The Best Jump Desktop Alternative for Mac

Jump Desktop has a good reputation among Mac users, and it’s earned it. It’s a polished app, it’s fast, and on the Mac it’s a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. If you’re here, you’re probably wondering whether you need all of it just to get into your own Mac, or whether there’s a way to do it without an account and a cloud service in the middle.

This page covers how Jump Desktop reaches a Mac, what its free and paid plans include, and why a standard RDP server on the Mac is a simpler fit if all you want is your own desktop.

How does Jump Desktop connect to a Mac?

Jump Desktop is really two apps. Jump Desktop is the app you connect from. Jump Desktop Connect is the app you install on the computer you want to reach. In Jump’s words, Connect “is the app that makes a computer available for remote access.”¹

On a Mac, Connect streams the screen over Jump’s own protocol, Fluid Remote Desktop. To set it up, you install Connect on the Mac, sign in to a Jump Desktop account in your web browser, and then “sign in with the same account in Jump Desktop on the device you connect from.”¹ The Mac shows up in your account, and you connect to it from there.

It runs through Jump’s cloud

By default, Jump describes its connections as cloud-managed: “The Jump cloud authorizes the user and establishes the connection.” It tries a direct, peer-to-peer connection first, and “falls back to public relays when the network blocks a direct connection.”² Jump says Fluid connections are “always end-to-end encrypted” and that its “servers and relays forward the connection but can’t decrypt it.”³

That’s what makes Jump easy to use across the internet. It also means a normal connection to your own Mac depends on a Jump account and on Jump’s service being up to authorize it.

There is a way around the cloud. Cloudless Fluid lets you reach a host “by hostname or IP address, with no Jump cloud service in the connection path,” and sign in with a local account on the Mac.⁴ But it’s only available on Jump Desktop for Teams Enterprise, which lists at $14.99 per user per month.³

What Connect needs on a Mac

Jump’s documentation lists the macOS permissions Connect asks for⁵:

• Screen Recording, which “streams the Mac display to the device you connect from.”
• Accessibility, which “allows remote control of the mouse and keyboard.”
• Remote Desktop, on macOS 14 and later, which “maintains unattended access.” Jump notes that Connect can’t detect whether it’s been granted, so you have to check it yourself.
• Microphone, which is optional and streams the Mac’s audio.

What does Jump Desktop cost?

Jump Desktop’s pricing is friendlier than most. The individual plan is listed at $0, and Jump says the free version “is fully functional and can be used for personal and business use.”³ The catch is which apps are free. In Jump’s words, it’s “free on Windows, Android, and the web. The Mac and iPhone or iPad apps are a one-time purchase.”³ The Mac app is $34.99 on the Mac App Store⁶, and the iPhone and iPad app is a separate purchase.

The individual plan also has limits that matter if you work on your Mac for hours at a time. Jump’s pricing page lists it with one virtual display, video bandwidth of up to 20 Mbps, two-channel audio, and Good or High color. Up to four virtual displays, up to 60 Mbps, 10-bit color, and Cloudless Fluid are all listed under Teams Enterprise.³ Teams plans are per-user subscriptions, starting with Teams Pro at $7.49 per user per month.

Why use RDP instead?

Jump Desktop was built to reach any computer from anywhere, including machines behind networks you can’t set up and people you’re supporting. That’s why it has accounts, a cloud that brokers connections, and relays. If you’re getting into your own Mac, from your own network or over your own VPN, most of that is overhead.

RDP is a standard protocol, not a product. It’s what Windows Remote Desktop uses, and clients for it already exist everywhere: Remote Desktop Connection is built into every copy of Windows, Microsoft’s Windows App runs on Windows and Mac, and FreeRDP runs on Linux. Fluid only works between Jump’s own apps.

It connects straight to the computer. An RDP client connects to the Mac’s address and signs in with a username and password on that Mac. There’s no account to sign in to, no cloud authorizing the connection, and no relay. That’s the setup Jump offers as Cloudless Fluid on its Enterprise plan.

It was built to carry a whole desktop. RDP was designed as a set of channels inside one encrypted connection: graphics, input, audio, clipboard, files, and more. Modern RDP streams the screen as H.264 video, which a Mac can encode in dedicated hardware, and the client picks the resolution. If you want the wire-level details, RDP vs. VNC walks through how RDP works.

The catch has always been that macOS doesn’t come with an RDP server, which is why apps like Jump Desktop bring their own protocol to the Mac. ProRDP fills that gap with RDP instead.

Meet ProRDP

ProRDP is a native RDP server for macOS. You install it on the Mac you want to reach, in place of Jump Desktop Connect, and from then on any standard RDP client can connect to it. To the client, your Mac looks like a Windows PC.

A few things that matter if you’re coming from Jump Desktop:

• It’s free for home and personal use. There’s no account, no sign-up, no device limit, and no features held back for a higher plan. See Licensing.
• Nothing goes through the cloud. Your client connects straight to your Mac by its address, and you sign in with ProRDP’s username and password. There’s no relay and no account standing between you and your own computer. To reach the Mac from outside your home network, connect over a VPN.
• Every connection is encrypted. ProRDP uses TLS on every connection, with Network Level Authentication on by default.
• You don’t need to buy a client. Connect from the RDP client that’s already on your Windows PC, or from Windows App or FreeRDP.
• It’s fast. ProRDP captures the screen with ScreenCaptureKit and encodes it on the Mac’s hardware video encoder, at up to 60 fps and up to 4K, with a bitrate you can set from 20 to 120 Mbit/s. An idle desktop sends almost nothing.
• It uses all your monitors. A client with several monitors gets up to four, each a full-screen display.

Jump Desktop vs. ProRDP on a Mac

This comparison is for using Jump Desktop to reach your own Mac, with Jump Desktop Connect installed on the Mac. The Jump Desktop column uses Jump’s own documentation and pricing page wherever they say something, checked in October 2026.

Plans and prices can change from time to time, so it’s worth checking Jump Desktop’s pricing page³ for the latest numbers.

When Jump Desktop still makes sense

To be fair to Jump Desktop, it does a lot that ProRDP doesn’t try to. If you need to reach computers on networks you can’t set up a VPN for, want to connect from a phone, tablet, or web browser, or manage access for a team across Windows, Mac, and Linux machines, Jump Desktop handles all of that well. ProRDP is for one thing: getting into your own Mac with a fast, encrypted, standard RDP connection.

How do you switch from Jump Desktop to ProRDP?

Switching takes a few minutes, and you can leave Jump Desktop Connect installed until you’re happy:

1. Install ProRDP on your Mac and grant it the Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions it asks for.
2. Set a username and password in the Account pane. These are what your RDP client signs in with.
3. Click Start in the General pane. ProRDP shows you the address to connect to.
4. Connect from your RDP client. On Windows, open Remote Desktop Connection, type the Mac’s address, and sign in. On a Mac, use Windows App. On Linux, use FreeRDP.

Once it’s working, you can uninstall Jump Desktop Connect, remove the Mac from your Jump account, and revoke the permissions you gave Connect in System Settings › Privacy & Security.

For a full walkthrough from each kind of client, see How to RDP into a Mac and Getting started.