ShrinkIt Alternative for Mac: When a Video Squeezer Is Not Enough

Three situations where ShrinkIt is the better pick and paying us $29 would be wasted money.

Your whole problem is video, and you want it cheap. ShrinkIt is free to download and Pro is $14.99 on the Mac App Store. If you shrink MP4, M4V and MOV clips and nothing else, that is half our price for the job you actually have, and you can start without paying anything. Batches are a Pro feature, so a folder of clips needs Pro or a pass.

You only need it once. The listing shows a $0.99 one-day pass and a $2.99 thirty-day pass. If you have a single pile of clips to deal with this month, the pass is a better deal than any one-time license, including ours.

You want to see the result first. ShrinkIt’s website describes a slider that switches between the original and the compressed video. Smol has no such slider. ShrinkIt also lists exact file sizes for Email and Discord as a Pro feature, which is handy when the limit is the point. Smol sets video quality by labels or CRF, not by a byte count.

For video-only work on a recent Mac, yes, and you can find out for free.

The Mac App Store listing shows ShrinkIt as free with in-app purchases: Pro at $14.99, a one-day pass at $0.99 and a thirty-day pass at $2.99. It needs macOS 14.0 or later, weighs 1.9 MB, and the current version was 3.0.1 on 14 October 2026, with 3.0.0 listed a few days earlier. The listing says it supports .mov, .mp4 and .m4v, never makes a file bigger than the original, and compresses with hardware acceleration on Apple silicon. Its site adds that it keeps metadata.

The site claims over 50,000 users, and the App Store page shows no overall rating yet because there are not enough ratings.

What it does not cover is anything that is not a video. If the same folder holds screenshots, PDFs and voice memos, you need a second tool, and that is where a single app starts to earn its price.

It does not touch images, PDFs or audio files, and its listed video formats stop at MP4, M4V and MOV.

Nothing on its pages mentions MKV, WebM or AVI input, so screen recordings from OBS in MKV or web-ready WebM clips are outside what it advertises. Output follows the input format by default, and changing it is listed under Pro.

Smol takes MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM and AVI in, and writes MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, with H.265 by default or H.264, and an exact CRF control for people who want it. If you are still deciding between the two codecs, H.265 vs H.264 explains the tradeoff, and how to compress video on a Mac walks through the settings. The same Smol also compresses images, PDFs and audio from the same window.

One caution about metadata. ShrinkIt says it keeps it, which is the right default if you want your dates and camera tags to survive. If you are sharing a clip and want the location tags gone, Smol has a separate strip-metadata operation. Photo privacy before sharing covers why that matters.

Both have one, and ShrinkIt’s is the more cautious design.

ShrinkIt’s watch folder compresses new videos, saves them to a destination you pick, and then deletes or moves the originals. Its listing also says it never makes a file bigger than the original, which is exactly the property you want in an unattended job. The folder watching is listed as a Pro feature on the App Store.

Smol’s watched folders each carry their own preset and write a copy beside the original by default. We have a known defect: they can make files that are already optimized larger, so we only recommend them for fresh, unoptimized material such as screen recordings or camera exports. The details are in our watched folders guide. For one-off batches, drag a whole folder in and read batch compressing videos on Mac.

Install Smol, drag your video files or a whole folder in, and pick a quality.

Smol writes a copy next to each original with a _compressed suffix by default, so nothing is overwritten. The default video setting is H.265 at the “High” label, which is CRF 24; “Web” is CRF 28. You can also reduce resolution or remove the audio track. There is no import of ShrinkIt’s settings, so recreate any preset by hand. If the target is a specific upload limit, our guides for email and Discord show the settings to try, because Smol has no byte-count target for video.

Smol is a one-time $29 purchase for one Mac. There is no trial and all sales are final, so check the formats and the macOS requirement first. Other options in the same space are compared in HandBrake alternatives and Compresto alternatives.