Comparison · read from their own pages on 27 October 2026
What the others cost, and what they do
CleanMyMac and MacKeeper are the two apps people mean by “a Mac cleaner”. Both are bigger than this one and both do things it will not do. The differences worth paying attention to are the price model, the four developer categories where the space on a Mac that builds software actually is, and the two buttons RefreshYourMac refuses to ship.
Price
Nothing here is converted. A converted price is a number nobody is actually charged, so each figure is quoted in the currency the seller showed us. MacPaw prices by country and their store showed euro; their App Store listing shows dollars, so both are here.
| RefreshYourMac | CleanMyMac | MacKeeper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Made by | Caddora | MacPaw Way Ltd | Clario Tech FZCO |
| One-time purchase | Yes$24.99 one-time fee | Yes€119.95 on MacPaw’s store; $89.99 for CleanMyMac X on the Mac App Store | Nosubscription only |
| Yearly | Yes$14.99/yr, with the first 7 days free | $39.99/yr on the Mac App Store; €39.95/yr on MacPaw’s store$39.99/yr on the Mac App Store; €39.95/yr on MacPaw’s store | €71.40 for the first year, 1 Mac. Their page shows it against a €119.40 list price€71.40 for the first year, 1 Mac. Their page shows it against a €119.40 list price |
| Monthly | Yes$1.99/mo, cancel any month | $9.99/mo$9.99/mo | €10.95/mo€10.95/mo |
| Account needed | Nonothing to sign into | Yes | Yes |
A subscription is the right model for anything with a running cost behind it — a malware feed, a VPN, a breach-monitoring service. MacKeeper sells all three and charges accordingly. This app has no running cost — it stores nothing, runs no server and sends nothing about your Mac anywhere — so it can be bought once, and that is the price it leads with. The yearly option is there for anyone who would rather start smaller, not because the app needs it.
Features
The RefreshYourMac column is measured against the current build. The other two are read from their own feature pages and are not re-checked on every change — treat them as those apps on 27 October 2026.
| RefreshYourMac | CleanMyMac | MacKeeper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caches, logs, Trash, mail attachments | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| App uninstaller, with leftovers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Unused applications | Yesa real last-used date, from three sources | Partlyuninstaller only | YesSmart Uninstaller |
| Large and old files | Yesover 200 MB, four folders | YesMy Clutter | Yes |
| Duplicate files | Yesexact, SHA-256 | Yes | Yes |
| The same picture saved again | Yespixels compared in colour; the best copy is kept and never offered for deletion | Yes | Yes |
| Look-alike pictures (bursts, near matches) | Nobuilt, measured, removed — it called two different bills the same picture | Yes | Yes |
| Xcode: DerivedData, device support, archives | Yes | Partlypartial, folded into “junk” | No |
| iOS and Android simulators and runtimes | Yesthrough simctl, so the sizes are the ones the tool itself reports | No | No |
| node_modules, Pods, Gradle, Homebrew, pip | Yes | No | No |
| Running simulators and log watchers, shut down | Yes | No | No |
| CPU, memory and thermal readings | Yesread-only: swap rate, compressor ratio, pressure, throttling | PartlyPerformance, plus a RAM purge | PartlyMemory Cleaner |
| Memory purge button | Refused, and measured insteada row saying what the button would free on your Mac, and what macOS would read straight back | Yes | Yes |
| Malware scanner | Refused, and measured insteadXProtect’s signature version and date, and Gatekeeper’s state, read from your own Mac | Yes | Yes |
| Maintenance tasks | Yesseven | Yes | Partly |
| App updater | No | Yes | Partly |
| VPN, ad blocking, ID theft monitoring | No | No | Yes |
| Scheduled auto-clean | Partlya timer inside the menu bar app, so it only fires while the app is running. Theirs is a background agent — not the same guarantee | Yes | Yes |
| Background agent running all the time | Noa menu bar app and nothing else | Yes | Yes |
| A safety rating on every category | Yesfour levels, and the rating decides what the buttons may do | Noone-click “junk” | No |
| Move files to another drive instead of deleting | Yes | No | No |
| Nothing selected for deletion until you ask | Yes | Partlyauto-selects | Partlyauto-selects |
- has it
- narrower than it sounds
- does not
- refused, with the measurement shown instead
DaisyDisk, OnyX, OmniDiskSweeper and Mole
Not columns in the table. Two show you sizes and leave every judgement to you, and one is a maintenance utility. Mole is a cleaner, but it is two products, a free command-line tool and a paid app, so it gets a write-up rather than a column. Each is read from its maker's own page on the date shown.
