Two years ago, "a teleprompter that lives in the MacBook notch and stays invisible on screen shares" was one app. In 2026 it's at least six. CueNotch, Moody, Notchie, NotchPrompter, Textream and Avocado all park your script above the lens, all disappear from Zoom and OBS, and all scroll when you speak.
Which is genuinely good news, and it means every roundup that still sells notch placement as a differentiator is out of date. Here's what actually separates them now.
Short answer: the mechanics are a tie now, so it comes down to what you get before paying, how far the app reaches beyond your own screen, and how it feels to actually use. Avocado is the pick on all three — a permanent free tier, multi-device prompting, and the only one built like a Mac app rather than a utility. The $29-ish one-time apps are a fair choice if you only ever prompt yourself.
What every notch prompter does now
Worth being blunt about, because most comparisons still treat these as selling points:
- Notch placement. All of them. Your script sits above the lens so your eyes read as eye contact.
- Screen-share invisibility. All of them, and by the same route — macOS lets a window set
sharingType = .none, which excludes it from every capture API. It's a documented system capability, not anyone's secret. - Voice-activated scrolling. All of them, using Apple's on-device speech recognition.
If a comparison tells you one of these is unique to any app, it was written before this year.
So what actually separates them in 2026
- What you get without paying. Most are $29–30 up front with no free mode at all. Two are free. One is free with paid extras.
- Whether it scales past one screen. Nearly every option assumes one person reading off one Mac. Multi-device prompting and remote control are where the field thins out fast.
- Whether it helps you improve. Scrolling text is solved. Telling you your pace drifted in the third paragraph is not.
- How much it does when you aren't reading. Script organisation, imports, markers, tags — the unglamorous parts you touch every single session.
Avocado — best free tier, and the only one that leaves the Mac
Start with what's free, because it's unusual in this group: unlimited constant-speed scrolling at whatever words-per-minute you set, notch and floating modes, screen-share invisibility, the Focus Guide, Script Markers, tags and search, PowerPoint import, and hotkey pause so you can stop the script mid-sentence without touching the trackpad. No card, no account, no expiry. Voice-activated scrolling is free up to 200 words a script, plus three full-Pro passes every week.
That matters against a field where the alternative to a $29 purchase is usually nothing at all. You can run real sessions on the free tier indefinitely — the cap is script length on voice mode, not time, features, or a watermark.
Where Avocado stops resembling the others is past the point of one person reading off one laptop. Director Mode hands the prompter to a producer or co-host, who can play, pause, scrub and jump markers from their own phone over local Wi-Fi. The Teleprompter Viewer casts the same script to up to five devices at once — phone, tablet, Windows machine, or a hardware rig through a plain browser — all in sync, all driven by your Mac's microphone. No other notch app does either. Teleprompter.com has remote control and preview too, but routed through its cloud and its account system rather than your own network.
It also keeps score. Every session ends with a receipt — pace, completion, where you sped up or stalled — and running the same script again shows the difference run over run. Smart Cues mark the pacing before you start, and Delivery Coaching breaks the take down afterwards on-device, and a recap lands every Monday. CueNotch is the only other app here doing anything in this territory.
And it looks like a Mac app
Worth saying plainly, because it's the thing you notice within ten seconds and no feature table captures it. Avocado is native SwiftUI, and it's built to sit on macOS rather than beside it.
The notch panel is drawn to the real geometry of the MacBook Pro cutout — bent corners and all — so it reads as part of the hardware instead of a black rectangle parked near it. The prompter can go see-through, sitting over your wallpaper rather than blocking it, and you can set the background tint and text colour to whatever you can actually read against. Typography is sized for reading at arm's length from a lens, not for fitting the most words on screen — the details that decide whether you sound like you wrote it or like you're reading it.
None of that shows up in a comparison table, and all of it is the difference between an app you keep open and one you tolerate. Judge it from the clips on this page rather than the description — that's the only fair test.
Two honest limitations. Avocado doesn't record — deliberately, since staying invisible is what lets it sit alongside QuickTime, ScreenFlow, OBS or Final Cut instead of replacing them. And it's a subscription rather than a one-time purchase, which is a real trade against the $29.99 apps. See the pricing question below.
The one-time apps — CueNotch, Moody, Notchie
Three variations on the same idea, all around $29 paid once: notch placement, screen-share invisibility, voice scrolling. Moody has been around longest and has the larger user base, Notchie is the most minimal, and CueNotch bundles the most extras — a script library, rewriting, captions and rehearsal coaching.
They share the same two gaps. There's no free mode, so the only way to find out whether the workflow suits you is to buy it. And all three stop at the edge of your own screen — no second device, no handing control to anyone else. If you prompt yourself on one Mac and would rather pay once than subscribe, any of them is a fair deal, and cheaper than Avocado Pro over a couple of years.
NotchPrompter and Textream — free and open
NotchPrompter is free, open-source, and does the mechanic properly: notch placement, voice activation, capture invisibility, multi-display. Textream is free too, with a Dynamic Island-inspired design, and needs macOS 15 or newer.
If all you want is a script above your lens at zero cost with no upgrade path dangling, these are the honest answer, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. What you're giving up is everything around the reading — imports, markers, multi-device, rehearsal history — and, with open source, whoever's maintaining it that month.
Teleprompter.com — a different category
Often grouped in with these, but it's solving a different problem: prompting and recording in one tool, with built-in 4K capture, auto subtitles, cloud sync across iPhone and iPad, and imports from Word, PDF and Drive. For creators living across several devices who want one app for both jobs, it's genuinely strong.
It's not a notch app. It runs in a browser or a standard window, so it appears on screen shares and sits beside your eyeline rather than above the lens, and scripts live on its servers. Pricing is the catch for Mac users watching cost. Teleprompter.com Pro is $19.99/mo per seat month to month, or roughly $96 a year on the annual plan they advertise at 60% off. Avocado Pro is $7.99/mo or $79.99 a year — lower on both, and less than half the price month to month. The free Starter tier is real but watermarks everything you record. Full comparison →
CuePrompter — the browser fallback
Instant, nothing to install, paste and read. There's a usable free tier with paid upgrades available. It's also a browser tab: visible the moment you share your screen, no notch, no capture exclusion, no on-device voice model. Fine for a one-off, wrong as a habit. Full comparison →