What is Beam?

Beam is a native macOS application that provides a lightweight, sandboxed ChatGPT experience with no Electron overhead. It offers a floating chat panel that can be opened with a single hotkey, allowing users to interact with the current context without leaving their workflow.

Users can select screen areas or PDF documents and ask ChatGPT for summaries, translations, or explanations. Templates and AI profiles let writers and developers save prompts and configure model behavior for consistent, efficient output. All interactions stay local, with data only sent to OpenAI’s servers, ensuring privacy and system isolation.

Beam on the web:

Beam pricing

Free trial

Basic $6

Plus $19

Premium $29

Verify on the official pricing page.

Start free trial

Beam's key features

Floating chat panel via hotkey
Screen area query with hotkey
Summarize, translate, explain actions
Save prompts as templates
Native macOS low memory usage
Sandboxed, no system access
Local data storage only

Beam use cases

Quickly summarize a lengthy PDF for a meeting by selecting the document in Beam, ensuring all data stays local with its sandboxed GPT‑4 integration
Translate a research article on the fly by highlighting a screen area in Beam, leveraging the local GPT‑4 model for instant, privacy‑preserving translations
Generate concise meeting notes by selecting key slide content in Beam, using its AI prompt templates for structured summaries, all without leaving macOS

Beam user reviews

Would you recommend Beam?

Recommend this tool?

Who is Beam for?

Tech enthusiasts
Product designers
Content creators
E-commerce sellers
Language learners

Beam FAQ

Is Beam free?

Not permanently. Beam gives you a free trial, after which a paid plan is required. Plans include Basic at $6, Plus at $19 and Premium at $29.

What are the best alternatives to Beam?

The closest alternatives to Beam are MacGPT, ChatPDFGPT, Sidekiiick, Heynds and MindMac. You can compare them side by side in the alternatives section further down this page.