MacPaw's CleanMyMac X is the most powerful clean-up and optimization application that we have ever used for Mac OS. It is also one of the more expensive system cleaners, costing $39.99 if you purchase a single license or $59.99 if you want to get a family pack with five licenses.
Surely, the cost can be justified for many due to the disk cleaning and stellar speedup potential. For select users, however, the performance gains from the tons of optimization tools that CleanMyMac offers still don't justify the monetary cost to keep your Mac running as smoothly as possible.
If you are looking for an alternative app that offers similar features (some at a cheaper or free price-point), this list will help! Below are five CleanMyMac alternatives that we recommend using instead if you don't want to utilize MacPaw's cleanup software for one reason or another.
3 Recommended Paid Alternatives to CleanMyMac X
Best CleanMyMac Alternative Overall – MacClean 3
MacClean 3 is another popular app to clean up your Mac computer. It offers a lot of competitive product features such as malware scanning and even some that surpass CleanMyMac's like a native duplicate finder.
One of the pros it holds over its competitor is that you can remove unnecessary junk files from our Mac in batches rather than just deleting them all at once as MacPaw's software does when performing most cleaning tasks.
On the downside, however, some users have complained about difficulty installing this Mac app–specifically with regard to getting notifications from other programs while trying to install or using lots of disk space. We didn't experience this in our MacClean review, but I think it is worth mentioning.
Runner-Up – MacBooster
Developed by IOBit, MacBooster is a popular clean-up utility for Mac computers. According to IOBit’s website, it has been downloaded millions of times and has an average rating of four out of five stars on CNET.
MacBooster offers various features such as junk cleaner that removes temporary files or caches from your drive, memory cleaning which periodically cleans up inactive apps to free more system resources and disk health checking which scans your disc space and alerts you if anything needs attention so you can fix any problems before they become worse.
From a pricing model, MacBooster advertises their single license price by a monthly cost of $3.33 which results in $39.96 a year. At the time this article was written, the pricing was discounted to $29.95 for their “Spring Sale”. Higher license counts jump in to $59.95 for a three license yearly subscription or $89.95 for a lifetime plan for three licenses.
Honorable Mention – Disk Clean Pro
Previously branded as Smart Mac Care, Disk Clean Pro is another tool alternative to the CleanMyMac X app. It offers solid performance with a decent user interface just not as impressive overall as CleanMyMac or MacClean 3.
Similar to other Mac cleaners, it doesn't just delete unnecessary or junk files, but cleans up the startup items on your computer as well. Disk Clean Pro also has a setting to clean up files on your computer's external hard drive.
Disk Clean Pro is quite affordable at $26.99 for an individual license. The user interface is not nearly as appealing as the one found in CleanMyMac, but it gets the job done for a slightly cheaper cost.
Top 3 Free CleanMyMac Alternatives (Or Under $5)
Best Free Alternative to CleanMyMac – CCleaner For Mac
CleanMyMac X is one of the best paid cleaners out there but if you're looking for something free, CCleaner might be worth checking out.
It is a decent Mac cleaner that comes with plenty of useful tools like the ability to clean your browser history and cache, remove temporary junk files from all of your browsers and uninstall software.
CCleaner has been around since 2004 so it's definitely another trusted name in terms of being a reliable option and can help keep your computer running smoothly by removing any unnecessary data on your hard drive.
CCleaner makes carrying out complex manual tasks like emptying caches, deleting histories and cookies, removing unused language translations or other system files much easier and safer for more novice users.
Disk Doctor
Disk Doctor is a program that is designed to clean up your storage drive by removing any unnecessary or unused files.
Disk Doctor: System Cleaner has a lot of features, but it's also missing a few key components–namely the ability to scan for duplicate photos and find duplicates in Photos libraries (photos are captured as metadata). You can only remove them manually if you know they're there.
The good news with Disk Doctor is that it's as cheap (or maybe even cheaper) than a cup of coffee. Pricing comes in at $2.99 with other Mac cleaners costing upwards of $25-$60 per year, is a factor many users fing appealing about this software application because it offers plenty of value for just a few bucks.
Disk Diet
Disk Diet is a $5 cleaning utility for Mac computers that can clean up your hard drive using advanced algorithms to remove useless files and folders.
Disk Diet scans every folder in your computer and removes any old or unnecessary items you don't need anymore including temporary files, cache files–all the things that take up space on your Mac's storage device without providing much use to anything else.
Honorable Mention: DaisyDisk
Another useful Mac cleanup tool for analyzing your system storage is DaisyDisk. This app is a popular option that offers a useful free trial with a cheap $9.99 premium version.
DaisyDisk will analyze your storage device, show you where all the important folders are located, and provide an estimate of how much space you have left on that device.
Another cool feature of the DaisyDisk app is that it has an intuitive zoomable interface which makes browsing and finding files much easier than ever before. One word of caution–Daisy Disk does not offer any sort of data loss protection, so be careful when deleting anything!
Daisy Disk isn't one of our top choices in the free or budget category of Clean My Mac X alternatives for Mac, but we wouldn't discount anyone who wants to utilize it. DaisyDisk is a great app to help understand where potential areas to clean up your Mac's files are available.
Not Interested in CleanMyMac X Due to the Cost?
I can understand why some of you may be looking for alternatives to CleanMyMac X due to the cost aspect. Paying $40 or more a year for a Mac cleaning software isn't always within budget for many people.
However, the feature set, reliability, and user interface of CleanMyMac X are hard to pass up. It optimizes your Mac system and safely removes gigabytes of junk with just a few clicks with a low risk of misuse.
Given this, you can go with one of the cheaper Mac cleaner alternatives listed in this article or you can use the software temporarily for a stellar speedup before losing access. There are two ways that you can go about doing this.
Get A Limited Trial For A Quick Clean – CleanMyMac X Trial Version
For those who don't need the most thorough cleaning of their Mac, MacPaw offers a trial version of the CleanMyMac X app. The software is available to download at no cost although you'll be limited to select features (some maintenance tasks such as malware scanning are disabled) and the cleaning potential is limited to just 500MB.
This gives you a good sample of what a system cleaner app like CleanMyMac is capable of. Then you can decide whether it is worth investing in or maybe going with one of the free CleanMyMac alternatives mentioned above.
Get The Full Version Access Temporarily – Setapp Trial
Now with the trial of CleanMyMac X, you are getting a kind of watered-down experience given that the amount of junk files that you can free up from your storage space is capped to just 500 MB.
If you want to be able to access the entire CleanMyMac X app as well as other Mac software products, there is a free and legal place to do so. Thanks to the free trial of the Setapp subscription from MacPaw, you can access unrestricted use of CleanMyMac as well as many other Mac apps including Gemini 2.
Gemini 2 is a paid Mac app to locate and delete duplicate files from your system. While you may find this feature standard in another Mac cleaner, CleanMyMac doesn't natively offer the ability to scan duplicate files so Gemini 2 is their best say of accomplishing this.
What's the catch with Setapp, you may be wondering? Well, all good things must end so this trial only provides full access to CleanMyMac and the other Mac apps for 7 days and then you'll need to either pay for the tool or the subscription.
Ending Summary
We hope it has helped answer some of your questions about CleanMyMac X and the alternatives that are available to you. Between the paid and free utilities mentioned above, we hope these suggestions are helpful on your journey to get a faster, more efficient Mac computer.
