Compresto Alternatives for Mac: An Honest Head-to-Head

Six situations where Compresto is the right $49 and we would say so to your face.

Your files are mostly video. Compresto grew out of CompressX, a video tool, and the priorities show. You choose H.264 for compatibility or H.265 for size, set a target frame rate, cap the CPU cores, toggle GPU acceleration, or just ask for a finished size in KB, MB or GB and let it find the quality. Smol exposes CRF 0 to 63 and nine speed presets, which is more raw control and less guidance. If you compress a screen recording every day and do not want to think about CRF, buy Compresto.

You want one licence across two Macs. Compresto’s Standard plan is $69 for two devices. We sell one Mac per licence and nothing else, so two Macs means two purchases and two keys. On a desktop-plus-laptop setup that is a genuine ergonomic loss for us, not just a price difference.

You already pay for Setapp. Compresto is in the bundle. If Setapp is already on your card, installing it costs you nothing today, and no argument we can make about AVIF beats free.

You live in Raycast, or you want to trigger compression from another app. Compresto ships a Raycast extension and documents deep links, so a shortcut or a script in some unrelated tool can hand it a file. Smol has no Raycast extension and no URL scheme. Our automation surface is the MCP server, a Finder Quick Action and clipboard compression, which is a different shape and does not help you from inside Raycast.

Disk space is tight. 24.1 MB against 403 MB is not a rounding error, and Compresto beats us on footprint by a wide margin.

You want files named for you. Compresto’s AI renaming runs a local Ollama vision model over the image and writes a descriptive filename, offline. Nobody else in this category has built that, and we have not either.

Compresto sells two one-time plans on compresto.app/pricing: Personal at $49 for one macOS device, and Standard at $69, marked down from $98, for two. Both list the same feature set. The page also carries a toggle for a subscription plan and an educational discount for verified school email addresses, and the app is available through Setapp.

Smol is $29 once for one Mac. That is the entire price list.

Now the part that costs us something. Smol has no downloadable trial. No seven-day build, no limited free mode, no watermarked output to evaluate. You pay $29 and then you find out. Asking for money before anyone has seen the software is a worse deal than it sounds, and we are not going to bury it three sections down.

Compresto is in a similar position on its own site. Its setup guide walks through Welcome, then an installation step that downloads dependencies, then License Activation, which asks for a key and links to the pricing page if you do not have one. No trial step is documented. The exception is Setapp, where the licence comes with the subscription and Setapp’s own trial applies.

Both of the other apps in this bracket do better than either of us here. Zipic gives you a seven-day full Pro trial and then a permanent free tier of 25 images a day. Picmal gives you seven days with every tool unlocked, no card and no account, plus a fourteen-day refund. If “let me try it” is the deciding factor, neither Compresto nor Smol is your answer, and we would rather you knew that now than after a charge.

Compresto’s own FAQ states the format list in one sentence: “Compresto supports the most common media formats: MP4, MOV, and other major video codecs; PNG, JPEG, HEIC, WebP, TIFF, and GIF for images; and standard PDF files.” AVIF does not appear there, on the pricing page, or anywhere in the documentation we read on 26 September 2026. Neither does JPEG XL.

That is a real capability gap, and it is the clearest reason someone otherwise happy with Compresto ends up searching for an alternative. How much it matters depends on where the output goes. If your images go into a website and you care about Largest Contentful Paint, AVIF is supported in every current browser and is usually the smallest lossy option on photographic content. If they go into Slack, an email, or a client’s CMS from 2014, WebP or JPEG is the answer and AVIF is a liability.

A measurement, because a format list is only an assertion. We took a file that exists on every Mac running this OS, /System/Library/Desktop Pictures/Mac Blue.heic, which is 9,282,587 bytes at 6016 × 6016 pixels. We compressed it three times through Smol’s MCP server with identical settings: image quality 75, resized to fit 2000 × 2000, metadata stripped. All three outputs came back at exactly 2000 × 2000. Machine: Apple M2 Pro, 16 GB, macOS 27.0 (build 26A428), Smol 1.0.34.

Read that carefully, because the interesting result is the one that does not flatter us. WebP beat AVIF on this image, by a wide margin, and Compresto writes WebP perfectly well. A smooth blue gradient is close to the ideal case for a WebP encoder and close to the worst case for an AVIF one, so this is a single data point about a single file and not a league table. On photographic content the ordering usually flips.

Which is the actual argument. The reason to want AVIF in the list is not that AVIF always wins. It is that you cannot know which encoder wins on a given image until you try both, and here one of the two is missing. Squoosh is still the best tool anyone has built for watching that trade-off happen.

