Picmal Alternatives: Two $29 Mac Apps, Compared Honestly

More often than we would like, honestly. Five cases where Picmal is the $29 to spend.

You want to try it first. Picmal’s FAQ is unambiguous: “Download the app and press Try free: 7 days with every tool, on that Mac, no card and no account.” Then a fourteen-day refund on top. Smol has no trial build at all, and our terms state that all sales are final. If “let me see it before I pay” is a requirement rather than a preference, this section ends here.

Your formats are exotic. Picmal lists 64 image input formats by name, including PSD, AI, XCF, ORA, DCM, JP2, QOI, and more than thirty RAW types from CR3 to IIQ. It writes 45, including JPEG XL, SVG, PSD, PSB, HDR, DPX and FITS. Smol reads RAW and writes nine image formats. If your pipeline involves a PSD going to WebP or a DNG going to JXL, Picmal has the encoder and we do not.

The job is really an editing job. Background removal onto a transparent PNG using on-device Vision, tracing a logo to real SVG paths, auto-trimming margins, stamping a watermark over a video, building an icon set from one image, splitting an audiobook by chapter, stitching clips together. Smol does none of that. It compresses, converts, strips metadata and upscales. Picmal is a wider tool.

Your PDFs need pages moved around. Picmal merges, splits by page range, reorders by dragging, builds a PDF from a folder of photos, and has a burst mode its own page describes as “Turn a PDF into one file per page, numbered in order, in a single pass.” Smol compresses PDFs with five presets and converts one to PNG or JPG, and that conversion covers the first page only. We have written about that limitation and the Automator workaround in our PDF to JPG guide. On PDF structure Picmal wins outright.

You need more than one Mac. Picmal sells 1, 2, 5 and 10-Mac licences at $29, $39, $89 and $149, and prices upgrades at the difference with an offer that never expires. Smol sells one Mac, full stop. Two machines means two purchases and two keys, and there is no upgrade path between them.

Only if you are on macOS 15 Sequoia or later. This is the single most practical difference between the two apps and it is worth checking before you read anything else.

Picmal’s buy section says “Needs macOS 15 or later,” and its FAQ expands that to “macOS 15.0 (Sequoia) or later. Runs natively on Apple Silicon and works fine on Intel Macs too. If you’re on an older version, update macOS to install the latest Picmal.” So Intel is fine; the OS floor is the constraint.

Smol ships separate native builds and sets the floor lower: macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or later on 64-bit Intel. That matters for a specific and fairly large group of people: anyone on a 2017 to 2019 Mac that Apple stopped carrying forward, anyone in a managed fleet pinned to an older OS, and anyone who simply has not updated. If you are on Ventura or Sonoma and you are not going to move, Picmal is not an option and the comparison is over.

For everyone else, the OS requirement is noise. It tells you something about the two codebases, though: Picmal is free to use whatever Apple shipped most recently, which is probably part of how one developer ships background removal and Vision-based tracing.

Picmal, by a distance, on media. Smol, by a distance, on documents. The two lists barely overlap at the edges.

Picmal publishes its counts on its own homepage: images 64 input and 45 output, audio 42 input and 8 output, video 31 input and 14 output, with compression supported for 65 image, 35 audio and 23 video formats. The input lists are exhaustive and specific, naming everything from PCD and VICAR to SHN and Bink video. That is not marketing rounding, it is a list of decoders.

Smol’s image outputs are JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, TIFF, BMP, GIF and PDF. Video out is MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV. Audio out is M4A, MP3, WAV, FLAC and OGG on conversion, with AAC and Opus added on compression. Against Picmal’s list that is modest, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

Two places the comparison flips.

Video codecs. Picmal’s FAQ describes compression as “Images, video (H.264), audio (AAC) and PDFs”. H.264 is the safe, universally playable choice and it is a defensible default. Smol defaults to H.265 and exposes CRF from 0 to 63 alongside nine encoder speed presets, which at the same visual quality typically produces a meaningfully smaller file. If you are archiving 4K footage, that difference compounds. If you are emailing a clip to somebody on Windows, H.264 is the right answer and Picmal picked it for you.

Audio bitrate. Picmal compresses audio to AAC. Smol compresses to AAC, M4A, MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG and Opus, with bitrate adjustable from 16 to 512 kbps and sample rate from 8 to 192 kHz. Picmal converts to a wider set of audio containers than we do, so the honest split is that Picmal wins on conversion targets and Smol wins on compression control.

And then documents, which Picmal does not do at all. Smol converts Word to PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT and HTML; spreadsheets to PDF, XLSX, ODS, CSV and HTML; presentations to PDF, PPTX and ODP; tables to CSV, TSV, JSON, NDJSON, Markdown, XLSX and Numbers; and fonts to TTF, OTF, WOFF and WOFF2. If your recurring chore is turning a client’s XLSX into CSV or a TTF into WOFF2, Picmal is the wrong app and no amount of image formats changes that.

Both apps assume you do not want to open a window. They landed on overlapping but different answers.

Picmal’s summary of its own integrations is one line: “Finder, Shortcuts, Raycast, a command line tool, and a clipboard that compresses screenshots as you copy them.” Add watched folders, which it describes as pointing Picmal at a folder so whatever lands there gets converted, compressed, or built into a PDF on its own. That is a complete set for a human driving a Mac.

Smol has the Finder Quick Action, which reported installed: true on this machine, clipboard compression, and watched folders where each folder carries its own preset. We have no Raycast extension, no Shortcuts action and no smol binary, so on three of Picmal’s five surfaces we are simply absent.

Where Smol goes further is the MCP server, and Picmal has no equivalent. It exposes 28 tools to an AI coding agent: compression, conversion, upscaling, metadata stripping, neural compression with an exact KB target, clipboard compression, preset management, watched-folder management, Quick Action install and status, engine lifecycle, and job listing, status and cancellation so the agent can poll and abort long work. It installs with one click for Claude Code, Codex and Google Antigravity.

The distinction is who is holding the mouse. Picmal’s surfaces are excellent if a person is initiating the job. An MCP server is for when nobody is: “compress every PNG in public/ to WebP under 200 KB and rerun the build” becomes a step inside a task the agent already has. A shell CLI gets you part of the way there, and Picmal has one, so this is a difference of degree rather than kind.

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

There is a sensible order of operations here that costs you nothing: install Picmal, use the seven days, and find out whether it covers your work. If it does, that is $29 well spent and we would rather you bought the right tool. If you hit the Office wall, the macOS 15 wall, or the upscaling wall, come back.

For the rest of the bracket, Zipic is the images-only option with a permanent free tier, Compresto is the video-first option at $49, Squoosh is the free browser tool Google stopped maintaining, and ImageOptim alternatives covers the free lossless route. Smol itself is a one-time $29 purchase covering one Mac, with no subscription and no per-file limits.