Mac apps for GitHub pull requests

The shortlist

Measured 2026-09-16. Star counts come from each project's GitHub repository on that day; every tool is described from its own site, repository or store listing, linked below. PR Marmot's own row is included on the same terms.

Gitify — the better notifications app

Gitify describes itself as “Git notifications on your menu bar. Available on macOS, Windows & Linux.” It is MIT-licensed, written in TypeScript, and had 5,346 stars when measured 2026-09-16 on its repository.

Where it wins: it covers GitHub notifications as a whole — issues, releases, discussions, mentions, CI — not just pull requests, and it lives quietly in the menu bar. If what you actually want is “tell me when GitHub has something for me”, Gitify does that better than PR Marmot does, and it does it on three operating systems.

PR Marmot notifies only about pull requests you have explicitly watched, and only while the app is open. The two tools sit together comfortably: Gitify for the notification stream, PR Marmot for reading the queue.

RepoBar — the honest native rival

RepoBar is a Swift, native macOS menu-bar app that shows “status of GitHub Repos right in your menu bar and terminal: CI, Issues, Pull Requests, Latest Release.” MIT-licensed, 2,192 stars measured 2026-09-16.

Where it wins: it is native, free, open source and considerably more established than PR Marmot, with a well-known author behind it. If your unit of attention is the repository — is main green, what shipped, how many issues are open — RepoBar answers that better, and it does it from the menu bar without a window at all.

PR Marmot's unit of attention is the pull request. It is a full window with a table of rows, each carrying a computed Note about what that specific pull request needs next, plus watch, snooze and Changed state. Different question, different shape.

gh-dash — the category leader

gh-dash is the most used tool in this category by a wide margin: 12,519 stars measured 2026-09-16, MIT, a gh extension configured in YAML. If you live in a terminal it is very likely the right answer, and it can run your own commands against a pull request where PR Marmot cannot.

It gets a page of its own, including a full side-by-side table: PR Marmot and gh-dash.

PR Flow — the paid one, with a wider scope

PR Flow is a closed-source desktop pull request client. Its pricing page, checked 2026-09-16, lists $69 one-time with 12 months of updates, after which “the app keeps working — no renewal required”, a 14-day trial with no card, a 14-day refund window, and team licences from 5 seats. It lists macOS, Windows and Linux.

Where it wins, plainly: it reviews diffs and submits reviews inside the app, it has AI review and agent pipelines, it handles stacked pull requests, it integrates with issue trackers, it supports GitLab, Gerrit and Azure DevOps alongside GitHub, it ships on Windows and Linux, and it releases far more often than PR Marmot does. PR Marmot has none of that. It reads GitHub and sends you to the browser to act.

The two overlap in one respect: PR Flow also authenticates through the gh CLI for GitHub, so “no GitHub App to approve” does not separate us from it. What does: PR Marmot is free and MIT-licensed rather than $69 and closed, it is a native Rust application rather than a cross-platform one, and it is deliberately read-only rather than a full review client.

If you want one app that replaces the GitHub web UI for reviewing, PR Flow is a serious product and PR Marmot is not the tool you are looking for.

Mergi — the closest thing to the same shape

Mergi is a native macOS app for Apple-silicon Macs on macOS 12 or later, and its own headline is “Code review for the age of AI.” It is closed source with no public repository, and its site says it is free while in beta, with no credit card; there is no pricing page, so what it costs after beta isn't stated. Described from its own site, read 2026-09-16.

Where it wins: of everything on this page it is the product closest to PR Marmot's shape — a native Mac window with a Smart Inbox, saved views and local caching — and it does the thing PR Marmot refuses to do. It brings an agent you already run, such as Claude, Codex or Cursor, into the app to walk you through a diff. If you want help reading a review rather than help finding one, Mergi is built for that.

The differences are licence and boundary. PR Marmot is MIT with a public repository you can read before you install it, and it stays read-only: it will point you at the pull request, not explain it to you.

The clearest split: AI review

Two products here are betting on an assistant doing the reading. PR Flow has AI review and agent pipelines; Mergi's entire positioning is code review for the age of AI, with your own agent brought inside the app.

PR Marmot deliberately does neither. There is no AI in it. It does not summarise a diff, suggest a change, or judge whether code is good. It reads GitHub's own signals — CI, reviews, unresolved threads, conflicts, draft state, labels, linked issues — and writes one plain sentence about what a pull request needs next. Deciding what to look at, not deciding what to think.

The honest cost: if you want an assistant to read the diff for you and explain it, Mergi and PR Flow do that and PR Marmot does not. That is a design decision rather than a missing feature, which is worth knowing before you install it and find out.

The App Store options

Two paid Mac App Store apps cover adjacent ground. Described from their own listings, read 2026-09-16.

• Omniscience for GitHub — tracks the status of pull requests relevant to you, separating those pending your review from those you have reviewed, with desktop notifications for new review requests, dismissed reviews and re-requests.
• Pull requests Manager — tracks pull requests across selected repositories grouped by repository, and can merge, squash or rebase them from inside the app with a customisable commit message.

Both are closed source and paid, and the second does something PR Marmot deliberately does not: change the state of your repository.

Where PR Marmot fits

PR Marmot is a native macOS dashboard written in Rust and GPUI. It is free, MIT-licensed, and read-only toward GitHub. It reads through the gh login you already have, so there is no PR Marmot account and no app for your organization to approve.

What it is for: opening one window in the morning and knowing, without clicking anything, which of your pull requests are blocked and which reviews are genuinely waiting on you. Each row carries a Note written from CI, reviews, unresolved threads, conflicts, draft state, labels and linked issues. Watch with w, snooze with s, and Changed markers show what moved while you were away.

What it is not: a review client, an AI assistant, a notifications hub, a repository status bar, a Windows or Linux product with a prebuilt binary, or an established project. It is new. The source is public and the star count on this page is the real one.

What this page does not claim

There are no memory, CPU, battery or startup-time numbers anywhere on this page, and no performance comparison between PR Marmot and anything else on it. No benchmark has been published, and until one is, such a comparison would be an assertion rather than a measurement.

There are also no download counts for the commercial products on this page. Star counts are public facts about open-source projects; scraping a competitor's sales signals into a marketing page is not a comparison, and it would not make PR Marmot better.

Sources

Every number below was measured on 2026-09-16 and will drift. Each link goes to the project's own page so you can check it.

• dlvhdr/gh-dash — 12,519 ★, MIT. Docs at gh-dash.dev.
• gitify-app/gitify — 5,346 ★, MIT. Site at gitify.io.
• steipete/RepoBar — 2,192 ★, MIT, Swift.
• PR Flow pricing — $69 one-time, checked 2026-09-16.
• mergi.dev — native macOS, free while in beta, no public repository. Read 2026-09-16.
• Omniscience for GitHub and Pull requests Manager — Mac App Store listings.
• oliver-kriska/prmarmot — 0 ★, MIT. See also GitHub's own dashboard.