Duet Display alternatives that don't require a subscription (2026)
Duet's move to subscription left a lot of people looking for a one-time-purchase alternative. Here are the real options, ranked.
Why people are looking
Duet Display launched in 2014 as a one-time purchase — €19.99 or so, depending on the year and the App Store. For nearly a decade it was the answer when someone asked, “How do I use my iPad as a second monitor for my Mac without paying Apple’s hardware tax?”
Then in 2022, Duet’s pricing model flipped. The App Store listing became free-to-download, but the actual functionality was gated behind subscriptions: Duet Starter at €3.99 / month or €44.99 / year, Duet Air at €5.99 / month or €59.99 / year, and Duet Pro at €7.99 / month or €89.99 / year. Long-time customers who’d paid €19.99 for “the lifetime of the product” suddenly found themselves looking at a recurring bill. Black Friday lifetime deals appear occasionally — usually around $199, which is roughly four years of the cheapest tier.
It’s not unique to Duet. Roughly half of the productivity-app market made the same move between 2018 and 2024. The argument for it is real: subscriptions fund continuous development, and most users would rather have an actively maintained tool than a frozen one. But for users who buy a piece of software, set it up once, and use it for the next decade exactly as it is — and that’s the typical second-monitor user — the recurring fee feels excessive for what they actually need.
This post is a 2026 ranked list of alternatives that aren’t a subscription. Some are free. One is hardware-based. One is what you’re reading on. We tested all of them.
The criteria that matter
Before the rankings, the criteria. For most “iPad as second monitor” users, the decision is shaped by five things:
- Total cost of ownership over five years. A €5/month subscription is €300 over five years. A €9.99 one-time purchase is €9.99. The difference compounds.
- Hardware involvement. A USB-C dongle is great for plug-and-play but adds something to lose.
- Apple ID lock-in. If your iPad and Mac aren’t on the same Apple ID, Sidecar is out — see our other post for that whole rabbit hole.
- Wi-Fi support. Wired-only options are limiting; the cable goes from cable-as-option to cable-as-requirement.
- Visual quality and latency. A laggy or blurry second monitor is worse than no second monitor — you’ll stop using it within a week.
Rank order below uses these criteria.
Alternatives ranked
5th place — Sidecar
Price: Free, bundled with macOS. Apple ID required: Yes — same Apple ID on both devices. Verdict: Sidecar is the obvious “alternative” only if you happen to have devices on the same iCloud account. For most users that’s the disqualifying constraint. It’s not really an alternative for the typical Duet refugee — it’s a different product line entirely.
4th place — Splashtop Wired XDisplay HD
Price: Free. Connection: Wired only. Verdict: A perfectly fine fallback if you don’t mind the visual compression and the cable being mandatory. The encoder is older than Duet’s and shows it; you’ll notice color banding on dark UI surfaces. The user interface hasn’t been seriously updated in years.
If your only requirement is “iPad shows my Mac’s screen, free, and I never use Wi-Fi anyway,” Splashtop covers it.
3rd place — Yam Display
Price: €8.99 one-time (paid app). Connection: Wired only (USB). Verdict: Yam is the single closest comparable to Lightspan’s pricing tier. €8.99 once, no subscription, hardware-encoded video. Quite polished for what it is.
The catch is the wired-only connection. If you only ever use your iPad as a second monitor on your desk, Yam is competitive. If you want to grab the iPad off the dining table and stand at a counter for thirty minutes — or use it on a flight, or in a coffee shop without your USB-C cable — Yam can’t do it.
2nd place — Lightspan
Price: €9.99 one-time. Connection: USB-C cable + Wi-Fi. Apple ID required: No. Verdict: Lightspan is the option built specifically for the post-Duet “I just want to pay once” market. €9.99 once, cable and Wi-Fi both, no Apple ID, no hardware, polished UI.
The technical pipeline is the same modern hardware-encoded H.264 with low-latency rate control that Duet’s premium tiers use, paired with QUIC for resilience on flaky Wi-Fi. End-to-end latency on a clean home network or cable is 40–60 ms.
What Lightspan doesn’t have, in fairness:
- Apple Pencil input forwarded back to the Mac (display only)
- Multi-iPad-per-Mac (one at a time)
- Mac-as-display (driving a Mac from another Mac — that’s Luna’s territory)
For most users wanting “iPad as a Mac monitor without a subscription,” none of those are blockers.