DaisyDisk
$9.99 once, a lifetime licence for up to five personal Macs, with a free trial. Also sold on the Mac App Store. macOS 10.13 or newer. Read 1 October 2026.
A map of your disk drawn as rings, so the folders taking the most space stand out at a glance, with deletion from inside the map. It can also scan as administrator to see folders a normal scan cannot reach.
Pick it when: You want to see where the space has gone, visually, and are happy to judge each folder yourself. For finding one enormous forgotten folder it is quicker than any list.
Worth knowing: It shows sizes, not what a folder costs you to lose: there is no rating saying a cache regenerates and a backup does not.
OnyX
Free, from Titanium Software. A separate build for each macOS version: 5.0.6 for macOS Tahoe 26, 5.1.0 for macOS 27 on Apple silicon. Read 1 October 2026.
A maintenance utility: it verifies system files, runs maintenance tasks, deletes caches, rebuilds databases and indexes, and exposes hidden settings for the Finder, Dock and Safari.
Pick it when: You want free system maintenance and the hidden settings, and you are comfortable choosing which tasks to run.
Worth knowing: Use the build that matches your macOS exactly — its maker is explicit that an older build should not be run on a newer system. Its cache deletion is a checkbox, not a measured list.
OmniDiskSweeper
Free, from The Omni Group. The newest build on its page is listed for macOS 10.13 High Sierra. Read 1 October 2026.
Every file on the drive, largest to smallest, with a button to move it to the Trash or open it.
Pick it when: You want a free, plain list of what is big, and you know which of those files you can live without.
Worth knowing: Nothing on the list says what is safe: it will move an app’s only copy of its data to the Trash as readily as a cache.
Mole
The mo command-line tool is free and open source (GPL-3.0), installed with Homebrew, for macOS 12 or newer. Mole for Mac is a separate paid app: $19 once for two Macs, with free updates, a 14-day refund and macOS 14 or later, sold on mole.fit and not on the Mac App Store. Read 10 November 2026.
A cleaner, uninstaller, optimiser, disk explorer and live system monitor, in two forms. In the terminal, every command that deletes has a --dry-run preview. The app shows the full file list and sizes before it removes anything, and sorts each item as selected, review-only or blocked. Both cover Xcode build data, simulators, package caches and AI coding tool leftovers.
Pick it when: You live in a terminal and want something free that you can read, script and preview. Or you want the app’s wider toolkit, such as app updates, fan control and a live dashboard, for less than this one costs.
Worth knowing: mo clean deletes permanently and empties your Trash unless you add the Trash to its whitelist, so run mo clean --dry-run first. The app deletes caches permanently too unless you choose Move to Trash in its settings.
What RefreshYourMac adds to the first three is the rating: every category it measures says what removing it costs, and that rating decides what can be cleaned in bulk. Against Mole, the difference is Move to Backup for your own files, and a scheduled clean that only ever takes Safe for auto removal categories and never the Trash. See the four safety levels at a glance and how it decides what is safe.
MacReviver
MacReviver is a Mac optimiser from ReviverSoft. Malwarebytes detects it as PUP.MacReviver, a potentially unwanted program, and describes it as “a system optimizer from ReviverSoft targeting MacOS systems”. If it is on your Mac and you did not mean to install it, quit it, move it to the Trash, and then look for what it left behind by its bundle ID, as the leftover files after uninstalling an app describes; a security scanner such as Malwarebytes will also find its parts. RefreshYourMac makes no speed claim to set against it: it measures what is on the disk and says what removing each thing costs.
The two rows with a ↺ are the whole argument
A memory purge and a malware scan are the two features this app cannot do honestly. Rather than leave a gap, each is a row on the Maintenance screen that states what the button would actually do on your own Mac: how much memory is genuinely spare against how much macOS would read straight back, and XProtect's real signature version and date. A measurement can be checked. A refusal has to be taken on trust.
Why a RAM purge does nothing →
What macOS already does about malware →