CleanMyMac alternative for developers: one price, no subscription, and it shows you the paths

CleanMyMac is the Mac cleaner most people have heard of, and the reviews on its App Store page repeat the same three complaints: it is a subscription, it pushes a Clean button before showing what it will delete, and the free version scans but will not remove anything. If those are your complaints too, here is what Decruft does differently, and honestly where it does less.

Price

CleanMyMac is a yearly subscription per Mac, with a more expensive lifetime option. Prices change; at the time of writing the one-Mac plan is around $40 a year and the lifetime license around $120.

Decruft is $19, once, for up to 3 Macs. Updates are included. There is no account and no renewal.

Both let you scan for free. Both charge to clean.

What it shows you before it deletes

This is the difference that matters to a developer.

CleanMyMac's Smart Scan produces a total and a Run button. You can open a review pane, but the design pushes toward the total. Its cleanup includes things like language files and app caches that regenerate on the next update or launch, which pads the number without freeing anything for long.

Decruft's scan produces a list of paths. Each row is a real folder with its measured size and age, and a line saying what recreates it. DerivedData says "next build is slow". An archive says "carries the dSYM for that build". You tick the rows you want. Nothing is selected for you.

What gets deleted, and how

Decruft moves everything it removes to the Trash. A wrong decision is recoverable until you empty it. A default-deny guard refuses to offer mail, keychains, iCloud Drive, preferences, source folders or anything it does not recognise as junk.

CleanMyMac deletes outright and has a Safety Database it consults. Both approaches work most of the time. Only one of them has an undo.

Where CleanMyMac does more

Decruft is a disk tool. It finds caches, build output, simulators, Docker's reclaimable space, package-manager stores, iPhone backups, logs and duplicates, uninstalls apps with their leftovers, and clears browser data. That is the list.

CleanMyMac also scans for malware, manages login items and launch agents, frees memory, updates apps, and has a menu bar dashboard for CPU and battery. If you want one app that does all of that, Decruft is not it, and the free alternatives do not cover it either.

Where Decruft does more

Developer caches. CleanMyMac knows about Xcode DerivedData. It does not list your simulator devices, your Docker reclaimable space, or the npm, pnpm, Gradle, Cargo, CocoaPods and Swift package stores, each with its size. On a developer's Mac those are most of the missing disk, and they are the reason Decruft exists.

Trying it

Download Decruft, run the scan, and read the list. If it finds nothing worth $19, you have lost nothing, and the list itself tells you what to delete by hand.