Who each one is for
Night Shift is for anyone who wants a warmer screen in the evening with nothing to install and no cost. If you close the laptop a couple of hours before bed and a slightly warmer screen is all you are after, it is hard to beat, because it is already there.
Sundown is for people who use a Mac late, often in a dim room, and find that Night Shift at full strength still looks too white. It sits in the menu bar with a warmth ladder from ordinary daytime white down to a deep red, shows you the exact number you are on, and lets you move it in steps of equal size, or set a schedule by clock time so the screen warms in the evening on its own.
What Night Shift does well
It is free and built in, so there is nothing to download or pay for. You can schedule it from sunset to sunrise, or set a custom schedule, and you can turn it on or off by hand until sunrise or the scheduled time. For a lot of people that is enough, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
How warm each one goes
Apple does not publish a warmth figure for Night Shift. You set it more or less warm, and at its warmest the screen sits at about a warm white. Sundown covers the whole range from a normal daytime white screen down to its warmest, where the screen turns a deep red. The gap between Night Shift's warmest and Sundown's warmest is bigger than it looks on paper: one is a warm white, the other is a deep red.
Sundown works in colour temperature numbers and shows the value you are on, so if you find a setting you like, you can come back to exactly that setting tomorrow. Sundown also dims, so the screen can be warmer and darker at the same time.
Scheduling and presets
Night Shift’s schedule runs from sunset to sunrise, or on a custom schedule you set, and you choose how warm it gets. Sundown gives you warmth presets you pick from the menu bar, any step on the ladder in between, and a schedule you set by clock time. If all you want is “warmer after dark”, Night Shift’s schedule does it. If you want to work in colour temperature numbers and presets, Sundown is built around that.
Price and compatibility
Night Shift is free on macOS Sierra 10.12.4 or later, on Macs from 2012 or later and Mac Pro models from 2013 or later. Sundown costs $4.99 a month or $39 a year, both with a 7-day free trial, or $79 once for a lifetime licence. It runs on macOS 12 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Its latest release, 1.6.1, went out on 21 October 2026. If you try Sundown, turn Night Shift off first, because two apps changing the display colour at once give unpredictable results.
Which should you choose?
Stay with Night Shift if a warm white is enough for you, if you want nothing to install, or if you do not want to pay for anything.
Choose Sundown if you have already turned Night Shift all the way up and want the screen warmer, down to a deep red, or if you want to pick warmth by an exact step.
If you are not sure, the 7-day trial is the cheapest way to find out: turn Night Shift off, run Sundown for an evening, and see which one you prefer. Our guide on how to turn on Night Shift walks through Apple’s settings, the Night Shift alternatives roundup covers other apps, and Sundown vs f.lux compares Sundown with f.lux, the free app for Mac, Windows and Linux.
“this is my favorite app on my entire mac and i’m not even exaggerating. the warm screen at night is so nice.”
What the research says about Night Shift
Two studies are worth knowing about, and neither tested Sundown. In 2019, researchers at Rensselaer’s Lighting Research Center compared Night Shift’s warm and cool settings on an iPad and found that melatonin suppression did not differ significantly between them, which they read as a sign that changing a screen’s colour without changing its brightness may not be enough (Nagare, Plitnick and Figueiro, 2019). In 2021, a BYU study of 167 people aged 18 to 24 found no differences in sleep across the whole sample between using a phone with Night Shift, without it, or not at all (BYU News, 2021).