Free Software Clean Mac Recommended
Utilities • Updated on Apr.8, 2020
ThinkMobiles is one of most trusted companies conducting IT & software reviews since 2011. Paper jamz pro app. Our mission is to provide best reviews, analysis, user feedback and vendor profiles. Learn more about review process. Test & comparison of 15 free registry cleaner tools. Clean Master for PC is best free PC cleaner for Windows 10, 8, 7 that helps you clean your system and keep your privacy intact in 2020. Here, its advanced system scans over 1000+ programs with single-click while searching and removing residual & junk files to clean up system storage. Best malware software, free download - Mac Malware Remover, Apple Flashback malware removal tool, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, and many more programs.
Mac devices are normally great, you know. It has a smooth User Interface, a smoother integration and most importantly the smoothest workflow.
However, there is a slight problem: running low on space. People are always worried about losing storage space on their macOS devices if they store too much data.
So, do we need a cleaner of macOS?
Background
Starting with macOS Sierra, Apple offered an elegant space-clearing solution feature, Optimized Storage.
Optimized Storage in macOS Sierra and later can save space by storing your content in the cloud and making it available on demand. To make room for more storage, it automatically saves files, photos, movies, and email attachments to the cloud.
Each file stays right where you last saved it, and downloads when you open it. Files that you’ve used recently remain on your Mac, along with optimized versions of your photos.
This feature helps you deal with junk like duplicates, old email attachments and downloads — and automatically examines them to delete the files or move them to the cloud.
The result of the optimization is more free space on your hard drive, but several gigabytes of cloud storage taken up, which you could’ve used for other things.
Mac cleaner and productivity
While Optimized Storage is an amazing built-in feature, it doesn’t help many users who use their Mac for data intensive tasks.
It’s not possible to keep paying Apple according to the storage space taken up. As we mentioned above, Optimized Storage would only be moving your junk files to iCloud, and the iCloud space is limited. When you cross the 5GB free limit, you will have to start paying for the extra space you are getting. When you have GBs of junk data to keep on the cloud, this doesn’t make sense.
Using a dedicated Mac cleaner software – with the right expectations (and a bit of circumspection), you will be able to do this without iCloud. The benefits are more…
- you don’t have to spend extra money if you can find free space in your Mac itself.
- with all junk getting accumulated on your Mac (and if your Mac is so old that it has HDD instead of SSD) over the years, periodic cleaning gives a performance boost.
- save your time and have greater safety to identify safe-to-delete files than non-technical users who remove the important system files.
- do regular surveillance and increase process effectiveness.
What makes a good Mac cleaner app
We used the following criteria to find the most effective tool for cleaning a Mac:
- Is it intuitive and easy to use?
- Is the core feature to clean junk files, trash, unused and copies in different system sections?
- Does it provide smart decisions and work efficiently?
- Does it check your Mac health?
- Is the price fair that striking a good balance between affordability and powerful functionality?
- Is it compatible with the latest macOS version?
- Is the app available in different languages to be used effectively in different countries and by different users?
Disclosure: We sometimes use affiliate links which means that, at zero cost to you, we may earn a commission if you buy something through our links.
Our pick: Macpaw CleanMyMac X
CleanMyMac is an all-in-one cleaning software for devices running macOS. It’s developed and distributed by a company named Macpaw, which develops other utility programs as well.
However, CleanMyMac can be by far the biggest success — for all the good reasons. With the 10th anniversary edition, CleanMyMac has completed its transformation into a comprehensive cleanup, optimization, and management tool, it is X times better, so call it CleanMyMac X.
Qnap backup software for mac. Of course, yes. Warning Stop READING or WRITING to the NAS immediately when you find that you have deleted or lost your data. No matter how you get your files or folders lost on a QNAP drive, you can get them back from 1 Recycle bin (if enabled), and individual users might ask NAS administrators for help; 2 Third-party QNAP software.To recover deleted files from the Network Recycle Bin, right-click the files in the @Recycle folder and select 'RECOVER'.To quickly and thoroughly undelete files from QNAP network drives with software, select a reliable, trustworthy yet powerful one as recommended here, and learn with the detailed user guide. QNAP data recovery is possible. Discontinue backups (temporarily) that write to the NAS drives.
What makes this software great?
CleanMyMac X ticked all of our checkmarks to become that one, much-needed cleaner software for 2020. By bringing up all the features around cleanup, privacy, security, and app management in one place, this app makes sure that you do not have to fall back to the numerous apps that single-out these operations.
