The best ways to get GitHub notifications on a Mac in 2026

Updated August 2026 · 6 min read · written by the DevNotify team

If you write code for a living, missing a review request costs hours. Yet GitHub's default notification setup on macOS is surprisingly weak: either you keep a browser tab open all day, or you rely on email that arrives too late to matter. Here is every realistic option, with an honest assessment of each.

Disclosure: we make DevNotify, one of the options below. We've tried to be fair to the alternatives — including the free ones.

1. The github.com notifications inbox

How it works: you keep github.com/notifications open in a browser tab and check it manually.

• Pros: free, always current, full filtering and bulk actions.
• Cons: it only works if you remember to look. A tab left open costs memory, attention, and tab-switching context all day long.

Verdict: fine if you only get a handful of notifications a week. Painful past that.

2. Email notifications

How it works: GitHub emails you for each thread you're subscribed to.

• Pros: reaches you on every device; searchable in your mail client.
• Cons: latency and noise. By the time you see the email, the PR has usually moved on — and active weeks produce hundreds of messages.

Verdict: good as a fallback, bad as your primary channel.

3. Gitify (free, open source)

How it works: an Electron menu bar app that shows your unread GitHub notifications and marks them read.

• Pros: free, cross-platform (macOS/Windows/Linux), mature, open source.
• Cons: ships a Chromium runtime, so it uses more memory than a native app; no paid support channel.

Verdict: the best free option. See our detailed Gitify vs DevNotify comparison.

4. Slack or Discord integrations

How it works: route repository events into a team chat channel.

• Pros: notifications arrive where the team already is; good for team-wide CI and deploy events.
• Cons: it's team-level, not personal. Your own review requests get buried among everyone else's events, and chat channels are their own distraction.

Verdict: complements, doesn't replace, a personal notifier.

5. Browser extensions

How it works: a Chrome extension such as Notifications for GitHub adds an unread-count icon to the browser toolbar.

• Pros: free, one-click install, good while you're browsing.
• Cons: it lives inside Chrome — no badge when the browser is closed, polling throttled by tab-sleep, and nothing shows while you work in other apps.

Verdict: fine if Chrome is always open. If not, see our comparison of GitHub notification extensions vs. a native menu bar app.

6. DevNotify ($19 lifetime, 7-day free trial)

How it works: a lightweight Tauri menu bar app showing your unread count at a glance; click any item to jump straight to it.

• Pros: smallest footprint of the menu bar options (system WebKit, no bundled browser), strictly local — your token never leaves your Mac and there is no telemetry — plus direct email support.
• Cons: macOS-only today, not open source, and it isn't free after the trial.

Verdict: for developers who live in pull requests all day on a MacBook and want the lightest, most private option.

Which should you pick?