Comparison · checked October 2026
TabTool vs TableTool by Jakob Egger
The original MIT-licensed Mac CSV editor, unchanged since 2017. TabTool is the same idea with a maintained codebase and an iOS app.
- Their license
- MIT
- Their price
- Free on the Mac App Store
- Their platforms
- macOS 10.8 or later
Jakob Egger’s TableTool is the open-source CSV editor many Mac users still have in their Applications folder. It is MIT-licensed, under a megabyte, and free on the Mac App Store. It detects delimiters and encodings, edits cells, and converts between formats.
The last App Store release was 1.2.1 in July 2017, and the repository has been quiet since 2020. TabTool shares the name and the license, not the code: it is a new Swift 6 codebase with a separate CSV core, a large-file mode, and an iOS editor.
| Criteria | TabTool | TableTool by Jakob Egger |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Price | Free to build from source | Free |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, iOS 17+ | macOS 10.8+ |
| Last release | 1.0 in development | 1.2.1, July 2017 |
| Last commit | Active | April 2020 |
| Large-file mode | Memory-mapped, background index, streamed save | Not documented |
| Filters and sorting | Sort on both platforms, filters on iOS | Not documented |
| iPhone and iPad app | Yes | No |
| Binary size | Not published yet | 837.8 KB on the App Store |
| Privacy | No network entitlement, no analytics | No account or network features listed |
Swipe the table sideways to see the TableTool by Jakob Egger column →
Where TableTool by Jakob Egger is stronger
- Tiny footprint: under one megabyte, with a decade of real-world use.
- Available today on the Mac App Store, for free.
- A simpler feature set if all you need is a quick look and a format conversion.
Where TabTool is different
- Maintained code: Swift 6, strict concurrency, 254 core tests and 320 app unit tests in the repository.
- Documented large-file mode with a 5 GiB benchmark and a streamed save path.
- Sorting, iOS filters, drag-and-drop reordering, and an iPhone editor.
- Format detection with an override bar for every detected value.
Verdict
If you need a free Mac CSV viewer today and never touch huge files, the original TableTool still works. If you want an editor that is maintained, handles multi-gigabyte files, and runs on iPhone, TabTool is the successor in spirit.
Sources
- jakob/TableTool on GitHub github.com/jakob/TableTool
- Table Tool on the Mac App Store apps.apple.com/us/app/table-tool/id1122008420
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