Here we will look at the three factors that make this software great — the design, how it works with speeding up and cleaning up your Mac, and its ability to offer protection along with other services.
Design
CleanMyMac X has got a lot of rounded corners, brightly-colored icons, faux transparent backgrounds, and a nice ombre effect throughout. It helps you manage your Mac without feeling like it’s rocket science.
Once you have downloaded and installed CleanMyMac X on your Mac, you will be able to see the welcome window. Here, you can start a Smart Scan to understand the basic issues with your Mac. It will let you find issues and areas of improvement.
Other than Smart Scan, CleanMyMac X is divided into five main sections that can be accessed from the sidebar. Each window in the menu bar tells you what the particular feature would do.
CleanMyMac X Interface consists of a CleanMyMac Assistant as well. You can access the feature by clicking the icon on the top-right portion of the window. If you cannot find a particular section, you can simply ask the Assistant. There is also a Silent Mode where the Assistant does not provide voluntary response.
Altogether, the design aspect of CleanMyMac X is top-notch. We haven’t seen many Mac cleaner UIs that make the cleaning process this easier.
Cleanup and Speedup
Cleanup and speedup are the highlighting features of CleanMyMac X. They form the core functionalities of the app and a large part of how it works revolves around them.
Unwanted files on your Mac tend to clog up the disk space and slow down your device. CleanMyMac X, with a single click, performs a thorough scan of your disk. It searches for a variety of files, including duplicates, and helps you clear them one by one — all with the click of a button.
It also helps you clean those unneeded files such as the outdated caches, broken downloads, logs, and useless localizations. You can also use it to remove tons of clutter that lurks in apps such as iTunes, Mail, Photos, and save gigabytes of those large hidden files that are generally unnoticeable.
Depending on the various needs, you can choose from the five available options to remove tons of clutter that lurks in apps such as System, Photos, Mail, iTunes, Trash and save gigabytes of those large hidden files that are generally unnoticeable. All this information is smart-selected and you can remove them without any fear about system crashes.
From our test, CleanMyMac X removing the massive amounts of unused junk. One of the best examples of this is when it scrubs the junk out of Photos. Before reviewing CleanMyMac X, we had no idea that Photos left so much junk scattered all over our computer. Before this turns into a rant about Photos, the reason that made an impression on us is that it optimizes the photograph library and removes local iCloud cache files as well. CleanMyMac X demonstrates the level of thought put into this software.
Experts suggest that you should use both CleanMyMac X and Optimized Storage from Apple. This way, you will find enough space to store files on Mac, while moving junk stuff to available iCloud space.
Coming to the Speedup bit, the optimization part of this section helps you recognize and quit apps that take up a lot of resources. If you did not know, hung applications can keep consuming a lot of resources. CleanMyMac X will recognize such apps and quit them. This section also shows you the Login Items and Launch Agents. In short, CleanMyMac X lets you optimize how your Mac behaves when it’s booted up.
Maintenance part of CleanMyMac X section is even better. In a single click, you can improve the performance of drives, eliminate application errors and improve search performance. Indeed, CleanMyMac X does a lot of things in the background. The tool will show you a bunch of options like Cleaning RAM, Flush DNS Cache and Reindex Spotlight. Select the ones you need and hit the ‘Run’ button. You’re all good to go.
We really loved these features, mainly because we had a snappier Mac experience after using them.
Protection and More
Of course, your Mac needs protection. Understanding this, Macpaw has added some security and privacy-oriented features in the latest CleanMyMac X.
Malware Removal is the biggest feature in this sector. With this, you will be able to scan your Mac device to find possible threats like viruses, adware, spyware etc. CleanMyMac X is using trusted malware databases to recognize the threats.
Privacy is yet another useful section in the CleanMyMac X Protection section. You will be able to deal with many aspects of digital privacy here. For instance, CleanMyMac X will remove browsing traces, such as your browsing history, saved WiFi networks, and autofill data.
CleanMyMac X also offers you the option to uninstall and update apps, lets you find large and old files on your Mac. The app even scans your system for vulnerabilities and hazards like adware, viruses, spyware, and cryptocurrency miners. These can mine your data and send out sensitive information. With CleanMyMac X at work, you can be assured that none of these hazards hinder the performance of your machine along with your privacy.
Long story short, CleanMyMac X lets you stop worrying about data security and files taking up space.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
CleanMyMac X is a great app — quite an all rounder when it comes to cleaning up your Mac. However, it does stand under the radar. We’ll explain how:
If you do not use the app with precaution, you might end up losing some precious data. Yes, safety checks can prevent that, but you must keep an eye out for it. It would’ve been great if the app could make these distinctions stand out — could clearly highlight what you are going to delete, and whatnot. Something like an added layered warning for those who have a habit of clicking on options without reading around them.
