Most Mac window tools snap the window in your hand. Stay and Putback do not; they are both restorers, which puts them in the rare category of tools that actually try to solve the problem of windows landing in the wrong place after a display change. That makes this a fair comparison, unlike most "vs" pages in this space. The difference between them is not whether they restore windows. It is how each one decides what to restore.
Manual snapshots vs continuous learning
Stay works on a save-then-restore model. You arrange your windows the way you like them, open Stay, and tell it to remember that arrangement. From then on, Stay can put that saved snapshot back, including when your display setup changes. It is a genuinely useful pattern, as long as the snapshot stays current.
Here is where it breaks down in practice. Say you saved your layout on a Monday: three windows on the external monitor, a browser and a notes app on the laptop screen. By Friday afternoon, your project has moved on. You have swapped in a different set of documents, resized a couple of windows, and closed the notes app entirely. You undock for the weekend, dock back in on Monday, and Stay dutifully restores Monday's snapshot: the old documents, the old sizes, the notes app you closed. The restore worked exactly as designed. It just restored the wrong week.
Putback has no snapshot to go stale, because it never asks you to make one. It learns your windows while you work, all week, so the layout it restores after a display change is the one you actually had a moment ago, not the one you remembered to save.
How they actually differ
| Aspect | Putback | Stay |
|---|---|---|
| Save model | Nothing to save, learns continuously | Manual, you save a snapshot yourself |
| Restore trigger | Automatic on display change | Automatic or manual, restores the saved snapshot |
| Per setup memory | Separate memory for every display setup | Separate saved arrangements you manage |
| Maintenance | None, always reflects your current layout | Re-save whenever your layout changes |
| Price model | $19 once, 7 day free trial | See Stay's own site for current pricing |
Based on Stay's public documentation; tools evolve, check their site for current details.
Who should pick which
Stay genuinely suits people who want explicit control over saved states: a fixed layout for "writing mode," a different one for "editing mode," recalled on command rather than inferred. If that is how you like to work, and you do not mind opening Stay each time your setup changes, it will keep doing what it has always done.
Putback suits the more common complaint: you do not want to think about your windows at all. No save step, no snapshot to keep current, no remembering which layout goes with which desk. Plug in, and whatever you actually had comes back in about 0.4 seconds, with a separate memory for every display setup you use. See the wider comparison against Rectangle, Magnet and Moom in Putback compared with every Mac window tool, the reason any of this happens in the first place in why Mac windows move, the bigger picture in which kind of Mac window manager you actually need, or how Putback stacks up against Moom's saved-layout side in Putback vs Moom.
