TrayDisclosure: we make Tray. Dropzone 5’s details were checked against Aptonic’s official site on 31 October 2026. Two things that site does not document are whether its grid previews files and whether an action copies or moves the original — both are marked below rather than guessed at.
At a glance
| Tray | Dropzone 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | An arc of files in a corner | A grid of actions at the top |
| Opens | Corner, with or without a drag | On drag, menu item, or F3 |
| Holds files | That is the whole app | Drop Bar, beside the grid |
| Runs tasks | No | Upload, resize, rename, custom scripts |
| Preview | Space, Quick Look | Not documented |
| Recent downloads | Shown automatically | Not documented |
| Scriptable | No | Ruby and Python actions |
| macOS | 14.1 or later | 13 or later |
| Price | Free tier; £9.99/year or £79.99 once | $35 once, 14-day trial |
The actual difference
Dropzone answers “do this to this file”. You drop something onto a square and it is uploaded to S3, resized, renamed, moved to a folder you picked once. The destination is decided in advance and the drop executes it.
Tray answers “hold this while I work out where it goes”. It runs nothing. The file sits in the corner until you drag it into whatever window turns out to be the destination — which you did not know when you put it down.
That is why people bounce between them. If your destinations repeat, automation is the right tool and a shelf is a slower way to do the same thing. If they do not repeat, there is no action to configure and the shelf is the whole answer.
Dropzone’s actions
The grid is configurable — columns, size, several grids for different jobs — and ships with actions for uploading to S3, Imgur and SFTP, resizing images, renaming and moving, launching apps. You can write your own in Ruby or Python. Nothing in Tray approaches this, and if you read that list and recognised your week, stop reading: Dropzone is the app.
Drop Bar and the corner
Dropzone does have a shelf. Drop Bar sits beside the grid and holds files temporarily so you can gather a few and drag them on together. It is a staging area in service of the actions.
In Tray the shelf is not in service of anything. It opens from any of the four corners with empty hands, it shows what arrived in your watched folders without being asked, you can preview a card with Space, and a pile of files can become a real folder. The difference is not that one has a shelf and the other does not — it is how much the shelf is expected to carry.
What happens to your files
Aptonic’s page does not say whether a given action copies or moves, which is reasonable: it depends on the action, and some of them exist precisely to move things.
Tray is easier to state. A card is a reference to a file where it already is. Putting something on the shelf copies nothing; taking it off leaves the original alone. Three operations touch the disk and each one asks first.
Price and requirements
Dropzone 5 is $35 for a lifetime licence with a 14-day trial, needs macOS 13, and has a free version through the Mac App Store and Setapp.
Tray needs macOS 14.1, is free to keep at three pinned files and one watched folder, and is £9.99 a year or £79.99 once. The yearly plan has three free days on the direct download.
Which one to get
- The same thing happens to most files. Dropzone. Configure it once and stop deciding.
- You upload to S3, Imgur or SFTP routinely. Dropzone, and it is not close.
- You write scripts. Dropzone takes Ruby and Python.
- Every file goes somewhere different. Tray. There is no action to configure for a destination you will use once.
- You want to see what just downloaded. Tray shows it without being asked.
They coexist happily — one automates the repeated, the other holds the unrepeatable. If what you actually want is a plain shelf, compare Yoink and Dropover instead, which are aiming at the same thing Tray is.