1. MacPaw CleanMyMac X

MacPaw’s CleanMyMac X is a strong player in the clean cleaning betting. At the time of writing, a yearly subscription for one Mac costs $34.95 / £29.95. It can also be purchased as a one-time purchase if you don’t want to subscribe. Plus, there’s a free version that you can download if you want to try before you buy.

This popular utility brings together a number of useful tools in one package, including a file cleaner that will remove junk and junk cache files, optimization and maintenance tools, an application uninstaller (so that you remove all the files that an application scatters all over your Mac) and an uninstaller malware. Version 4.12 gained compatibility with Ventura, and version 4.11 brought a major update to the menu bar, which now offers additional information such as your laptop’s battery, temperature and health, your hard drive’s capacity and overall health, the amount of free RAM, as well as your CPU load and hardware temperature. You will also find information such as disk capacity, processor speed, system temperature, system load, and network activity readings, all easily accessible.

A new feature in version 4.12.4 will alert you to high and unexpected battery drain.

CleanMyMac has a simple layout that offers a lot of features. These include a general system cleanup that optimizes space by deleting temporary files that can linger, as well as reducing unneeded app items and removing any leftovers left after deletion.

There is also the option to search your Photos, Music, and Mail folders to remove and clean up junk and stray files that might be slowing down your system.

CleanMyMac is a comprehensive package that offers several additional tools to cleanly uninstall apps, remove various extensions, improve disk performance, and digitally shred files that you don’t want anyone to recover.

We use CleanMyMac as we had to remove a lot of files to install Big Sur. One of our favorite features is the fact that the tool is in the menu at the top of the screen, so we can see a simple overview of our system at all times, which also means a simple one-click memory freeing process when RAM gets low.

However, all these features are not free. There is a free trial available from the Mac App Store and the MacPaw website, but it limits the app to deleting files no larger than 500MB, and it will require you to pay an app license fee during the process of deleting files. You can download this limited version and scan your Mac to see how much space you can save before you buy the app.

The license can be transferred to a new machine if the previous installation was previously deactivated.

MacPaw is currently offering a 30% student discount – enter your university email address and get the download code here.