Fetchii vs Downie: Which macOS Video Downloader Is Right for You?

Fetchii and Downie are both native macOS video downloaders priced at $19.99. Same price, same platform — but they make different trade-offs, and the right choice depends on how you actually use a downloader. Here's the detailed breakdown.

Downloading: Very Similar

For the core use case — paste a URL, get a video — both apps are well-matched. Both support 1,000+ sites, download up to 4K 60fps, handle playlists, fetch subtitles, and use Apple's VideoToolbox for hardware-accelerated encoding. Either one will handle your typical YouTube download without issue.

Where they differ on the download side: Downie syncs your download history via iCloud, which is useful if you work across multiple Macs. And Downie supports the Firefox browser extension, while Fetchii covers Safari, Chrome, Edge, and Brave. If Firefox is your daily browser, that's a real difference worth noting.

Format Conversion: The Bigger Gap

This is where the two apps genuinely diverge, and it affects the total cost of ownership.

Downie handles basic post-processing — you can set it to automatically convert downloads to MP4 or HEVC. But if you need more control (extract audio as MP3 or FLAC, convert to MKV or WebM, adjust quality settings), you need Permute. Permute is a good app, but it's $14.99 extra. Downie + Permute together cost $34.98.

Fetchii includes all of that conversion functionality built in — MP4, MKV, WebM, M4A, MP3, FLAC, resolution downscaling, quality control — for $19.99. If you ever need to convert formats, you save $15 and avoid the context switch between two apps.

SponsorBlock and Quality-of-Life Features

Fetchii has built-in SponsorBlock integration. You configure which segment types to skip — sponsors, intros, outros, self-promotions, whatever you want — and those segments are automatically removed from your downloaded YouTube videos. It's one of those features that feels small until you realize how much you use it.

Downie doesn't have SponsorBlock. Both apps support subtitle downloading. Fetchii also surfaces errors in plain language when something goes wrong, rather than showing raw logs — which makes a difference when you're trying to figure out why a particular download failed.

Livestream Recording

Both apps can record livestreams. In Fetchii you can set a maximum duration and run up to 5 recordings at once; the file is saved cleanly when the broadcast ends or you stop it. These features matter if you record streams regularly; less so if you only do it occasionally.

Privacy

Both are native macOS apps with Apple notarization. Both process everything locally — no video data goes to any cloud service. From a privacy standpoint, they're equivalent.

The Bottom Line

• Choose Fetchii if: You want download and conversion in one app, care about SponsorBlock, or want livestream recordings that stop and save on their own at a time limit
• Choose Downie if: You already own it (no reason to switch), need iCloud history sync across Macs, use Setapp, or rely on Firefox extension support