Mac cleaners · an honest answer
How do you choose a Mac cleaner?
Ask what it shows you before it deletes, whether it rates what is safe, whether you can undo it, and how it is priced. Many people need no cleaner at all: Apple's Storage settings and a free disk visualiser cover a lot. A cleaner earns its place when it finds what those miss and is honest about what is yours.
I made RefreshYourMac, so take this as a maker's suggestion. It is written to help you pick, which sometimes means picking something else.
Do you need one?
Maybe not. If your disk has plenty of free space and the Mac is not slow, a cleaner has little to do. If it is slow, the cause is more often memory or one busy app than "junk" — see why a Mac runs slow. A cleaner is for when the disk keeps filling up and you cannot see why.
Five questions to ask of any cleaner
- Does it show what it found before it deletes? Each category, with its size, and what is in it. A single "clean" button with a total is a decision made for you.
- Does it tell you what is safe? Caches regenerate; your downloads and old projects do not. A cleaner should treat them differently, and say which is which.
- Can you undo it? Moving to the Trash can be undone; deleting outright cannot.
- What does it want from you? An account, telemetry, Full Disk Access, an administrator password. Some of these are needed to do the job; you should know which and why.
- How is it priced? Once or yearly, and whether scanning is free so you can see what it would find before paying.
The kinds of tool, and what each is for
Apple's built-in Storage settings
System Settings → General → Storage. Free, already installed, and good at the big obvious things: large documents, apps by size, iOS backups, iCloud offloading. It will not break down System Data, which is where the hard-to-find space usually is.
Disk visualisers
DaisyDisk, GrandPerspective and OmniDiskSweeper draw your disk as a map or a sorted list, so the largest folders stand out. They show you where the space is and leave the deciding to you. For someone comfortable judging what a folder is, that can be all they need.
Maintenance utilities
OnyX is a long-running free utility for maintenance tasks and hidden settings. It is powerful and assumes you know what each option does.
All-in-one cleaners
CleanMyMac is the best-known, with a polished interface and tools beyond cleaning, such as a malware scanner, an app updater and look-alike photo detection. If you want all of those in one window, it is built for that. How it compares feature by feature, read from its own pages, is on RefreshYourMac vs CleanMyMac and MacKeeper.
RefreshYourMac
A cleaner built around the first two questions. Scanning is free and measures 45 categories on your own Mac; every category is rated Safe to Remove, Review, Move to Backup or Protected, and the rating decides what the buttons may do. Nothing is deleted without asking, and scheduled cleaning only ever takes the Safe to Remove categories. It is strongest on developer and AI tool files, which most cleaners skip. It has no account and no telemetry, and costs €39.99 once or €19.99 a year. It leaves out the RAM purge and the malware scanner on purpose, and says when another cleaner fits better.
Things to be wary of, whichever you choose
- Alarming totals. A figure for "junk" that counts caches your apps will rebuild tomorrow is not space you keep.
- RAM purge buttons. They empty a cache macOS reads straight back. The measurement is here.
- Repairing permissions or running maintenance scripts. macOS has not needed either for years.
- Downloads from anywhere but the maker. Check the app is signed and notarised; macOS tells you if it is not.
Doing it without any tool
Everything a cleaner does can be done by hand, and the guides here show how: the clean-up checklist, every place worth checking for space and clearing the cache. A tool saves the time and the guessing, not the knowledge.