Why I switched from Keyboard Maestro to something I actually use every day
Keyboard Maestro is extraordinary software. Peter Lewis has been building it for over two decades and the depth is genuinely impressive: conditional logic, variables, loops, over 30 trigger types, hundreds of actions. If you want to automate something on a Mac, Keyboard Maestro can almost certainly do it.
We used it. And we kept noticing the same pattern.
The Keyboard Maestro problem
You discover Keyboard Maestro and you are excited. You spend a weekend building macros. A morning startup routine. A file renaming workflow. Something that automates your most tedious daily task. You run them a few times, they work, and they genuinely save time.
Then, slowly, you stop using them.
Not because they stop working. Because you forget they exist. The macros live in a list inside Keyboard Maestro. They are triggered by hotkeys you assigned months ago and can no longer remember. Every time you want to run one, you either try to recall the key combination, open Keyboard Maestro to find it, or, most often, just do the task by hand.
Part of this is the learning curve. Keyboard Maestro has hundreds of actions and triggers. Understanding what each one does and how they fit together takes real time. It is a powerful tool, but it rewards patience and expertise. For users who want a macro running in a few minutes rather than a few hours, that investment can feel like too much.
Keyboard Maestro is built for people who can maintain a large mental map of what they have automated and how to trigger it. For those people, it is irreplaceable. For everyone else, the power is real but the friction of access makes it theoretical rather than practical.
What we wanted instead
When we built Radial, we wanted automation that people would actually use. Not a system you configure once and slowly forget about. Something you reach for every day because it is always visible and always one gesture away.
The answer was simple in retrospect: put everything in a visual menu. Press a hotkey and see your workflows by name. Not a list of macros in an app you have to open. A circle of labeled actions right at your cursor.
You no longer need to remember that your morning startup macro is triggered by Command+Option+Shift+M. You just open your menu, see "Morning Setup," and click it.
What Radial does differently
In Radial, you build workflows with a visual editor. You add actions one at a time: open this app, wait, press this shortcut, paste this text. No scripting required for most things, though AppleScript and shell scripts are supported if you want to go deeper.
Getting a basic workflow running takes minutes, not hours. You do not need to learn a library of actions before you can be productive. Start with something simple, get it working, and add complexity as your needs grow.
The menu is the interface. Everything you have built is visible, labeled, and accessible without opening another app or remembering a hotkey. Adding something new means adding it to the circle. Removing it means removing it from the circle.
Where Keyboard Maestro is still the right tool
Keyboard Maestro is more capable than Radial for genuinely complex automation. If you need conditional logic, variables, loops, or macros that trigger automatically on a schedule or when a specific event occurs, Keyboard Maestro handles all of it. Radial's visual editor is designed for sequential workflows triggered on demand. For decision-tree automations with branching logic, Keyboard Maestro is the right choice.
The combination that works best
If you already use Keyboard Maestro and want to keep it, you do not have to choose. Radial has direct integration with Keyboard Maestro: you can add a Keyboard Maestro macro as an item in your Radial menu and trigger it with a single click. You get the full depth of Keyboard Maestro's automation engine with the accessibility of a visual launcher in front of it.
This combination is genuinely useful. Use Keyboard Maestro for the complex macros that justify its learning curve. Use Radial as the front end that makes all of them easy to reach.
But if you have tried Keyboard Maestro and found yourself not actually using it, the macros sitting there untriggered while you do things by hand anyway, that is exactly what Radial is built to fix.