Coming from Windows
There is no free Mac app that does what Everything did. There are free tools that cover parts of it, and they are worth knowing before you spend anything.
mdfind — Spotlight's index from the command line, without the ranking or blending. mdfind -name report is genuinely fast and covers most of what a GUI adds.
find — reads the disk directly, so it finds everything Spotlight excludes. Slow and complete.
locate — a prepared filename database, instant to query. Disabled by default and updated only weekly, which limits it badly.
Together these cover a surprising amount. The gap is that none is pleasant to use dozens of times a day, and none has an interface.
Most free Mac search apps are front-ends over Spotlight's index. That makes them free to build and gives them Spotlight's exclusions — ~/Library, package contents, unmounted volumes. If your problem is *speed*, they help. If your problem is *completeness*, they cannot.
Alfred and Raycast both have free tiers with usable file search, backed by Spotlight.
An independent, complete, live-updating filename index. Building one means walking the whole filesystem, maintaining an on-disk format, subscribing to FSEvents, and shipping outside the App Store with Full Disk Access. Nobody maintains that for free, which is the honest reason this category is paid.
mdfind -name and find -inamelocate if you can live with weekly updatesfind catalogue of archive drivesIf that gets tedious enough to be worth $19, that is the point at which buying makes sense — and not before.
No direct equivalent. mdfind, find and locate are free and cover parts of it.
Basic file search is in the free version. The Powerpack adds workflows and more.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
Download for Mac