Free Alternative to CleanMyMac

I started using Pearcleaner a few months ago after getting annoyed with leftover preference files from old Steam games. It is written in Swift. The app feels incredibly fast on Apple Silicon. The user interface is strictly utilitarian. You search for an app. You hit delete. Pearcleaner hunts down the associated folders in your Library and trashes them. I tested it against a particularly stubborn Adobe Premiere installation. It found 42 separate hidden files that Adobe's own uninstaller missed. The app requires Full Disk Access to work properly. Giving an open-source tool that level of permission feels much safer than giving it to a commercial app with an active marketing department. The developer updates it constantly. I noticed version 3.0 added a leftover file scanner that actually works. It scans your system for remnants of apps you deleted months ago. I highly recommend running this immediately after installing it to see what garbage is lurking in your Application Support folders.

I have installed AppCleaner on every Mac I have owned since 2010. FreesoftMac created a utility that does exactly one thing perfectly. You drag an application icon from your Finder window into the tiny AppCleaner box. It instantly lists all the associated .plist files and caches. You click remove. That is the entire experience. I love software that refuses to suffer from feature creep. Version 3.6 still looks largely the same as it did a decade ago. It works flawlessly on macOS Sonoma. I occasionally find that it misses deep system extensions installed by complex audio plugins. You will still need to manually hunt down some Audio Unit files in your Library if you do music production. It handles 99 percent of standard Mac apps without breaking a sweat. It is a tiny 7MB binary that stays entirely out of your way until you need it.

Titanium Software updates OnyX for every single major macOS release. You must download the exact version matching your operating system. I am currently running the macOS Sequoia build. OnyX exposes the hidden maintenance scripts that Apple buries deep inside the system. I use it to rebuild broken Spotlight indexes. I use it to clear corrupted font caches when design apps start crashing. The interface is frankly intimidating. You are presented with checkboxes for things like Launch Services database and XPC cache. Clicking the wrong box will not destroy your Mac. It might reset your custom folder views or force you to log back into websites. I run OnyX about twice a year when my system starts acting strangely. It fixes weird graphical glitches better than anything else I have tested. Just prepare to restart your computer when it finishes.

When my MacBook Air ran out of space last week, I immediately downloaded OmniDiskSweeper. The Omni Group built this tool years ago. It remains the fastest way to find out exactly what is eating your storage. The app scans your drive and presents a simple column view ordered by file size. There are no fancy graphs. You just get cold hard numbers. I found a 40GB Final Cut Pro render file hiding in a buried project folder within minutes. You have to be careful. OmniDiskSweeper will happily let you delete vital system files if you wander into the wrong directory. I strictly use it to scan my User folder. The app recalculates folder sizes in real time as you delete things. It is incredibly satisfying to watch your free space numbers tick upward.

Sometimes you need to see your storage problems visually. GrandPerspective draws a giant colorful block map of your hard drive. Every file is a rectangle. Bigger files get bigger rectangles. I used it to clean up an external SSD full of old photography backups. I spotted a massive block of duplicate .dmg installer files instantly. The open-source nature means the UI is incredibly basic. Hovering over a block shows the file path at the bottom of the window. I prefer this visual approach over text lists when I am dealing with nested folders of video assets. You can filter by file type to highlight every single .mp4 file on your drive in bright red. It takes some getting used to. Once you understand how to read the treemap, you will clear gigabytes of space in seconds.

Patrick Wardle writes the best Mac security tools available today. KnockKnock shows you exactly what is set to run automatically on your Mac. CleanMyMac charges money to monitor your background items. KnockKnock does it for free with far more accuracy. I ran it on a test machine and found three leftover update daemons from apps I deleted in 2021. It integrates directly with VirusTotal. You can click a button and instantly see if a background script is known malware. The app is purely an auditing tool. It shows you the files. You have to go into Finder and delete them yourself. I appreciate this hands-off approach. It prevents you from accidentally bricking your system by deleting a required Apple kernel extension.

If OnyX scares you, Titanium Software offers Maintenance. It strips away all the advanced parameter tweaks. You get a simple checklist of caches to clear. I install this on my parents' computers. When they complain their Mac is running slow, I tell them to open Maintenance, leave the default boxes checked, and hit run. It executes the standard Apple maintenance scripts and clears the temporary files. It is the closest thing to a clean my Mac button you can get without paying a subscription fee. I tested version 3.0.2 on macOS Sonoma. It cleared 8GB of corrupted application caches in about three minutes. The required system reboot is annoying but necessary to rebuild the font caches properly.

CleanMyMac features an app updater tab that checks for new versions of your installed software. Latest does the exact same thing for free. I have about 40 applications installed outside the Mac App Store. Latest scans my Applications folder. It checks both the App Store and Sparkle-based update feeds. I open it once a week. It lists all available updates in a clean interface. I click Update All and watch it work. It occasionally fails to update apps that use proprietary installers like Adobe Creative Cloud. It handles standard Mac apps perfectly. The developer built it entirely in Swift. It feels incredibly native and lightweight. It saves me from opening 40 different apps just to trigger their individual update prompts.

Sloth is a graphical interface for the lsof command line tool. Every Mac user has tried to empty the trash only to get an error saying a file is in use. Sloth fixes this. It shows you every open file and socket on your system. I filter the list by the file name I want to delete. Sloth shows me the exact background process holding it hostage. I kill the process right from the app. It is a highly technical tool. I find it absolutely necessary for dealing with stubborn system quirks. Version 3.2 runs perfectly on Apple Silicon. You will see thousands of mysterious system processes running. You must be careful not to kill core macOS services.

I have to mention Disk Inventory X even though it rarely gets updated. It is a staple of the Mac freeware ecosystem. It works similarly to GrandPerspective. It provides a more structured view with a file tree on the left and a treemap on the right. I tested version 1.3 on macOS Sonoma. It still works perfectly. The app struggles with APFS snapshot sizing. It will sometimes report different free space numbers than the Finder. I use it strictly for finding big media files rather than calculating exact disk usage. The interface looks hilariously old. It still uses the brushed metal design language from 2005. It remains a rock-solid tool for hunting down forgotten video projects.