Quick comparison
| Feature | Shake It On | Caffeine |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $9.99 one-time | Free |
| How it works | Mouse movement | System API toggle |
| Smart conditions | ✓ (12+ conditions) | ✗ |
| Scheduling | ✓ (hours + days) | ✗ |
| Camera detection | ✓ | ✗ |
| Focus/DND detection | ✓ | ✗ |
| Battery awareness | ✓ | ✗ |
| Configurable intervals | ✓ (6 presets) | ✗ (always on) |
| Keeps remote sessions alive | ✓ | ✗ |
| Works with locked MDM | ✓ | ✗ |
| Actively maintained | ✓ | ✗ (legacy) |
| Snooze | ✓ | ✗ |
About Caffeine
Caffeine is one of the original Mac keep-awake apps. Click the coffee cup icon in your menu bar and your Mac stays awake. Click it again to turn it off. That's the entire feature set.
It was great for its time and millions of people used it. But the original Caffeine hasn't been updated in years and may not work well on recent macOS versions. There's a newer app called Caffeinated ($0.99) that does the same thing with a more modern codebase, but the concept is the same: a simple on/off toggle with no conditions.
Where Shake It On wins
Caffeine's simplicity is also its limitation. It can't answer questions like "should I be running right now?" It doesn't know if you're on battery, in a video call, or whether it's 2 AM and you actually want your Mac to sleep.
Shake It On handles all of this:
- Smart conditions that pause during video calls, when on battery, when Focus is active, or when specific apps are in the foreground
- Scheduling by hour and day of week so it only runs during work hours
- Mouse movement that works in corporate environments with locked settings and keeps remote desktop sessions alive
- Snooze for quick temporary pauses
The other big difference: Caffeine prevents sleep at the system level but doesn't generate any actual user activity. Slack, Teams, and remote desktop software don't see any mouse movement, so they may still mark you as away or disconnect. Shake It On's mouse movement registers as real input everywhere.