When comparing Yabai vs Amethyst, the Slant community recommends Amethyst for most people. In the question“What is the best window manager for Mac?” Amethyst is ranked 5th while Yabai is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Amethyst is:
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast
Pro Integrates with other apps
Like skhd, sketchybar, hammerspoon scripts, ubersicht
Gives you more control and oversight of your machine
Pro Actively developed
Pro Reliable
Pro Extremely programmable
Pro It's free and open-source
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Pro Recently updated and rewritten in Swift.
The application was written in Objective-C, but was recently updated and completely rewritten in Apple's new native language Swift.
Pro Works with keyboard shortcuts, no mouse needed
As it's designed to work closely to how xmonad, Amethyst uses keyboard shortcuts to control the windows being used, meaning no mouse input is necessary. This can make for a faster way to control windows.
Pro Multi-monitor suppport
Pro Has many common layouts to choose from (fullscreen, floating, row, column, wide, etc)
Pro Can switch between tiling and floating mode
Pro Under active development
Pro Configured via UI
No CONFIG file provides security and will avoid making amethyst crash. Instead configured via simple UI
Pro True tiling means never losing track of windows under a huge pile of others
Cons
Con Can be a steep learning curve at first
Con Needs disabling SIP to get full benefit
SIP is a security feature for Mac. You can use most of the features without disabling it.
Con Needs additional tools to get the full benefit
Install "skhd" to use keyboard shortcuts
Con Can be buggy at times
Con There are more user friendly window managers available
There are certainly more user friendly window managers available for MacOS, such as Divvy or Moom. Amethyst, however, is more powerful and customizable than the more user friendly options available and therefore may be a better choice for a user looking for more advanced capabilities and customization.