HighballHighball › Compare › Highball vs CrossOver: an honest comparison for Mac gamers
Highball vs CrossOver
CrossOver is the paid product this whole category is measured against, and it deserves that position. CodeWeavers has been shipping it for over twenty years, employs Wine's maintainer, and funds most of Wine's development. Highball runs on Wine. So does CrossOver. The difference is that CodeWeavers pays for the work and Highball does not.
That is the honest starting point. What follows is where the two actually differ: price, openness, and what happens to your fixes over time.
The short version
| Highball | CrossOver | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | CrossOver+ lists at $74/yr and is routinely discounted: $54 on the store on 29 August 2026. CrossOver Life is $494. 14-day full trial. |
| Licence | GPL-3 | Proprietary app on top of open-source Wine |
| Account | None | Licence key and activation |
| Updates | Auto-updating, notarized DMG, no gate | 12 months of updates per licence. An expired licence keeps the last version you had, but stops receiving updates. |
| Compatibility data | 101 curated games, open licence, reusable | 22,655 applications, proprietary |
| Renderers | DXVK, DXMT, D3DMetal, switchable per bottle | DXVK, DXMT, D3DMetal, Wine D3D, switchable per bottle |
| Kernel anti-cheat | No | No |
| Support | GitHub issues | Email and phone support from staff |
| Requirements | Apple Silicon, macOS 14+ | Apple Silicon and Intel today. CrossOver 27 drops Intel Macs and 32-bit bottles. |
What CrossOver does better
Breadth, by a factor of two hundred. CodeWeavers' compatibility database covers 22,655 applications, 4,044 of them with one-click CrossTie install profiles. Highball's curated database has 101 games. There is no version of this comparison where that gap is spun as a positive. If your title is obscure, or if it is not a game at all, CrossOver is far more likely to already know about it.
Somebody is paid to chase regressions. Game launchers break constantly, and CodeWeavers has staff whose job is to unbreak them. Their 26.3.0 release in July 2026 fixed Epic Games Launcher downloads and GOG Galaxy failing to load after vendor updates. 26.1.0 fixed a Battle.net install. Those turnarounds are measured in weeks and they happen whether or not anyone in the community feels like it that month.
D3DMetal, licensed. CrossOver bundles and updates Apple's D3DMetal under an arrangement with Apple. That arrangement is theirs. It is the one renderer a free app cannot simply ship.
A post-Rosetta answer that exists. Rosetta 2 is on the way out, and CodeWeavers shipped a native ARM64 macOS preview built on a custom FEX fork in July 2026, with CrossOver 27 targeted for early 2027. The preview is rough by their own account, and CrossOver 27 will drop Intel Macs and 32-bit bottles. But it is a real, testable answer, and Highball does not have one to show you today. If you are buying for 2027, that is a genuine reason to buy CrossOver.
Funding Wine. This is not a marketing line. CodeWeavers employs Alexandre Julliard and writes a large share of Wine's commits. Money spent on CrossOver reaches the people who make everything in this category possible, Highball included.
Where Highball is different
Free, and the fixes never expire. Highball is GPL-3, auto-updating, and there is no licence timer. The sharpest version of the difference: with CrossOver, when a game update breaks something in month fourteen of a twelve-month licence, the fix is behind a renewal. Highball has nothing to renew. That is a structural difference, not a discount.
No account, no telemetry. Download the notarized DMG, open it, install a game. Steam is one click, Epic runs through the open-source Legendary client, and there is a Battle.net recipe. Install guide.
The data is open and reusable. Curated entries are CC0, ProtonDB-derived predictions are ODbL, and the anti-cheat data keeps AreWeAntiCheatYet's MIT notice. Fork it, ship it in your own tool, no permission needed. CodeWeavers' database is a genuinely better database and it is also theirs. How the data works.
Verdicts name a renderer, and dated runs record the engine build. That structure is the point: a game that black-screens under one translation layer often runs under another, so a single verdict per game throws away the part you need. Being straight about the fill: 40 of the 101 curated entries have no renderer recorded yet, only the 5 verified ones carry a date and an engine build, and exactly one carries a macOS version. The schema is ahead of the data, and the empty rows are printed as open asks rather than hidden.
Being straight about the coverage. The per-renderer structure is real. The coverage is not there yet. Of 101 curated games, 5 are verified by hand on real hardware, and today no game has two dated renderer verdicts. The rest of the database is 39 titles blocked by kernel anti-cheat and 12,491 ProtonDB-derived predictions, which are odds from Linux, not answers about a Mac. Anyone telling you a young database beats a twenty-year-old one on coverage is selling something. Look for yourself.
Anti-cheat: both give the same answer
Neither app runs kernel-level anti-cheat, and CodeWeavers has never claimed otherwise. Their own policy says they will not attempt it. Fortnite, Valorant, Rust and Apex do not run under either tool.
The picture is per-title rather than per-vendor, which is the part most comparisons get wrong. Helldivers 2 and Elden Ring both run under CrossOver despite carrying anti-cheat. Highball marks 39 database titles as blocked and shows that in your library before you start the download. The full explanation.
Which should you use
Buy CrossOver if you need Windows applications rather than games, want the broadest catalogue, want someone to email when a game breaks, want an ARM64 story before Rosetta goes away, or simply want to fund Wine. All five are good reasons and the 14-day trial costs nothing to check. CrossOver at CodeWeavers
Do not pick Highball if you are on an Intel Mac or macOS 13 or older: it requires Apple Silicon and macOS 14+. Do not pick it if you need a non-game Windows app, if you need a named human accountable for a fix landing on a schedule, or if your game is not in the database and you have no appetite for trying three renderers yourself.
Use Highball if you play a handful of games on Steam, Epic or Battle.net, you would rather switch renderers by hand than trust an Auto setting, you want compatibility data you can take and reuse, or you do not want your fixes attached to a renewal date.
Also worth reading: Highball vs GameHub and Highball vs Whisky. And running both Highball and a CrossOver licence is a completely sane setup. They do not conflict.