Because the two apps made opposite decisions about where the encoders live, and both decisions have a cost.

Compresto’s setup documentation is explicit. On first launch the app “will automatically download and install all required dependencies”, and it names them: FFmpeg for video and GIF, Gifski for GIF creation, pngquant for PNG optimization, and Ghostscript for PDF. Those land in the app’s support directory rather than your system, and the step needs an internet connection. Ghostscript gets its own page, because it is the one that trips people up: the PDF guide warns that compression “requires Ghostscript to be installed on your Mac,” and the app will offer to run brew install ghostscript if Homebrew is present.

None of that is a criticism. Ghostscript is excellent, it is what most PDF compressors are quietly built on, and its licensing makes bundling a decision rather than a default. The result is the 24.1 MB download shown on the Setapp listing for version 1.30.1.

Smol went the other way. Everything is inside the bundle, which is why du -sk /Applications/Smol.app returns 412,364 KB on version 1.0.34, roughly 403 MB. You get a PDF compressor that works on a plane with no Homebrew involved, and you pay for it in disk. Anyone who finds 403 MB absurd for a compression utility is entitled to. Pick whichever cost you would rather carry.

This is where the two products stop overlapping, and it is the most useful thing on the page if you are deciding.

Audio. Compresto documents a path called “How to extract MP3 from video,” which pulls the audio track out using libmp3lame at highest-quality VBR, roughly 245 kbps, and it works in batch. What is not documented is dropping an existing WAV, FLAC, M4A or OGG on the app and getting a smaller one back. Smol treats audio as a first-class input: compression to AAC, M4A, MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG and Opus at 16 to 512 kbps and 8 to 192 kHz.

Documents that are not PDFs. Compresto does not attempt them. Smol converts Word, spreadsheets and presentations to PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, HTML, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPTX and ODP, tables to CSV, TSV, JSON, NDJSON, Markdown, XLSX and Numbers, and fonts to TTF, OTF, WOFF and WOFF2. If your pile is a client handover with a PPTX, three spreadsheet exports and a folder of PNGs, that is one app instead of two.

PDF, in both directions. Compresto offers four quality levels its docs map to Best (Prepress), High (Printer), Balance and Low. Smol offers five presets, from tiny to original, which are long-edge pixel caps rather than DPI targets. Going the other way, Smol converts a PDF to PNG or JPG, with a caveat we wrote up in our PDF to JPG guide: it converts the first page only. Compresto puts its PDF-to-image tool on its website rather than in the app.

Video and upscaling. Compresto’s site names MP4 and MOV; Smol writes MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV. Compresto converts video to GIF with custom dimensions, which Smol cannot do at all. Smol runs Real-ESRGAN on-device at 2×, 3× and 4×, which Compresto is not trying to do.

Both apps assume you do not want to open a window every time, and they solve it differently.

Compresto’s folder monitoring is the more mature of the two and we will not pretend otherwise. You add a folder in Settings, give it its own compression settings, and pick whether it watches images, video, or both. Version 1.28 added a settle-time delay, which is the kind of fix that only gets written after somebody drops a 4 GB export into a watched folder and the app starts compressing it mid-write. Around that sits a floating Drop Zone, a Raycast extension and documented deep links. Smol has none of those three.

What Smol has instead is watched folders with per-folder presets, a Finder Quick Action that reported installed: true on our test machine, system-wide clipboard compression, and an MCP server. The MCP server will either mean nothing to you or be the whole reason: it exposes 28 tools to an AI coding agent, from compression and upscaling through preset and watched-folder management to job polling and cancellation, and it installs in one click for Claude Code, Codex and Google Antigravity. Every measurement on this page was produced by driving it that way.

Compresto’s answer for developers is different and, for some jobs, better: a hosted REST API at /v1/compress that accepts a file upload, a URL or base64, plus a /v1/usage endpoint, with a free tier of 500 compressions a month and a 10 MB file cap. That runs on their servers, not your Mac. If you want compression inside a CI job on Linux, an API is the correct shape and a macOS app is not.

Read down the left column and stop at the first row that describes you.

The last row is the honest one. If you will not buy unsighted, start with Zipic, which has a permanent free tier, or Picmal, which gives you seven days with everything unlocked. For the free end of the category, ImageOptim alternatives covers the open-source lossless route and where it stops being enough.

Smol is a one-time $29 purchase covering one Mac, with no subscription and no per-file limits.