Best Tampermonkey Alternatives in 2026
Every Tampermonkey alternative that still works in 2026: Violentmonkey, ScriptCat, Userscripts for Safari, Greasemonkey, and Tweeks, compared by browser, license, and maintenance.
Search for a Tampermonkey alternative and most of what comes up was written before mid-2025, when Chrome finished disabling Manifest V2 extensions and broke several of the managers those pages still recommend. Everything below runs today, on the browsers listed.
One disclosure before the list: we build Tweeks, which shows up near the end, so you know where we stand. We might be biased, but it's pretty darn good, and our users on the Chrome Web Store seem to think so too.
What Chrome broke in 2025
You can't pick a userscript manager in 2026 without knowing what happened in 2025.
Chrome finished its long-promised Manifest V2 phase-out around July 2025 and force-disabled the extensions that hadn't migrated to Manifest V3. Userscript managers were hit harder than most, because running user-supplied code is the one thing MV3 was designed to restrict. The one route left is the chrome.userScripts API, and it only works if the user switches it on themselves. Originally that meant enabling Developer Mode; since Chrome 138 each extension's details page has its own "Allow user scripts" toggle as well. Chrome is making this harder and harder.
Every manager on Chrome now needs that toggle, so don't count the setup step against any one of them. Where the purge does matter is what it killed: a manager that never shipped an MV3 version stopped working on Chrome, however many lists still recommend it. Firefox kept Manifest V2 support and came through untouched. Safari is a separate and trickier world of its own, though Tweeks has that covered too.
Violentmonkey
For years the standard advice was: want an open source Tampermonkey? Install Violentmonkey. It's a barebones, simple manager, MIT-licensed, and it should still work on Firefox. It runs the standard userscript format with the usual GM_* APIs, and most of what's on Greasy Fork works with it unchanged.
On Chrome it's gone. The project is still maintained, with a stable release as recent as May 2026, but it never shipped a Manifest V3 version, so the purge disabled it along with the rest of the MV2 holdouts. The maintainers have had an MV3 issue thread open since 2023 and there's no port in sight. If a roundup recommends Violentmonkey for Chrome, check the publish date. And if the purge stranded your script collection on Chrome, Tweeks runs on today's Chrome and imports your .user.js files unchanged.
If all you need on Firefox is something minimal with code you can read, it does the job.
ScriptCat
ScriptCat is the closest thing to Violentmonkey that still runs on Chrome. It's open source, built on Manifest V3 from the start, and it handles standard userscripts and the GM_* APIs. There are extras like background scripts, scheduled runs, and cloud sync, but underneath it's still a plain userscript manager: the scripts come from Greasy Fork or from you. Tweeks is the exception to that on this list; you describe the change and it writes the script.
It's also a riskier bet than its open license suggests. The project is small, most of its community and documentation live in Chinese (the English docs still have untranslated corners), and open code only protects you if people are actually reading it, which a small community makes less likely. Same "Allow user scripts" toggle as everything else on Chrome.
If open source on a Chromium browser is a hard requirement, this is where you land; just know you're betting on a smaller project than the established names.
Userscripts, the Safari app
Safari users have been the ecosystem's second-class citizens for a decade, and Userscripts is the app that fixed it. It's free and open source, and it runs as a proper Safari extension on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and even visionOS, which means you can run userscripts on an iPhone. It handles JavaScript and CSS injection and supports a solid subset of the GM.* APIs; if a script you need falls outside that subset, Tweeks supports the full GM API on Safari. The last stable release landed in January 2026, with betas still coming since.
It's simpler than the desktop managers by design: no dashboard, your scripts just live in a folder you point it at. For a personal collection on Apple platforms, that simplicity is most of the appeal.
If you want free and open source on Apple devices, this is the one.
Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey started all of this in 2005; people still sometimes call userscripts Greasemonkey scripts. It remains Firefox-only and still gets maintained, though updates arrive at a leisurely pace.
The thing to know before choosing it is API drift. Greasemonkey 4 moved to asynchronous GM.* APIs years ago, and plenty of scripts on Greasy Fork still target the older synchronous GM_* style, so now and then you'll find a script that works in Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey but not here. Tweeks supports both styles, for what it's worth. For scripts you write yourself, none of that matters, and Greasemonkey is a fine, minimal home with two decades of history behind it.
If you're on Firefox and write your own scripts, the original still earns its keep.
OrangeMonkey
OrangeMonkey ranks high in Chrome Web Store searches, and it does work on current Chrome. The listing presents it as a Violentmonkey fork with a refreshed design and says it collects no data.
We couldn't find a public source repository to check any of that against, which makes it the one manager on this list that nobody outside the project can audit. A userscript manager can read and rewrite every page you visit, so that gap matters more here than it would for most extensions. Weigh it accordingly.
If you want a Violentmonkey-style UI on Chrome and you've made peace with the trade, it works.
Tweeks
Every other manager on this list assumes the script already exists: you find it on Greasy Fork or you write it yourself. Tweeks drops that assumption. You open the site, describe the change you want ("hide Shorts", "add a download CSV button to this table"), and Tweeks writes the userscript and installs it. The script stays editable afterward, in code or in plain English, so when the site redesigns and something breaks, the fix is another sentence instead of an evening in DevTools.
Underneath, it's still a standard userscript manager, and it runs on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It imports existing .user.js files, supports the full GM API in both the classic GM_* and modern async GM.* styles, and adds its own for things like model calls and email from a script. There's also a public library where every tweek shows its source before install, like removing Google's sponsored results or hiding YouTube Shorts. We wrote a longer comparison with Tampermonkey if you want the detailed version. On Chrome, it needs the same "Allow user scripts" toggle as every other MV3 manager.
Pick it if you know what you want changed and would rather describe it than build it, or if you want one manager across all three browsers.
Side by side
| Manager | Chrome today | Firefox | Safari / iOS | New modifications | Activity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tampermonkey | Yes | Yes | Yes | Find or write scripts | Maintenance mode (May 2026) |
| Violentmonkey | No | Yes | No | Find or write scripts | Active but slow (May 2026) |
| ScriptCat | Yes | Yes | No | Find or write scripts | Active (June 2026) |
| Userscripts | No | No | Yes | Find or write scripts | Active but slow (January 2026) |
| Greasemonkey | No | Yes | No | Find or write scripts | Maintenance mode (June 2026) |
| OrangeMonkey | Yes | No | No | Find or write scripts | Unknown (store updated March 2026) |
| Tweeks | Yes | Yes | Yes | Describe the change; Tweeks writes the script | Active (daily updates) |
Everything that runs on Chrome needs the per-extension "Allow user scripts" toggle. Dates in the activity column are the latest stable release or store update we could verify as of July 5, 2026.
Which one should you pick?
Start with Tweeks. Yes, it's ours, but the case is easy to make: it's the most modern manager here, it ships updates daily, and it's the only one that writes the script for you. It also runs on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, so it's one decision instead of three.
If you'd rather stick with a traditional manager, the runners-up by browser: on Chrome, keep Tampermonkey if it's working for you and closed source doesn't bother you, or take ScriptCat for open source with the small-project caveats above. On Firefox, Violentmonkey still covers the basics and Greasemonkey rewards people who write their own scripts. On Safari, Userscripts is the free and open source pick.
Whichever you land on, the scripts themselves are portable. The userscript format has outlived every manager on this list so far, and your .user.js files will move with you when the next reshuffle comes.