The tree you expect
Finder’s sidebar is a bookmarks bar. Folders gives you one persistent tree — drives, network shares, every cloud service, tags, recents, favorites — that you expand in place and order yourself.
The closest thing to Windows Explorer you can get on a Mac.
Habits that still work
⌘X to cut. Return to open. Folders first. A path you can click into and edit. A new document created right where you are. Years of muscle memory keep paying off.
Nothing to configure
No panes to arrange, no plugin system, no scripting required to get started. Install it, point it at your disk, and it already looks like a Mac app that knows what you want.
Clean, functional UI
Get everything you’d expect from a file manager, with the most used functions brought to the top.
Comprehensive undo
Undo any file operation including replacements and folder mergers.
Easy navigation
Familiar from other operating systems, the folder tree feels right where it belongs.
Dedicated buttons to duplicate current window and current tab. Expandable Favorites and Home folder
iCloud Drive, Cloud Storage, Recent Files
Color tags & text tags
Star ratings
→ Multiple windows and tabs, with saveable tab sets
→ Convenient access to your Home and iCloud Drive folders
→ All your cloud storage services collected in one place
→ Unique expandable, rearrangeable Favorites
→ Expandable folder symlinks
→ Recent files, color tags, text tags, and star rating in the tree
Four consistently behaving file views:
Table, List, Icons, and Gallery view.
Table View
List View
Icons View
Gallery View
→ Full control over remembered view settings for individual folders
→ “Folders first”, “Folders last”, or file attribute grouping
→ File changes shown in bold
→ Open files with Return key
→ Quick Look preview
→ Play audio and video files directly in Gallery view
→ Text recognition with Live Text in Gallery view
Separate File Info panel
Large preview
Basic image operations, file properties, edit tags, and assign rating
File permissions, EXIF properties
File metadata
→ Built-in preview including audio and video files
→ File details with EXIF and other metadata
→ Set multiple color tags, text tags, star rating
Fast and powerful search
→ Search with Spotlight or with full scan
→ Save Spotlight searches for later reuse
File operations beyond basics
File conflict resolution
Batch rename
Mount network shares
→ Cut / Cut via Trash with ⌘X
→ Edit text files and perform basic operations on images
→ Create an empty (blank) file, an office document, or an automatically typed file from the clipboard contents
→ Powerful Batch Rename
→ Compare file properties on conflicts during copy/move with an explicit option to merge folders
→ Collect files from different locations on the Shelf, then move, copy, or compress all or some of them at once
→ Discover, mount, and re-mount network shares
Customize
Color themes
Change the color of folder icons in the tree
Edit colors and order of category icons in Settings
→ Change the main accent color of the app
→ Rearrange and change the color of the top-level nodes or of all folders in the tree belonging to a specific category
→ Sync your settings between Macs with iCloud
Create, browse, extract, and modify archives
→ Supports zip, 7z, rar (read-only), tar, xz, gz/gzip, zlib, bz2/bzip2, and lz4
→ Display archives in the folder tree
→ Add, extract, or delete individual entries
→ Preview entries without extracting
Language support
Supports localization for English (US, UK), Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portugese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
Universal binary
Written in Swift, runs natively on both Intel and Apple silicon.
Lifetime license
One-time purchase with true lifetime updates, no ads or subscriptions
Try Folders for free with a fully functional 14-days trial period
With every new release, get 3 additional days to evaluate the updates
For the full list of features, see User’s Guide and Version History.
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Light theme, tabs, Table view, changes shown in bold
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Dark theme, Favorites, Table view, file permissions and EXIF metadata in Info panel, Star Rating in the sidebar
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Light theme, tabs, remembered Gallery view, file traits, EXIF metadata in Info panel, Tags in the sidebar
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Dark theme, List view, audio player in Info panel
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Light theme, tabs, Favorites, Search, Table view, video player in Info panel
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Dark theme, Icons view, file traits, context menu showing file operations
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Light theme, tabs, remembered Gallery view, file comparison on copy conflict
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Dark theme, Archive view, preview without extraction, context menu showing file operations
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Light theme, batch rename dialog
What switchers say
This is the closest thing to Windows File Explorer I’ve found. It has the familiar tree view on the left pane and the file/folder pane on the right that acts just like File Explorer. Finally something familiar.
X-Windower — Mac App Store, United States
While I am a Mac user for nearly 40 years, I never got to really like Finder. […] I have been trying several Finder alternatives, none of which solved the issue for me. Finally, I found Folders File Manager! It is by far the best file manager on macOS.
tinuroth — Mac App Store, Switzerland
I never really thought about the structure being presented separately from the content. It makes a lot of sense though and likely why Folders Pro just feels right. Finder just always slightly annoyed me and couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
u/mfr3sh — r/macapps
I had been looking for a decent Explorer alternative for Mac with tabs, a folder tree, proper copy paste support […] for years. I was at the point of confirming such a thing did not exist, in preparation of creating it myself, when I found this well hidden gem.
nulBody — Mac App Store, Bulgaria
I can tell it’s very polished. Every element of it has been carefully thought through. Even something simple, such as holding option, gives you more advanced features — instead of cluttering the right-click menu.
u/Latter_Pen2421 — r/macapps
I’m on the trial right now and will probably buy it. The price is cheap for what it offers.
u/jsgrrchg — r/MacOS
