Groupy for Mac: why there isn't one, and what to use instead
If you have moved from Windows to a Mac and gone looking for Groupy, you have probably already found the bad news. Here is the whole picture, including the part macOS does give you for free.
Short answer: Groupy is a Stardock product for Windows 10 and 11. There is no Mac version, and none has been announced. macOS has its own window tabs, but only inside a single application — so the thing Groupy is actually for, dragging a browser and a terminal into one tabbed window, needs a third-party tool on a Mac.
What Groupy does on Windows
Groupy's whole idea is one gesture: drag one window onto another and the two become a single window with a tab for each. From then on they move, resize and minimise together, and you switch between them the way you switch browser tabs. It works regardless of which applications the windows came from, which is what makes it useful — a document, a folder and a chat window living in one frame instead of three.
That is a Windows shell feature. It has no macOS equivalent from Stardock, and running Groupy in a Windows virtual machine on your Mac only groups the windows inside that virtual machine. Your Mac applications are invisible to it.
What macOS gives you already
Before reaching for anything third-party, it is worth knowing that macOS has had window tabs since Sierra, and a lot of people never find them.
In an application that supports them, Window > Merge All Windows collapses every open window of that app into one tabbed window. You can set the system-wide preference in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Prefer tabs when opening documents, which controls whether new documents open as tabs automatically.
Two limits decide whether that is enough for you:
- One application at a time. Native tabs group Finder windows with Finder windows. There is no arrangement in which a Safari window and a Terminal window share a tab bar.
- Only apps that opted in. The application has to adopt the system tabbing API. Apple's own document apps do. A great many others — most Electron apps, most terminals, most design tools — do not, and for those the menu item simply is not there.
If your windows are all from one Apple app, macOS already solves this and you need nothing else. If the problem you actually have is five different applications sprawled across a display, native tabs will not touch it.
The three options side by side
| Groupy | macOS native tabs | Tack | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Windows 10/11 | macOS | macOS 13+ |
| Group different apps together | Yes | No | Yes |
| Works with apps that don't support tabs | Yes | No | Yes |
| Drag one window onto another to group | Yes | No | Yes |
| Groups survive a restart | Yes | No | Yes |
| Cost | Paid | Free with macOS | Free 14-day trial, then $39.99 once |
Getting the Groupy gesture on a Mac
Tack is built around the same gesture, because it is the right one: pick up a window by its title bar, drop it onto another window, hold for a moment, and the two become a group with a tab strip above them. There is a picker as well — ⌃⌥⌘G — if you would rather choose windows from a list than drag them.
It groups anything with an ordinary window, whether or not that application ever heard of tabs, because it arranges windows through the macOS Accessibility API instead of asking each application to cooperate. That is also why it asks for Accessibility permission on first launch: moving another application's windows is not possible without it.
Things that are genuinely different from Groupy
Two honest differences, since you are coming from something you already know:
- Tack groups windows, not applications. Grouping one Chrome window does not sweep in your other Chrome windows unless you ask it to.
- The tab strip floats just above the group rather than replacing the windows' own title bars, because on macOS an application owns its title bar — the browsers draw their own tabs there.
Common questions
Is Groupy available for Mac?
No. Stardock builds it for Windows 10 and 11 only, and has not announced a macOS version.
Can I run Groupy on a Mac through Parallels or Boot Camp?
You can run it inside the Windows session, where it will group that session's windows perfectly well. It cannot group your Mac applications — it never sees them.
Does macOS have anything built in?
Yes, within a single app: Window > Merge All Windows, in applications that support it. Across applications, no.
What about Mission Control, Stage Manager, or a tiling window manager?
They solve a neighbouring problem. Mission Control and Stage Manager arrange and reveal windows; tiling managers place them side by side. None of them collapses several windows into one frame with one tab per window, which is the specific thing Groupy does and the specific thing people miss.