1st place — Luna Display (with caveats)
Price: $119 hardware (USB-C) or $59 (mini-DisplayPort), free app. Connection: Wi-Fi / P2P / USB through the dongle. Apple ID required: No. Verdict: Luna Display is the no-compromise option if your real need is more sophisticated than “second monitor”: specifically if you want to drive a headless Mac mini with no display attached, or do Mac-to-Mac second display, or you want the absolute lowest latency advertised in the category (16 ms). The dongle’s role is to make macOS believe a real DisplayPort monitor is plugged in, which gives Luna a low-level advantage that pure-software solutions can’t match for the headless-Mac case.
The reason it’s #1 here despite the price: Luna nails a use case nothing else does (headless Macs). If you have a Mac mini in a closet and want to operate it from your iPad in another room, Luna is the answer. The reason it’s not the obvious top pick: $119 of hardware to buy, and the dongle is one more thing to lose. For 90 % of users wanting “iPad as second monitor for my MacBook on my desk,” the $109 saved by going with Lightspan funds a respectable dinner.
Decision matrix
| If you need… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Cheapest, cable-only is fine | Yam Display (€8.99) |
| One-time price, cable + Wi-Fi, no Apple ID | Lightspan (€9.99) |
| Headless Mac (no monitor attached) | Luna Display ($119 hardware) |
| Mac-to-Mac second display | Luna Display |
| Heavy Apple Pencil pressure work | Duet Pro (subscription) or Sidecar if eligible |
| Free and you already have same Apple ID | Sidecar |
| Free and you don’t | Deskreen (browser, ~150 ms latency) |
The bulk of normal users land in row two: one-time price, cable + Wi-Fi, no Apple ID lock-in.
Why Lightspan exists
Concretely: someone (us) was tired of recurring bills for software that should be a one-time purchase. The plan was to ship a polished, software-only iPad-as-Mac-display app at a price that doesn’t require a subscription decision every quarter. €9.99 once, no Apple ID requirement, no recurring charge.
Apple handles billing and refunds via the App Store — meaning if Lightspan doesn’t work for you, you go through Apple’s standard refund process at reportaproblem.apple.com, and Apple is generally fair about it. We don’t see your billing data and can’t issue refunds directly; that’s a feature, not a bug.
If a paid app at any price isn’t your thing, Deskreen is open-source and free — see the Sidecar workarounds post for the full free-options inventory.
FAQ
Did Duet really go subscription-only? I have a lifetime license. Existing lifetime licenses still work for the version they were sold for, but new feature releases are gated behind the subscription tiers. Many longtime users describe a slow degradation experience: their old version still works, but updates increasingly nudge them toward a paid upgrade.
Is Duet’s video quality better than Lightspan’s? On the same hardware (M-series Mac, recent iPad), the two are visually indistinguishable. Both use hardware-accelerated H.264 with similar bitrates. Duet has more years of optimization around edge cases; Lightspan uses Apple’s WWDC21 low-latency rate-control mode, which is the cleanest path on modern Macs.
Does Lightspan support Windows hosts? No — Lightspan is Mac → iPad only. Duet supports Windows hosts; if you’re a Windows user, Duet is your option.
What about Astropad Studio — same company as Luna? Astropad Studio is for drawing tablet use, not generic second display. It’s a $80/year subscription aimed at digital artists using Photoshop, Procreate-on-Mac, Affinity Designer, etc. If your use case is “iPad as a second monitor for emails and Slack,” Astropad Studio is the wrong product line.
How does Lightspan handle audio? Audio is forwarded with the video — hardware-encoded as AAC, locked to the video timestamp, toggleable from the Mac menu bar. So if you drag a YouTube video to your iPad-as-second-display, the sound comes out of the iPad too.
The bottom line
Duet’s move to subscription opened a gap. Yam fills the cheapest-cable-only-end. Luna fills the I-need-a-dongle-for-headless-Macs end. Sidecar fills the I-have-the-same-Apple-ID end. Lightspan fills the obvious-middle — one-time price, cable and Wi-Fi, no Apple ID, polished — that nobody else was sitting in.
If that’s the shape of what you want, Lightspan is on the App Store for €9.99 once. The Mac component is at /download.
Or read the deeper comparison: Lightspan vs Duet.