How to Find Apps Running in the Background on Your Mac

There’s a category of Mac slowness that comes from nothing in particular — no single app misbehaving, just a slow accumulation of background processes you forgot about. Login items. Menu bar utilities. Helpers from apps you uninstalled months ago that somehow didn’t go away.

Finding all of them takes more than checking the Dock.

What “background app” actually means on macOS

A background app on Mac is anything that’s running but not actively in front of you. There are a few flavors:

• Visible background apps. App is open, you’ve switched away from it. Still consuming RAM and possibly CPU.
• Menu bar apps. Live in the top-right menu bar — Dropbox, Slack, Bartender, whatever. No Dock icon, but running.
• Login items. Started automatically when you logged in. Might or might not be visible.
• Helper processes. Spawned by parent apps to do work in the background — updaters, sync clients, indexers.
• LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons. Registered with macOS to start at login or on a schedule. Often the most invisible category.

Each requires a different approach to find.

Step 1: Visible apps in the Dock

Easy starting point. The Dock shows all running apps with a small dot under each icon. Anything with a dot is running.

To force-quit one:

• Right-click the icon → Quit
• Or Cmd+Tab, navigate to the app, Cmd+Q

This handles the obvious. The interesting stuff is below.

Step 2: Menu bar apps

Look at the top-right of your screen. Each icon is an app running in the menu bar. Most have a quit option in their menu — click the icon, look for “Quit AppName” or similar.

If you have so many menu bar icons that they’re getting cut off, that’s a sign you have more background apps than you realized. Apps to look for:

• Sync clients (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud)
• Communication (Slack, Discord, Zoom)
• Utilities (1Password, Alfred, Bartender)
• Music (Spotify, occasionally Apple Music helper)
• Customization tools (Magnet, Rectangle, Karabiner)

Each one is using some RAM and a small amount of CPU. Adds up.

Step 3: Activity Monitor

The full list of running processes lives in Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app).

Switch to the CPU tab and sort by % CPU. Then switch to the Memory tab and sort by Memory. Both views show every running process — including hundreds of system processes you’ve never heard of.

What to look for:

• App helpers you don’t recognize (AppNameHelper, <vendor>Updater, etc.)
• Multiple instances of one app (Chrome’s renderer per tab, for example)
• Old apps you thought you’d uninstalled (orphan helpers from previous installs)

To kill any of these:

1. Select the process
2. Click X in the toolbar
3. Quit if it’s well-behaved, Force Quit if not

Killing a helper that’s tied to a LaunchAgent will only buy you about 10 seconds — it’ll respawn. To stop the cycle, you have to disable the LaunchAgent (more on that below).

There’s a faster waySweep does the same hunt in seconds, with a preview before anything is removed. Try Sweep free →

Step 4: Login items

Open System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. You’ll see two lists:

1. Open at Login — visible apps that auto-start
2. Allow in Background — apps allowed to run extensions or helpers in the background

Both lists are worth reviewing. To disable an item, click the toggle off (for “Allow in Background”) or select it and click the minus button (for “Open at Login”).

A typical Mac that’s a few years old has 10–20 entries here, many of which the user doesn’t remember authorizing. Common surprise entries:

• Old printer drivers
• Auto-updaters from apps you’ve uninstalled
• Cloud sync from services you stopped using
• Helper apps that snuck in with bigger installs

Step 5: LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons

This is the part most cleanup guides skip and the part that actually matters.

A LaunchAgent is a .plist file that tells macOS’s launchd to start a process at login, on a schedule, or in response to events. They live in:

• ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ — user-level (no admin needed to remove)
• /Library/LaunchAgents/ — system-level for all users (admin needed)
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/ — root-level (admin needed)

Each .plist you find here is a process that auto-starts on your Mac. Many are legitimate. Many are orphans from apps you’ve uninstalled.

To find them:

1. Open Finder, hit Cmd+Shift+G, go to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
2. Look at each .plist file
3. Open one in TextEdit (or Quick Look). Look for the Label and ProgramArguments keys. The latter tells you the executable path.
4. If the executable path points at an app that no longer exists, the agent is an orphan.

Repeat for /Library/LaunchAgents/ and /Library/LaunchDaemons/.

To list active agents from Terminal:

launchctl list

The output is messy but you can spot non-zero exit codes — those are agents that are failing to launch their target, often because the target is missing.

Step 6: Browser extensions and helpers

Browsers run their own background processes. Each extension you’ve installed in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox can run its own background script. To audit:

• Chrome: Three-dot menu → Extensions → Manage Extensions
• Safari: Safari menu → Settings → Extensions
• Firefox: Three-line menu → Add-ons and Themes

Disable or remove anything you don’t actively use.

Common surprises

After running through this once, most people find:

1. 5–15 menu bar apps they forgot about
2. 8–25 login items they don’t remember authorizing
3. 3–10 orphan LaunchAgents from old apps
4. A bunch of browser extensions doing nothing useful

The combined impact:

• Slower login (each LaunchAgent and login item adds a few seconds)
• 1–3 GB of background RAM usage
• Idle CPU usage on battery
• Network activity from sync clients you forgot about

How to stop a respawning helper

The classic frustration: you kill a process in Activity Monitor, and it comes back 30 seconds later. That’s a LaunchAgent doing its job.

To stop it permanently:

1. Find the relevant .plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ (or system locations)
2. Note the Label value — you’ll need it
3. Move the .plist to your desktop
4. In Terminal: launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/<file>.plist
5. Force quit the helper one more time
6. It won’t come back

If you change your mind, move the plist back and launchctl load it.

Don’t dig through ~/Library yourselfSweep hunts down every leftover file an uninstaller misses. Free download for Mac →

Doing it with Sweep

Sweep’s background-app and login-item management does what we just walked through. It surfaces:

• Visible login items and “Allow in Background” entries
• LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons (user and system)
• Helpers running in the background
• Orphan LaunchAgents pointing at missing executables

For each, you can disable, remove, or leave alone — with a preview of what’s about to change. The orphan-LaunchAgent detection is the part that’s hard to do manually because it requires checking every .plist against the actual filesystem.

The Speed Boost feature also identifies runaway background processes and lets you pause them.

What to leave alone

A few categories you should not touch:

• Anything starting with com.apple.* — Apple system services
• Things in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ — protected by System Integrity Protection anyway
• LaunchAgents you don’t recognize but whose target executable still exists — probably part of an active app
• Anything involving security software — disabling it can leave you exposed

When in doubt, search the agent’s Label value on Google. If it’s a known good service, leave it. If it’s clearly orphan, remove it. If you’re not sure, leave it for now and revisit.

Quick checklist

To find every app running in the background:

1. Check the Dock for visible running apps
2. Check the menu bar for menu-bar apps
3. Open Activity Monitor and review by CPU and Memory
4. System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions (both tabs)
5. ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, /Library/LaunchAgents/, /Library/LaunchDaemons/
6. Browser extensions

For each thing you find, decide: needed or not? Quit and disable the not-needed ones.

A Mac that’s been carefully audited like this will boot 5–15 seconds faster, idle with 1–3 GB more free RAM, and feel measurably snappier. The cleanup also tends to be permanent — once you’ve removed an orphan LaunchAgent, it doesn’t come back unless you reinstall the parent app.