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Function Keys — Developer, Media and Remote & Cloud layouts PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Natural-language Find & Rename — describe it, Apple Intelligence fills in the form (macOS 26) Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Size bars — each item's share of the folder, in the Size column | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Paste as File — clipboard image, link or text saved as PNG, .webloc, .txt or .md | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Copy, Cut and Paste files — ⌘C, ⌘X, ⌘V and Move Item Here between panes, Finder and other apps, plus Duplicate | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Contact Sheet — photo & video thumbnails with names, as a PDF | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Media Show — flip through photos, video and audio with zoom, info and Shelf | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Folder analysis — a sunburst breakdown of where the space goes, with size and kind filters and optional Move to Trash and Add to Shelf Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Quick Edit — a small editor for text and code, with colour, Markdown and HTML preview, encodings, and the previous version kept Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Explain Log — warnings and errors grouped and explained, for logs of any size Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Validate on Save — sudoers, sshd, nginx, plist, launchd, cron and systemd files checked before saving, with lock-out warnings and permission notices | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Permissions and owner bar — mode, owner and group of the open file, changed with a click and applied on save, with a warning first | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hex view — a file's bytes as offset, hex and ASCII, edited in place, with search by bytes and a structure panel for certificates, plists and PNGs Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Certificate and PEM decoding — subject, issuer, expiry and fingerprints of a .pem, .crt, .cer or .der in Preview, with Check for Problems and Format | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Secret masking — passwords, tokens and private keys underlined in the editor, and Copy with Secrets Masked for pasting into tickets | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Snippets and decoder — snippets with Tab-through blanks, decode and encode of JWT, Base64, URL, HTML entities, Unicode escapes and hex in place, and a date on hover for Unix timestamps | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Colour swatches — a swatch after #hex, rgb(), hsl(), CSS and SwiftUI colours in the editor, with the system colour panel to change them in the same notation | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| JSON, YAML and TOML tools — a JSONPath or jq-style query bar, Sort Keys, conversion between the three formats and a collapsible tree in Preview | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multiple cursors, folding and Go to Symbol — several cursors (⌘D, ⌥-drag), code folding, and Go to Line and Go to Symbol in the built-in editor | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sort Into Folders — Apple Intelligence proposes folders for a messy folder; edit the plan as a tree, then sort and undo in one step Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shelf in the menu bar — a menu bar icon you can drop files on, with sizes, preview and Move to Trash | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Version History — compare auto-saved versions in File Comparator Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bringing windows forward — choosing an open window again brings it to the front | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Help buttons — a question mark on each window and sheet opens Help on its topic | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Languages — English (US, UK, Australia, Canada), French, Spanish, German, Greek, Bulgarian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| What's New — each release's new features, improvements & fixes, in the app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Drag files out of a pane (to Finder, the other pane, or the Shelf) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Finder Sync & Share extensions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| In-app updates — Install Update replaces the app and relaunches (the App Store edition updates through the App Store) PRO | – | – | ✓ |
means partly included. Hover or tap the symbol to see what is free and what needs the trial or the unlock. included, – not included.
| Feature | Free | Trial or unlock | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain FTP | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| SFTP (password or private-key auth) | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| WebDAV | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Amazon S3 & S3-compatible (MinIO, B2, Spaces) | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dropbox | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| iCloud Photos PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Sync Browsing — local folders | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sync Browsing — with WebDAV, S3 or Dropbox | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk Delete & Rename — local & plain FTP Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk Delete & Rename — WebDAV, S3 or Dropbox Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk Copy & Move — local & plain FTP Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk Copy & Move — WebDAV, S3 or Dropbox Apple Intelligence | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk Delete, Copy & Move — iCloud Photos (no Bulk Rename) PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Add to Shelf — local & plain FTP | ◐ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Add to Shelf — WebDAV, S3 or Dropbox | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Add to Shelf — iCloud Photos PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Feature | Free | Trial or unlock | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Embedded Terminal (in-pane shell) PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Finder Get Info PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Finder Comments column (read/write) PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Pack into 7-Zip (.7z) PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Open & extract 7-Zip and RAR archives PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Undoing a completed Copy, Move, Delete or Bulk operation PRO | – | – | ✓ |
| Snapshot-based file restore PRO | – | – | ✓ |
This is the part that isn't really a feature list — it's the actual entitlements each build asks macOS for, straight from each target's .entitlements file.
| Capability | maXfolders — every state | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| App Sandbox | Enabled — required for Mac App Store distribution | Disabled entirely |
| File system access | User-selected files/folders plus Downloads, held as security-scoped bookmarks | Unrestricted — any file or folder, no per-item permission prompts |
| Network access | Outbound client only (network.client) — used for the like and feedback buttons, and for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 and Dropbox while the trial or the unlock is active |
Unrestricted — no sandbox network rules apply |
| Automation (Apple Events) | Not requested | Requested — lets Finder integration ask Finder itself for Get Info and Comments |
| Child processes | A sandboxed shell can't reach outside its own container | Unrestricted — powers the embedded terminal, the bundled 7-Zip/unrar tools, and the tmutil snapshots behind snapshot restore |
| Distribution | Reviewed and distributed through the Mac App Store | Notarized directly by Apple, downloaded from this site |
If you just want a good file manager, maXfolders is free and stays that way. If you edit text and code, rename in bulk, or use FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 or Dropbox, the one-time unlock keeps all of that. If the embedded terminal, the Git Assistant or iCloud Photos are part of your workflow, maXfolders Pro is built for that — and it comes with the same purchase.
