CleanMyMac vs CleanSpace, compared honestly

CleanMyMac is the app most people mean when they say “Mac cleaner”. MacPaw has been shipping it since 2009, it is polished, and it is the one the ads follow you around with. CleanSpace is ours, it is much newer, and it costs a fraction as much.

Writing a comparison of your own product against the market leader is an obvious conflict of interest, so this page does two things to be worth reading. It gives CleanMyMac the wins it actually has, and it tells you the parts of your disk you can clear with neither app, because on most Macs that is where the first 20 GB comes from anyway.

Prices below were checked when this was written and both vendors change them. Check the MacPaw store and our pricing before you decide anything on the numbers.

The short version

What they agree about

Both apps are doing the same underlying thing, and neither is doing anything magic. macOS scatters reclaimable files across a dozen locations — ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/Logs, saved application state, Xcode derived data, package-manager caches, Mail’s downloaded attachments, the Trash on every mounted volume — and a cleaner is a program that knows those paths, measures them, and offers to empty them.

Both require Full Disk Access, for the same unavoidable reason: without it macOS hides the Trash, Mail’s container and other apps’ containers, and a scan silently under-reports. Both notarize their builds with Apple. Both send removals to the Trash by default rather than unlinking them.

And both are, in the strict sense, unnecessary. Every location either app touches can be emptied from Terminal in a few minutes, which is what our article on clearing caches safely walks through. The product either of us is really selling is the measuring and the not-deleting-the-wrong-thing.

Price

This is the least interesting difference and the one that decides most purchases.

CleanMyMac is sold as a subscription of around $40 a year for a single Mac, with a one-time option around $90 and multi-Mac bundles above that. It is also in Setapp, MacPaw’s own subscription bundle, at around $10 a month for the whole catalogue — which is genuinely good value if you would use four or five of the apps in it, and poor value if you only want the cleaner.

CleanSpace comes with a SecureMacApps plan: $1 a month, $10 a year or $50 once, per Mac — and the same plan unlocks every other SecureMacApps app. There is also a 7-day free trial that asks for no email or card.

The honest framing: if the money is not the deciding factor for you, it should not be the deciding factor. Neither app is expensive against the cost of a Mac. The gap matters most if you keep Macs a long time, because a subscription on a machine you own for six years is a recurring cost against a one-time one.

What each one removes

CleanMyMac covers more ground. Alongside cache and log cleanup it does app updates, a mail attachment sweep, large and old file review, a “clutter” pass over screenshots and downloads, and a set of maintenance scripts. Its uninstaller is very good, and it maintains vendor-specific knowledge — which support folder belongs to which app, including the awkward ones that share frameworks.

CleanSpace covers ten areas in one window: Smart Scan, Cleanup, Large & Old Files, Space Lens, Protection, Privacy, Uninstaller, Performance, Maintenance and the menu bar readout. It does not update your apps and has no plans to. Where CleanMyMac has more breadth, CleanSpace has more disclosure — every scan shows the full file list with real sizes before anything is ticked, including the areas you have not paid to clean.

The results converge more than either vendor’s marketing implies. Both find the same caches, because they are the same caches.

Malware

CleanMyMac has the better story here and it is not close. MacPaw maintains a malware engine with regularly updated definitions and a research team behind it. If a periodic malware scan is a reason you are buying a cleaner, that is the one to buy.

CleanSpace’s Protection tab is narrower by design: a signature check for documented adware and browser-hijacker families, plus a heuristic pass that flags launch agents behaving like persistence. It is a periodic look at the handful of locations where persistence actually lives. It is not real-time protection and does not claim to be — see do Macs need antivirus for what that distinction is worth in practice.

What each one knows about you

CleanMyMac requires a MacPaw account, checks your subscription against MacPaw’s servers, and collects anonymized usage analytics that are on by default. There is a switch to turn them off, and MacPaw publishes what it collects. None of this is unusual for commercial software, and it is what pays for the malware research above.

CleanSpace has no account and makes no analytics or telemetry requests at all. The licence is an Ed25519 signature verified against a public key compiled into the app, so it validates on your Mac with the network off. The only network request the app ever makes is the purchase itself. That design has a cost, which is the next section.

Where CleanMyMac wins

• Track record. Fifteen-plus years, a large team and a support organization. CleanSpace is new. If a cleaner breaking something is your main fear, longevity is real evidence and we do not have much of it yet.
• Malware definitions. Maintained continuously, by people whose job it is.
• Multiple Macs. Bundles exist, and Setapp covers your whole household’s Macs on one subscription. CleanSpace licences are one Mac and non-transferable — a second Mac is a second purchase, and replacing a logic board changes the hardware identifier and invalidates the licence on that machine.
• App updating. A genuinely useful feature we do not have.
• Localization and polish. More languages, more years of interface refinement.

Where CleanSpace wins

• The scans are free forever, not a trial. Every scan runs at full detail without paying, including Space Lens and the malware check. You can install it, find out that your problem is a 60 GB Docker image, delete that yourself, and never pay us. That is a legitimate outcome and it is the reason the free tier has no clock on it.
• Price. $10 a year or $50 once for every SecureMacApps app, against roughly $90 once or $40 a year for one cleaner.
• Nothing leaves your Mac. No account, no telemetry, no cloud, and a licence that verifies offline. If you are handing an app Full Disk Access, “it makes no network requests” is a meaningful property.
• It refuses by default. Every deletion passes one gate, and a path that is not explicitly recognized is refused rather than allowed. /System, /bin, /usr, keychains and security stores are refused outright. Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Movies and Music are never cleaned automatically. iCloud Drive, iOS backups, Messages, Mail’s database, Photos and Calendars are excluded even though they are cache-shaped.
• Rules, not predictions. No model decides what your files are. The rules are fixed, and the same scan on the same disk gives the same answer twice.
• Native Swift, no third-party code. Nothing in the app comes from a dependency we did not write.

How to actually decide

Free the obvious space first, with neither app. Check what System Data is holding, find the biggest files, and thin your local Time Machine snapshots. On a Mac that has never had this done, that is usually the bulk of it, and it costs nothing.

Then, if you still want a tool for the recurring version of that job: buy CleanMyMac if you want a maintained malware engine, app updates, several Macs on one bill, or the reassurance of a long track record. Buy CleanSpace if you want the cheapest honest version of the cleaning itself, no account, nothing phoning home, and a scan you can run for free before you decide anything.

Both trials cost nothing to run. Run both against your own disk and compare the numbers they report — that is a better test than any comparison table, including this one.