If you work on more than one project at a time — a staging API here, a local Docker stack there, a client's custom domain somewhere else — you've probably opened /etc/hosts in a terminal, typed your Mac password, and edited a line by hand more times than you'd like to admit. A handful of small utilities exist just to turn that chore into a menu bar click. Two of them are Hostflip, a very new Apple Silicon-only app, and SwitchHosts, a cross-platform open-source tool that's been around for years. Here's what actually separates them.
The short version
Both are free and let you save named /etc/hosts profiles and flip between them without re-typing your password every time. The real difference is scope: SwitchHosts is a mature, cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) tool with a broader feature set and a track record. Hostflip is a brand-new, macOS-only (Apple Silicon required) menu bar app built around one specific annoyance — password prompts and silently-overwritten manual edits — and it even ships a one-click migration path from SwitchHosts, which tells you exactly who it's positioning itself against.
Hostflip: built for one workflow, done carefully
Hostflip is a native macOS menu bar utility for managing and switching between multiple /etc/hosts profiles. Its standout feature is that it detects edits made outside the app — so if you or another tool touch /etc/hosts directly, Hostflip won't silently clobber those changes when you switch profiles. It preserves a baseline "Base Hosts" configuration with automatic backups, lets you group profiles as mutually exclusive (only one active) or stack them as additions, and uses a one-time daemon approval so you're not typing your password on every switch. It also ships a CLI and a "hostflip doctor" diagnostic command.
For who: developers and sysadmins on Apple Silicon Macs who juggle several /etc/hosts configurations and want a tool that won't fight them over manual edits.
Price: free, open source (MIT), no paid tier.
Strengths: detects and preserves external edits instead of overwriting them; true one-click profile switching with no repeated password prompts; automatic backups of your base config; a guided migration path straight from SwitchHosts.
Limits: it's a very young project (14 GitHub stars at time of writing) with a correspondingly small community and thinner documentation. Apple Silicon only — there's no Intel Mac support planned, and nothing for Windows or Linux. macOS 14+ is required.
SwitchHosts: the established, cross-platform option
SwitchHosts is a free, open-source hosts-management and switching app that's been the default answer to "how do I manage multiple hosts files" for a long time, precisely because it isn't tied to one operating system. It targets developers who need to flip /etc/hosts (or its Windows equivalent) on and off across environments, and its main selling points are simplicity and being lightweight rather than a deep feature set.
For who: developers who need a hosts switcher that works the same way whether they're on a Mac, a Windows machine, or Linux — or teams with mixed operating systems.
Price: free.
Strengths: free and open source; simple to pick up; lightweight and fast; genuinely cross-platform, which Hostflip is not.
Limits: fewer advanced features than a purpose-built alternative — no built-in detection of external edits the way Hostflip has, and it's a less widely known tool in general, which shows in the size of its community and ecosystem around it.
Side-by-side
| Hostflip | SwitchHosts | |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | macOS (Apple Silicon only), macOS 14+ | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Price | Free, open source (MIT) | Free, open source |
| Detects external edits | Yes — preserves manual changes instead of overwriting them | No dedicated mechanism |
| Password prompts | One-time daemon approval, then none | Standard OS prompts on write |
| CLI included | Yes, plus a diagnostic "doctor" command | No |
| Maturity | Very new, small community | Long-running, established |
| Migration path | One-click import from SwitchHosts | — |
Which one should you pick?
Pick Hostflip if you're on an Apple Silicon Mac, you're annoyed by repeated password prompts, and you've ever lost a manual /etc/hosts edit because a switcher app overwrote it — that specific problem is what Hostflip was built to solve, and its migration tool makes moving over from SwitchHosts painless.
Pick SwitchHosts if you need something that works identically across Windows, Mac and Linux, or if you'd rather use a tool with years of real-world mileage behind it instead of a 14-star project, even if that means living with the occasional overwritten manual edit.
Both are free, so there's no financial risk in trying either — and if you start on SwitchHosts and later move to an Apple Silicon-only workflow, Hostflip's built-in migration means switching later costs you almost nothing.