Keep your Mac awake.

A tiny menu bar utility that prevents sleep on demand — with fine-grained controls your IT team can manage from any MDM.

macOS 14 Sonoma or later

Features

Menu bar first

Lives in your menu bar. No Dock icon, no clutter.

Flexible sleep control

Stay fully awake, keep the system awake while the screen sleeps, or just block the lock screen.

Timed activations

5 minutes to indefinitely — or a hard cap set by policy.

Built on caffeinate

A thin Swift wrapper around the tool Apple ships with macOS. No daemons, no kernel extensions.

Lock indicators

Settings under IT control show a lock icon — users can’t override them.

Managed policy section

The settings window surfaces every active IT constraint clearly.

A look at niacin

Niacin menu bar showing an active session with options to deactivate or open settings. — Active session in the menu bar.

Niacin menu showing duration options from 5 minutes to indefinitely. — Pick a duration — or stay awake indefinitely.

Settings window with toggles for activate on launch, allow screen to sleep, prevent device from locking, and deactivate on user switch. — Settings — toggle behaviour to taste.

Settings window highlighting a Managed by Organisation section listing IT-enforced constraints. — Managed by Organisation — transparent IT policy.

Built for enterprise

Every setting can be locked and enforced by IT through a single managed preferences plist:

/Library/Managed Preferences/com.oldsalt.niacin.plist

Deploy through JAMF, Mosyle, Kandji, Intune, or any MDM that pushes preference domains. Keys present in the managed domain override the user’s preference and lock the corresponding UI control. Keys that are absent stay fully user-controlled.

Read the full MDM documentation →

Get niacin

niacin is open source and available on GitHub. The Mac App Store release is in review.

View source on GitHub →