Mounty is the best-known free way to write to NTFS on a Mac, and it's genuinely popular. But it works very differently from a real driver — and that difference matters for any data you care about. Omnimount is a paid (€9.99, open source) menu-bar app that uses the real ntfs-3g engine and also handles ext4. Here's the honest comparison.
This is the key point. Mounty does not ship an NTFS driver. It toggles Apple's
experimental built-in NTFS write support — code Apple includes in macOS but never enabled
by default, because it isn't considered safe for general use. That's why corruption reports
around Mounty are common: you're relying on an unfinished Apple feature. Omnimount ships
ntfs-3g, the production open-source NTFS driver that every Linux distribution uses,
running over FUSE-T. It's journal-aware and built for day-to-day writing.
| Omnimount | Mounty | |
|---|---|---|
| Filesystems | ext4 + NTFS (read/write) | NTFS only |
| Price | €9.99 one-time | Free |
| Write engine | Real ntfs-3g over FUSE-T | Apple's experimental native NTFS write flag |
| Data safety | Production driver, journal-aware | Unfinished Apple feature; corruption reports common |
| Hibernated / "Fast Startup" disks | Detects and can remount writable (remove_hiberfile) | Often just fails or mounts read-only |
| Extras | Format, filesystem check, clone, read-only repair | Mount toggle only |
| License | Open source (GPL-3.0) | Freeware (closed) |
If you need to drop a file onto a non-critical NTFS stick once, it's free and quick, and many people use it without incident. For a throwaway transfer where you accept the risk, it does the job at no cost.
For anything you'd be upset to lose — a backup drive, a client's disk, a NAS volume — a real
driver is the safer tool. And if you touch ext4 at all (Linux disks, Raspberry Pi,
retro handheld SD cards), Mounty can't help; Omnimount does ext4 and NTFS, plus format, check
and clone, all from the menu bar. It's also open source, so you can read exactly what it does to
your disks — or build it yourself for free.
Real driver, not an experimental flag. Omnimount writes NTFS with ntfs-3g and handles ext4 too — mount, write, format, check and clone from the menu bar, no kernel extensions, no Recovery Mode.
Get Omnimount — €9.99 or build it free (GPL)