tokn.watch vs ClaudeUsageBar: which Claude usage tracker belongs in your menu bar?

Both put your Claude usage limits in the macOS menu bar, both are free, and both keep your session on your own Mac. The deciding difference is scope. ClaudeUsageBar is Claude-only and open source. tokn.watch adds consumer ChatGPT next to Claude in the same menu bar item.

The 30-second verdict

We write the comparison pages on this site ourselves, which is a good reason to be suspicious of them. So here is the summary up front, including the parts that do not favour us.

Two rows in that table decide it for most people: ChatGPT and open source. If you need the first, there is one answer. If you need the second, there is a different one. Everything below is detail.

What ClaudeUsageBar does well

ClaudeUsageBar is a genuinely good piece of work and it deserves the ranking it has. It is a small, focused app that does one thing carefully: it shows how much Claude you have left, with reset times, a status indicator, and a last-updated timestamp, and it opens with a keyboard shortcut from anywhere.

Three things stand out.

It is open source, under an MIT license. For a category of app that has to hold your Claude session in order to work at all, that matters more than it would elsewhere. You can read exactly what it does with your cookie instead of taking a privacy page on faith. That is a real advantage and it is not one we can match.

It goes deeper on Claude than we do. It reports the 5-hour session window, the weekly window, weekly Fable usage, and your extra usage allowance. We cover the session and weekly windows and the reset countdowns for each, but we removed extra-usage tracking from tokn.watch in May 2026 and have not brought it back. If watching a paid extra-usage balance is part of your routine, ClaudeUsageBar covers it and we do not.

It installs through Homebrew. brew tap Artzainnn/tap && brew install --cask claudeusagebar is a nicer story than any download page if you already manage your Mac that way.

What tokn.watch does differently

The reason tokn.watch exists is the row in that table that says ChatGPT. Nearly every macOS usage tracker in this category, ClaudeUsageBar included, tracks Claude only. If you pay for Claude and ChatGPT, that leaves you either running two menu bar apps or only watching half your problem.

tokn.watch shows both providers in one menu bar item, each with its remaining percentage and its reset countdown. There is a distinction worth being precise about: some trackers that advertise ChatGPT support are tracking Codex limits on a ChatGPT plan, which is what ClaudeUsageBar's companion app CodexUsageBar does. That is not the same as your consumer ChatGPT allowance, which is what most people run out of. tokn.watch tracks the consumer side.

Two smaller differences are worth mentioning because they show up on day one rather than in a feature list.

Getting connected

ClaudeUsageBar authenticates the way most apps in this category do: you open claude.ai, open your browser's developer tools, find a request, copy the whole cookie header, and paste it into the app. It works, and if you are comfortable in developer tools it takes a minute. It is also the step where most people give up, and it is a genuinely odd thing to ask someone to do with a credential.

tokn.watch opens a sign-in window inside the app and you log in to Claude normally. The paste-a-cookie route is still there behind a "having trouble signing in" toggle, because sometimes it is the thing that works. It is just no longer the first thing you are asked to do. If you want the detail, the homepage has a walkthrough at how to connect tokn.watch to Claude.

First launch

tokn.watch is on the Mac App Store, so installing it is the ordinary Mac install and the first launch is uneventful. The direct download is signed and notarized with Apple, which means no security warning and no trip into System Settings to allow it. ClaudeUsageBar ships as a download from its releases page or through Homebrew, and its documentation does not state a notarization status, so your first launch may or may not involve a Gatekeeper prompt depending on how the build was prepared.

This is a small thing for anyone who installs unsigned software regularly. It is not a small thing for everyone else.

Where ClaudeUsageBar is genuinely the better choice

Comparison pages written by one of the two products usually bury this section. It is the most useful part, so here it is in full.

• You only use Claude. The dual-provider argument is the main reason to choose us, and it is worth nothing to you. Two apps that both track Claude well, and one of them you can read the source of.
• You want to audit the code. We can tell you that your credentials stay on your Mac and that there is no tokn.watch server involved. We cannot let you confirm it line by line. ClaudeUsageBar can.
• You track extra usage. We do not report it. ClaudeUsageBar does.
• You are on macOS 12. We require macOS 13 or later. ClaudeUsageBar goes back one version further, which decides it if you are on older hardware.
• You install everything through Homebrew. ClaudeUsageBar has a cask.

What the two have in common

More than the differences, in fairness. Both are free. Both are menu bar apps rather than dashboards you have to remember to open, which is the whole point of the category: the number is useful when it is in front of you before you hit the wall, and close to useless when you have to go looking for it.

Both also keep your session credentials on your own machine and connect straight to the provider, with no third-party server relaying your usage. And both read the same usage information the Claude web app itself reads, through endpoints Anthropic does not publish as a documented public API. ClaudeUsageBar says this plainly in its README, and it is equally true of us. Neither app is affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic, and if those responses change, both will need updating. That is the honest shared risk of every tool in this category.

For context on what the underlying limits actually are, Anthropic documents them in About Claude Pro usage and About Claude Max. We also cover the mechanics in more depth in our guide to how Claude's usage limits work.

So which one should you install?

If you have read this far you probably already know, but to state it plainly:

1. Claude only, and you value open source: ClaudeUsageBar. It is the better fit and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
2. Claude and ChatGPT: tokn.watch, because one menu bar item beats two.
3. Not sure yet: install both for a week. They cost nothing and they do not conflict. You will find out quickly which number you actually look at.

If you are still weighing up the wider field rather than just these two, we keep a broader roundup of the best Mac menu bar apps for tracking AI usage, which covers the paid multi-provider options as well.