Floaty vs PipNow: Both Float a Window, They Differ on When It Grows

Floaty is a carefully built floating-window utility for the Mac: free download, Floaty Pro at $9.99 one-time, no subscription.

It sits on the same shelf as PipNow, and the feature lists look similar — both turn any window into something that floats above the rest. So this is not a feature table. It is one question that actually affects your day: what happens when you need to read the details?

Three things both share

Before comparing, three facts worth knowing:

1. Both need Screen Recording permission. These tools do not raise your window — they capture its picture and draw it in their own floating panel. To capture, they need the permission.

2. Both are mirrors, not real windows. What you see is a live copy. The upside is arbitrary resizing, cropping and opacity. The cost is that when the original window is completely covered, macOS may stop rendering it and the copy freezes on the last frame.

3. Neither floats over full-screen apps. A full-screen app owns its Space; the overlay lives in the desktop Space. Floaty’s own documentation says it is not reliable there. The only thing that crosses Spaces is native Picture in Picture, and that only floats video.

All three apply to Floaty, PipNow, and most of this category. They are not anyone’s fault.

Where Floaty is genuinely strong

If you need the following, Floaty is more thorough than most:

• Per-window opacity — a reference you can see through
• Click-through — the pointer goes straight to the app underneath
• Auto-unpin on a timer — pin for 20 minutes and forget it
• Automation — global hotkeys, a Raycast extension, AppleScript
• Multiple windows — Pro pins several at once (free tier is limited)

That is a deep set of overlay controls, and Floaty does it well.

The difference is what happens at “I need to read that”

Say you are coding with a documentation window floating beside you.

With Floaty: the mini window is all you get. To read a paragraph properly you drag it bigger, then drag it back. Or you drop the opacity and squint, or you turn on click-through and go to the real window.

With PipNow: the mini window stays small. Hover it and a near-original-size preview pops out; move away and it retracts. If there is something to click, click it inside the preview — no resizing, no switching back to the original window.

In one sentence:

Floaty lets you control an overlay. PipNow lets you stop controlling it and just glance.

That difference lands differently on two kinds of people:

• If you regularly work inside the mini window (editing code, filling a form, paging through), Floaty’s click-through and manual sizing are genuinely flexible
• If you mostly glance at state (done yet? new message? number moved?), manually resizing every time gets exhausting

Side by side

	Floaty	PipNow
Role	Controllable overlay	Glanceable status window
Default size	You set it	Small, grows on hover
Detail	Resize by hand	Hover preview
Input	Click-through, or click back	Click inside the preview (Pro)
Opacity	Yes (Pro)	Yes (Pro)
Automation	Raycast, AppleScript	⌥⌘P hotkey
Full screen	No	No
Price	Free + $9.99 Pro	Free tier, Pro from $9.9

How to choose

Choose Floaty if you want fine control — opacity, click-through, timed unpinning — or if you prefer deciding the window size yourself rather than having something pop up.

Choose PipNow if you watch many things and resizing by hand annoys you, or if you need to click and type inside the small window without enlarging it.

Being clear about the free tier: PipNow free keeps one mini window, gives you hover preview and shortcuts, but no in-preview interaction, and the size and opacity stay at their defaults. Those two are Pro (one-time, from $9.9).

One more thing

If you only need a window to stop being covered, and you do not need it smaller, neither of these is the best answer — a free pinning app is enough. This article explains why.

And if you do not want to install anything at all, see the four built-in floaters.