TeX Live is the standard distribution of TeX, LaTeX, and related programs produced by TeX Users Groups across the world. The distribution runs on the Macintosh, Windows, Linux, and Unix machines, using the same packages and fonts on all of these platforms. The binary programs are compiled separately for each platform, but from the same source code. The icon at the top right of our web pages is a link which takes you to the home page of the English language TeX Users Group (TUG).

MacTeX is a package which installs TeX Live on the Macintosh. The package is notarized by Apple and uses Apple's standard install technology. It contains native code for both Intel and Arm processors. When installation is complete, the software is fully configured and ready to use. The icon at the top left of our web pages is a link which takes you to this MacTeX home page.

The MacTeX working group inside TUG provides two install packages. One, BasicTeX, is relatively small, about 90 MB, but fully capable of typesetting standard TeX and LaTeX documents. The other, MacTeX, is much larger and includes essentially all software available for typesetting with TeX-like systems, including TeX, LaTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, ConTeXt, etc. This complete system supports almost every written language in use today, including languages of Western Europe, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and a multitude of more obscure scripts.

BasicTeX and MacTeX can coexist on the same machine, so users experimenting with TeX may reasonably install BasicTeX to try it out. The full MacTeX is recommended if you are certain that you will use TeX, even if you are a beginner, because any example in a book will automatically work and no time will be wasted adding extra missing components to the distribution.

With MacTex you are getting a simple yet powerful LaTeX/ TeX editor. It's built exclusively for macOS, distributed as a lightweight package.