Coming from Windows
Ask this question anywhere and you get five answers. Four of them are Spotlight wearing a different coat.
"Just use Spotlight / Alfred / Raycast." Reasonable if your searches are for documents and apps. It misses the point for anyone who used Everything, because all three rely on Spotlight's index and inherit its exclusions. The specific test: search for something inside ~/Library. If it does not appear, this class of tool will keep disappointing you.
"Find Any File." The most useful answer in the list. It really does find everything, because it looks properly each time rather than consulting an index. It is also slower per search for the same reason, and that trade is the entire difference between it and Everything.
"EasyFind." Same architecture as Find Any File, free, older interface. Fine, and genuinely still maintained.
"HoudahSpot." Excellent tool, wrong shape for this problem. It is a research interface over Spotlight, so the exclusions come with it.
"Use find in the Terminal." Correct and complete, and nobody types a find invocation mid-thought. Worth knowing; not a replacement for a search box.
"Nothing exists, macOS just can't do it." Half right, and the half that is right is worth understanding: nothing indexes in two seconds like Everything did, because APFS has no MFT. Everything after the first index is achievable.
Ask: *does this maintain its own complete filename index?*
Everything was the third kind. If that is what you liked about it, the first two categories will keep feeling wrong no matter how well made they are.
Building one means walking millions of directories, handling FSEvents per volume, persisting an index that survives reboots and unplugged drives, and asking for Full Disk Access — which rules out the Mac App Store entirely, since sandboxed apps cannot read your filesystem.
That is a lot of work for a category Windows got for free from NTFS. It is why the answer to this question has been unsatisfying for fifteen years, and why the tools that do it charge money.
Find Any File comes up most often and deserves to. It is complete, cheap, and needs no setup; it is slower per search because it does not keep an index.
Building and maintaining a complete index is real work, and Full Disk Access rules out the App Store. The free options all search live or lean on Spotlight.
It is good for launching and for recent files. It uses Spotlight's index, so it will not find things Spotlight excludes.
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