Another thing that you might think of before buying the app is that there are numerous free alternatives available on the web that do what this app does — only not in such a comprehension, all-in-one unit. Besides, the alternatives that perform these individual tasks are also cheaper.
However, we don’t think these problems are deal breakers. You can make sure that you do not lose your important data by following each and every step of disk cleanup and making sure that you have your eyes on the checkmarks.
And yes! It does make sense to go for a cheaper alternative, but isn’t it nice to have all the alternatives bundled into one, offered at one price — no hassle of app conflicts, multiple scans, and more.
Availability and pricing
CleanMyMac X works on macOS 10.10 and later, including the newly released macOS 10.15 Catalina. A free trial version is available for download.
Macpaw is charging $39.95 per year for a subscription to CleanMyMac, or $89.95 for a one-time purchase. You can purchase it from official website store, or get it from Setapp subscription.
The paid competitions
For now, CleanMyMac X isn’t a solid contender. In fact, we’d come across other extremely promising competitors too. So, if you are not ready to spend on CleanMyMac X, you can try one of the following tools.
For years, the standard in PC cleaner software has been CCleaner, and now Mac users can benefit from the experience that the Piriform developers bring to the table. CCleaner Professional is quick and easy to use program, which speeds up your Mac and secures it. Although CCleaner has a free version, there are only two basic features described on the website as “faster computer” and “privacy protection”. At the premium level with price $24.95 you have Automatic Browser Cleaning, Real-time Monitoring, Automatic Updating and what they call “Priority Support”.
There are 3 tabs – “Cleaner”, “tools” and “option”. These 3 ways CCleaner helps you remove junk files, trash files, unused data, unwanted files and software and many more such things which decrease mac’s performance, enabling it to run faster and smoother. It also removes cookies, browsing history and saved passwords, making your online browsing more secure, so no one can misuse your online. CCleaner cleared almost 3000 files in one go from my system. So, it is effective.
Though CCleaner Professional has many helpful features, it lacks in some things. CCleaner for Mac is beta version, it is not fully featured. Some features are missing from it which are available in the original version. CCleaner is limited to some browsers such as Safari, Firefox and chrome to delete cookies and trash files from them. Windows version of CCleaner has more features.
MacBooster from IObit is a powerful Mac maintenance tool for cleaning up Mac computers, and offers good functionality for its class. MacBooster and CleanMyMac X have quite similar functionality, offering users a number of cleaning options and tools: system cleanup, finding duplicates, deleting large files, uninstalling applications, protecting your Mac from virus and malware, etc.
Start by clicking Clean and Boost for example and four sections – Internet Security, System Cleanup, System Optimization and Disk Clean – are scanned for errors, threats and redundant files. You’re shown how much space will be removed or how many issues require fixing, then find yourself invited to the click the Fix button.
We really like Macbooster’s performance boost tool, which basically lets you shutdown low-level services to speed up your Mac further. If you’re a power user looking to deep-clean your Mac, give the 14-day trial a whirl, after that, it requires a $2.49/month subscription.
Intego Mac Washing Machine is a Mac cleaner that makes it easy to get rid of junk files that slow down your Mac.
This app completes three separate but complementary functions. It scans for unused or obsolete files that can be deleted, it identifies duplicate files, and it lets you manage your desktop. Through the app’s intuitive interface, you can quickly access all features and have your computer running more smoothly in no time.
Overall, the app is fine. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are looking for an app that helps you organize your storage drives and removes unnecessary files.
But here is no quick-look support for files preview and the trial version of this app can only complete the preliminary steps of each function. You get to see what each phase of the scanning process looks like, but to get any real functionality you’ll have to pay $29.99 for an unrestricted license.
The Sensei app is a relatively new app on the market, but it can be another useful tool for your Mac. The app offers a gorgeous UI with lots of great functionality for monitoring nearly all the hardware activity taking place inside your Mac and provides a set of utilities to optimize its performance.
Also included is a generous toolbox of disk cleaning skills. The Optimize section makes short work of login items and launch agents, while the Uninstaller section purges installed apps in tandem with their related system files. The Clean section scans your Mac for large files, Downloads, Disk Images, Old System Cruft, and other categories of files you may be able to delete. Each category is sorted by size, making it a fast way to find big files that will free up space.
