Me Or Them app icon

Free & Open Source · macOS

Is it you,
or is it them?

A precision network monitor that lives quietly in your Mac's menubar — and answers the question every remote worker, gamer, and developer asks a dozen times a day.

Download Free v1.11.6 View Source

macOS 14 Sonoma or later  ·  Apple Silicon & Intel

All good
Unstable
Critical
Me Or Them dropdown menu showing latency and packet loss stats

Features

Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.

Me Or Them sits in your menubar and silently watches your network so you don't have to. When something goes wrong, you'll know in seconds — and exactly why.

📡

Real-Time Latency

Pings multiple custom targets simultaneously and displays average latency with a quality rating — Excellent, Fair, or Poor — updated on your chosen interval.

📉

Packet Loss & Jitter

Tracks packet loss percentage and jitter across all targets. Colour-coded thresholds tell you at a glance whether your connection is degrading before you even feel it. Optionally display current average latency as a number directly in the menubar — instant signal without opening the menu.

📶

Deep WiFi Diagnostics

See SSID, BSSID, RSSI, SNR, channel, band, PHY mode, Tx rate, IP address, and router — without ever requesting Location permissions. Uses CoreWLAN with SCDynamicStore fallback for reliable SSID detection on all macOS 14+ versions.

⚡

Bandwidth Testing

Kick off a speedtest from the menu with one click. Results and history persist across restarts so you can track how your ISP performs over time.

📊

History Bar Chart

The menubar icon can display a rolling history bar chart of your last five status readings — so you know whether a blip is a trend before you open the menu.

📄

Export Reports

Generate a full ping and WiFi history report as a beautifully formatted PDF, CSV, or JSON with one click — ready to send to your ISP, IT support, or your own analytics pipeline. Opt in to automatic daily log rotation and summaries are written silently to ~/Library/Logs/MeOrThem/ in the background.

🔍

Smart Fault Isolation

Me Or Them pings your router alongside external targets. When something breaks, it tells you whether the fault is local (WiFi/router) or upstream (ISP/internet outage) — not just that something is wrong.

📈

Per-Target Sparklines

Each target row in the menu shows a tiny inline sparkline of recent latency — so you can spot a trend before it becomes a problem, without opening a separate report window.

🧠

Intelligent Alerting

Status turns yellow only after two consecutive bad polls — and red after three. Single-poll blips are ignored. When the network is genuinely degraded, polling frequency doubles automatically to give you faster resolution data.

Performance

Obsessively light.

Every byte of memory and every CPU cycle was treated as a resource worth fighting over. Me Or Them was engineered to be invisible — not just in the UI, but in Activity Monitor too.

<1%
CPU usage
Average idle overhead between polls
~50MB
Memory footprint
Stable under continuous monitoring
105/105
Tests passing
Every release must pass all 105 unit tests
0px
Dock presence
Lives entirely in the menubar — no Dock icon

How It Works

Smarter than a single ping.

Me Or Them uses multi-poll hysteresis, smart adaptive polling rates, and gateway fault isolation to give you signal — not noise.

🔄

Hysteresis — No False Alarms

A single bad poll never changes the icon. The status turns yellow after 2 consecutive degraded readings, and red after 3. Resets to green the moment a good poll arrives. Your momentary download spike won't panic the icon.

🗺️

Fault Isolation — Me or Them?

Each tick includes a gateway ping. If your router is unreachable it reports "local network / router". If the gateway is fine but all external targets fail, it reports "ISP / internet outage". The gateway appears as a visible target in the menu — with its own sparkline and latency.

📊

Bandwidth Quality Bar

When a bandwidth test completes, a thin colored bar appears beneath the status circle in the menu bar. Green means fast (>25 Mbps), yellow means limited (<25 Mbps), red means slow (<10 Mbps). Thresholds are configurable in Settings. Invisible until data is available.

Security

You can trust what you can't see.

Me Or Them was audited end-to-end for the OWASP top 10 and beyond. Every line that touches external data was written with a paranoid eye.

  • ✓

    No Shell Injection

    All subprocess calls use argument arrays — never string interpolation. Shell metacharacters can't reach your system.

  • ✓

    Input Validation via inet_pton

    IP addresses are validated with inet_pton; hostnames pass a strict shell-character whitelist before any process is spawned.

  • ✓

    Binary Integrity Verification

    External binaries (speedtest) are verified before execution. Tampered or substituted binaries are rejected outright.

  • ✓

    No Location Permissions

    WiFi details — including SSID, channel, and BSSID — are obtained via CoreWLAN and SCDynamicStore APIs, avoiding the Location permission entirely.

  • ✓

    Hardened Against Null Crashes

    Every network interface pointer is nil-guarded before dereference. A malformed system interface list won't take the app down.

  • ✓

    Open Source & Auditable

    Every line of code is publicly available on GitHub. No telemetry. No analytics. No network calls you didn't initiate.

Built-in ELI5 Help

What does it all mean?

Every metric in Me Or Them has a built-in plain-English explanation. Tap Help from the menu to open a full guide.

📶
Latency

Like shouting and timing the echo. Low is great; >100ms consistently is a problem.

〰️
Jitter

How consistent the latency is. Wild swings cause choppy calls even if the average looks fine.

📦
Packet Loss

Data that vanishes in transit. Even 1% causes visible glitches in calls and lag spikes in games.

🔴
The Colored Circle

Green = all good. Orange = degraded. Red = outage. Only changes after 2–3 consecutive bad readings.

Christian Nilsson, creator of Me Or Them

The Story

Why "Me or Them"?

I work remotely — and like anyone who depends on a stable internet connection to earn a living, I found myself staring at a spinning cursor asking the same question over and over: is this my connection, or is it the service I'm trying to reach?

The apps that existed were either too heavy, too expensive, too complicated, or required me to hand over permissions I wasn't comfortable granting. I wanted something that would sit silently in my menubar, cost me nothing in CPU or memory, and give me an honest, instant answer.

So I built it. Me Or Them is the name because that's the only question it exists to answer — and it answers it better than anything else I've found. I'm making it open source because the tools that help people should be transparent, free, and auditable by anyone.

— Christian Nilsson

In Action

See everything. At a glance.

Main dropdown showing latency, packet loss, and jitter

Instant Overview

Latency, packet loss, and jitter for all your targets — plus a countdown to the next poll — in a single clean menu.

WiFi details submenu

Deep WiFi Diagnostics

Every WiFi parameter your router knows about, surfaced without requesting a single macOS permission beyond what's needed to run.

History at a Glance

The optional bar chart icon shows your last five status readings directly in the menubar — no click required.

Unmistakable Alerts

When your network hits critical thresholds, the icon turns red — visible even when you're deep in another window.

Download

Free. Open source.
Yours to keep.

Download the ready-to-run .dmg, or clone the source and build it yourself. Either way, it's completely free — forever.

Current version: v1.11.6  ·  Check GitHub releases to see if you have the latest.

Download Free v1.11.6 View on GitHub

macOS 14 Sonoma or later required  ·  Apple Silicon & Intel supported
First launch: right-click → Open to bypass Gatekeeper (app is not notarised — source is open for your inspection)