MonitorControl vs Lunar

Lunar's adaptive brightness is its most transformative feature and the primary reason many users purchase the Pro license. It reads your MacBook's built-in ambient light sensor and continuously adjusts connected external monitor brightness in real-time to match changing room conditions—exactly mirroring how Apple's own displays automatically respond to ambient light. As evening approaches and room lighting dims, your external monitors smoothly reduce brightness in sync with your MacBook display. When morning sunlight floods your workspace, they brighten correspondingly. The algorithm is configurable—you can set the sensitivity, minimum and maximum brightness bounds, and response curve for each monitor independently. For users in offices with changing natural light or those who work from home throughout the day, adaptive brightness eliminates the constant manual brightness adjustments that cause eye strain.

Lunar can unlock the full 1600-nit peak brightness on Apple Pro Display XDR and MacBook Pro displays for sustained use, far beyond the standard 500-nit SDR limit. Extremely useful for HDR content creation and bright environments.

Lunar's sub-zero dimming uses a software overlay to reduce brightness below the monitor's hardware minimum. Essential for late-night work, reducing eye strain significantly beyond what hardware dimming alone can achieve.

Lunar provides the most sophisticated multi-monitor management available on macOS. Synchronized brightness mode adjusts all monitors together proportionally, maintaining relative brightness relationships. Independent mode lets you fine-tune each display separately. Display layout visualization shows your monitor arrangement with named labels. Per-display adaptive brightness curves can be configured individually—for example, keeping a reference monitor at fixed brightness while adapting your main display. Display presets let you save and recall complete multi-monitor brightness configurations with a single shortcut.

Lunar can automatically adjust display settings when you switch between applications. For example, boost brightness for photo editing in Lightroom, then dim for coding in your IDE.

Lunar includes extensive DDC workarounds for problematic monitors and adapters. It can use alternative communication methods when standard DDC fails, and its fallback software dimming is more refined.

MonitorControl is completely free and open source (MIT license). No paid tiers, no feature limitations, no subscriptions.