While there are no scheduling options, but it is still an effective way to track down the biggest files that are taking up significant amounts of storage.
Sensei runs on macOS Catalina 10.15 or higher. After 14-day free trial, it requires a one-time purchase of $59 or annual subscription ($29 per year) to use.
DaisyDisk is a beautiful yet different disk space analyzer that scans the drives on your Mac and gives you a visual overview of what’s eating up space on your Mac. It displays files in a pinwheel-shaped disk map, letting you quickly locate and clean up large files. You can use the built-in QuickLook preview to see what you might want to get rid of (you can also reveal in Finder to take a closer look).
There’s a collection drawer where you can stage files (or entire segments) for trashing. Once you’ve browsed through and collected things you don’t need, one click clears them out. DaisyDisk is available for just $9.99 from the Mac App Store as well as from their own website (standalone edition). The standalone edition from their own website offers some additional features since it is not bound by Apple’s sandboxing rules.
We really like DaisyDisk’s design with its circular visualizations! But it’s important to note that DaisyDisk does not warn you if you delete something that is needed for your system or even for any application. So please use DaisyDisk carefully.
Disk Doctor is developed in the UK and was awarded the ‘Mac Gem’ award by MacWorld in 2013. The app focuses on disk cleanup only. It scans and removes application caches, browser logs , iTunes temp caches and other unnecessary files from your hard drive. The interface is very simple and professional as well as easy to use.
The limitation of Disk Doctor is that the utility is designed to work only with your Mac’s boot volume. You can’t scan an external volume and free up disk space on it.
It could use a few improvements and additional features, but at its current price of just $9.99, it’s worth having around.
The free alternatives
Free Software Clean Mac Recommended Download
Why do you let your pretty Mac get cluttered with apps? AppCleaner is a small and simple utility we’ll include it anyway, because it comes in handy when it comes time to uninstall an application and it is FREE. Sure, the Mac makes it a lot easier to get rid of unwanted software than Windows, but don’t be thoroughly cleaned — even if you’ve dragged a Mac application icon into the Trash, that doesn’t delete the Mac app’s entire footprint. Often times the app will leave behind configuration files, cache folders and other remnants that occupy disk space.
AppCleaner does a serviceable job of locating all the files associated with the app, and provides an index so you know just how much space they’re taking up. Once you’ve got them all accounted for, click the Delete button and banish them forever.
OnyX is another free multifunctional utility that can verify your Mac’s startup disk, run a variety of system scripts for cleaning tasks manually and rebuilding Mac.
The developer offers individually specific OnyX versions for every major version of OS system. When a new version of macOS comes out, just revisit the OnyX site and grab the latest release. Every version is free, and very small, so you aren’t wasting storage space downloading whichever one you need.
It’s handy for deleting caches, removing redundant and excessive files and folders, rebuilding databases and indexes, and making your machine run more smoothly and with added disk space.
Just be careful playing with these settings. They’re helpful and can really improve your Mac’s performance, but if you don’t know what a given setting is supposed to do, you’re probably best off not changing it.
As a free Mac cleaner, Onyx comes with an extremely high learning curve. We think it’s great for tech savvy and experienced Mac users to take significantly more time to get around and find what you need, then learn how to use it, but the result pays.
Additional things you can try to clean your Mac further
Keep the macOS desktop clean
Many people use Desktop as their primary destination for files. But this could be tricky because your OS treats every file on a desktop as an active window. When items on your desktop are too many, you’ll have the turtle-like speed. Try to keep the desktop clean and minimal with fewer icons and applications.
Grab an external storage
It is no mystery what is filling up your storage – files. To prevent your files from clogging up the system, you might consider saving your less-used files to a location away from your computer. An external drive will be ideal.
Stay current with macOS
Apple releases new versions of OS X as free upgrades, so there is no reason not to keep current. New versions of macOS contain performance improvements that often use more system resources.
In closing
So now you have a handful list of Mac cleaning software with different customization that can help you accomplish your goals.
Best Mac Clean Up Software
After carefully evaluating all the popular Mac cleaner solutions, we believe that CleanMyMac X beats them all in overall performance, ease of use and flexibility.
It should also be noted that CleanMyMac X is used by more than 5 Million Mac users across the globe. Just in case you didn’t know, it’s recommended by popular websites like TheNextWeb and MacWorld, which also show the trustworthiness.
Free Mac Clean Up Software
The apps that we reviewed are quite good with managing your disk space, and when used with Mac’s default built-in Optimized Storage, they are sure to yield fruitful results. Happy cleaning!