Permute Alternative for Mac: An Honest Comparison With Smol

Is Permute the better choice? For many Mac users it clearly is, and these are the cases.

Your budget is $15, not $29. Permute costs half as much, the direct download is the full app with a trial, and a licence covers up to three activations on your own Macs. Smol is $29 for one Mac with no trial. If price or “let me try it first” decides it, Permute wins without a contest.

You edit media, not just convert it. Visual trimming, precision cropping, stitching clips, splitting by EDL or CUE, adding subtitle tracks, swapping audio tracks, changing speed and volume. Smol does none of this. It compresses, converts, strips metadata and upscales.

You need text out of media. Permute’s Transcribe preset uses on-device AI to turn audio into text or SRT subtitles, and it runs OCR on images. Smol has no equivalent.

You need every page of a PDF as an image. Permute exports PDF pages as images. Smol converts only the first page, and our PDF to JPG guide covers that limit.

You already use Downie or Setapp. Permute and Downie cost $26.99 as a bundle, and Permute is available through a Setapp subscription. If that is your setup, adding Smol only makes sense for the compression work Permute does not list.

Only on macOS 26 or later, on Apple Silicon. Permute’s page says “macOS 26+ required” and “Apple Silicon required,” and the Mac App Store listing adds “a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.”

Charlie Monroe handles older Macs well. Permute 3 is still sold for macOS 11 through 15 and Intel Macs at the same $14.99, with a free upgrade to Permute 4 when you move to macOS 26, and the page says that offer does not expire. So an older Mac is not locked out of Permute, it just gets the previous generation.

Smol’s floor is macOS 13 on Apple Silicon and macOS 14 on Intel. If you are on Ventura or Sonoma and want the current release of whatever you buy, that difference matters. If you are on macOS 26 with an M-series Mac, it does not.

A converter first, and that is the clearest way to choose between the two apps. Permute’s own help page on video quality describes a “Triangle of Balance” between speed, size and quality, and handles it with presets such as “Small File” and “High Quality” plus an Automatic Setup section. For advanced users there is an Advanced Custom preset that passes raw FFmpeg commands. It also offers a target output file size, which is a genuinely useful control we will not pretend is unique to us.

Smol is a compressor first. Compression comes with explicit controls: image quality from 0 to 100, five PDF presets, video CRF from 0 to 63 with nine encoder speed presets, and audio from 16 to 512 kbps. Video defaults to H.265, and if the relationship between CRF and preset has ever confused you, our video compression guide measures it.

One technical note from Permute’s own help pages is worth knowing before you buy either. The FFmpeg bundled with Permute is an LGPL build that, in their words, “does not contain some encoders by default”; they offer a free GPL build, or you can point Permute at your own Homebrew FFmpeg. The page does not list which encoders are missing, so if a specific codec matters to you, check it during the trial.

Data files and fonts are where the lists stop overlapping. Smol converts tables between CSV, TSV, JSON, NDJSON, HTML, Markdown and XLSX, and fonts between TTF, WOFF and WOFF2. Permute’s product page lists none of that. The full list is in every format a Mac file converter should handle.

Permute has the better story for people who build Shortcuts. Its automation help page mentions Shortcuts actions, offers Drop Zones for drag-and-drop actions, and documents a permute:// URL scheme you can call from Terminal with open. Smol has none of those three.

Smol has the better story for folders that should look after themselves. Watched folders are built in, each with its own preset, which we walk through in auto-compressing every file dropped in a folder. Permute’s own watch-folder article builds the same thing from three parts: a Shortcuts Quick Action, an Automator folder action, and an AppleScript that calls shortcuts run for each new file. It works. It is also a small project.

The other difference is who does the work. Smol runs an MCP server so Claude Code, Codex and Google Antigravity can run jobs locally. An agent can compress a folder of screenshots or convert a CSV to JSON as ordinary tool calls. Permute’s permute:// links give scripts a way in, but we found no agent integration documented.

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

Plenty of people will end up owning both, and at $14.99 that is not an extravagant idea: Permute for media editing, Smol for compression and documents. If you only want one, try Permute first, since it costs nothing to find out. If you hit the PDF, table or macOS 26 wall, Smol is a one-time $29 purchase for one Mac. For the rest of the field, see our comparisons with Picmal, which sits at Smol’s price with a media focus, and HandBrake, the free option for video.