CCleaner review: A flexible Mac utility for clearing clutter

Price When Reviewed

Free; Pro version: $39.95 a year

Best Prices Today: CCleaner Pro

There’s something to be said for a software company releasing a product and heavily advertising its wares. There’s also something to be said for being something of a silent runner, having a good product and honing it over the years. Piriform Software’s CCleaner represents the latter of these two, and while not wrapped up in millions of dollars in advertising that seems to purvey every element of your internet experience, comes through with some useful tools in a friendly, appealing package.

CCleaner, which is easy to install and assign full disk permissions to, requires macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later to run, and retails for $39.95/£39.95 for CCleaner Pro, which covers one device for one year. There’s also a free version: CCleaner.

Similar to other Mac cleaning utilities (see our round up of the Best Mac Cleaning Apps we’ve tested) such as CleanMyMac and DaisyDisk, CCleaner centers itself around several modules, which consist of Quick Clean, Clean Clutter, Clean Browser, Find Duplicates, Analyze Photos, Uninstall Apps, Manage Startups, System Monitor, and Statistics.

The modules themselves work well and behave as expected, the Uninstall Apps tool worked well with no fuss, and the Manage Startups tool actually surprised me by digging up a chunk of files left behind from when we tested (the malware-like) MacBooster and offered an easy way to remove them.

The Analyze Photos tool performed well, not only scaning the local Photos library, but allowing you to add custom external photos, devices, and specific photos on the fly. The Clean Browser tool offered a good interface, is speedy, and was able to locate and remove 2.01GB of cache files and cookies, while the Find Duplicates tool was able to find no less than 106.45GB of duplicate files, offered a preview of what’s potentially on the chopping block, and allowed us to choose and filter by file type.

System Monitor proved interesting, and beyond a nice, clean interface, offered system specs, access to sensors, and information such as fan usage, disk usage, battery cycles, and temperature. The Quick Clean tool isn’t entirely original, but was able to locate app cache files, log files, trash, cookies, web cache, and duplicate files and I was able to clear 6.5GB of cache files alone. The Statistics tool did a good job of tallying what’s been cleaned up over either the entire usage of the app or over the last 30 days . Finally, the scheduling tool worked well, CCleaner offering a good level of customization to the user.

There’s room for improvement with CCleaner, but none of it represents a staggering need for a complete overhaul. While the Find Duplicates tool is generally excellent and offered good filters and categorization to help organize the returned files, you still have to click directly on the file’s check box and can’t simply click on the name, which gets annoying when you’re checking or unchecking a wide array of items.

From a corporate perspective, I never heard back from Piriform over a period of two weeks when I emailed them with questions. CCleaner’s biggest weakness is arguably the help menu/manual system, and while there’s a generic FAQ posted online, there’s no quick access to a viable help menu or onboard manual, which feels like an Achilles heel. Yes, there’s a good set of tutorial videos for CCleaner’s various versions, but you have to go looking for them. I think the next logical step is for Piriform to incorporate a decent manual as well as quick links to the tutorial videos they’ve already produced and published.

Should you buy CCleaner?

Yes, there’s room for improvement, but there’s an excellent collection of tools to be found in CCleaner, and you can see where the software’s following has built up over the years. The interface is clean, it runs well, and it doesn’t make the mistake of trying to perform every task under the sun, such as adding antiviral, antimalware, and VPN functions to its overhead. This in turn lends it a focus that some of its competitors have forgotten, and leads to an impressive collection of tools that are worth your consideration.