macOS still does not have a native "keep on top" toggle in 2026. The good news: several methods actually work, and picking the right one depends entirely on what you want to pin. Here is every path that works today, native workarounds, third-party utilities, and when to use each.
People ask this every year: Apple ships Picture-in-Picture for video, ships Slide Over on iPad, and even added window tiling to macOS Sequoia, but a generic "keep this window on top" toggle for any Mac app has never shipped. There is no keyboard shortcut, no Mission Control toggle, no menu-bar switch.
Third-party apps step in with two approaches: (a) pin a window you already have open, or (b) spawn a small floating window from a URL or built-in mini app. Both approaches work; picking the right one depends on what you want to keep visible.
If the thing you want to pin is a video, YouTube, a Zoom call, a Twitch stream, Picture-in-Picture is built in and works today, no third-party app required.
Limits. PiP is video-only. It cannot pin a chat window, a docs page, a form, a text editor, a recipe page, or a music player without a video element.
If the thing you want to pin is a window you already have open, a Zoom call, a Preview.app PDF, a Notion desktop client, a specific Finder window, a general-purpose pinning tool like Floaty is the right fit.
Floaty adds a menu-bar icon; select any open window and toggle its always-on-top state. It also adds per-window transparency and click-through, both useful when you want the pinned window to fade into the background but still be visible.
Limits. Floaty pins windows that already exist. It does not create new floating windows from a URL, and it does not ship built-in mini apps like a floating calculator or pomodoro.
If the thing you want to pin is a web app (ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify Web Player, YouTube, a Notion doc, a Slack thread) or one of six built-in mini apps (calculator, notes, to-do, pomodoro, color picker, password generator), TopShelf is what you want. TopShelf lives in the menu bar; click, paste a URL or pick a mini app, and get a small floating window that stays above every other window even across Spaces and full-screen mode.
The distinguishing move is that TopShelf spawns the window; you do not need a browser tab already open, and installing a Chrome extension is not required. It also does pin ChatGPT next to code, float Apple Music web, pin recipes while cooking, and much more.
Limits. TopShelf pins web versions of apps. For services like Spotify or Slack it works with the web app, not their native Mac client (which macOS does not allow to be forced always-on-top by third parties).
Helium was the classic open-source floating browser for macOS. It shipped translucent windows and click-through in a single small app. It was archived on February 6, 2022 and never updated for modern macOS. Community forks like HeliumLift exist but are also sporadically maintained.
Use it if you specifically need translucent-window and click-through and you are comfortable building a Swift project from source. Otherwise pick a maintained option.
MenubarX takes a different approach: instead of always-on-top by default, it puts a full browser inside your menu bar with ad blocking, iCloud-synced bookmarks, and user-agent switching. Detach any tab and it becomes a floating window.
Use it if you want a menu-bar browser as your main surface and always-on-top only occasionally. If always-on-top is the whole point, TopShelf or Floaty is a closer fit.
A quick decision tree:
Two long-standing limits are still there, and no third-party tool can fully fix them: