CCleaner Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

CCleaner was developed by Piriform and it is available for Mac, PC and Android devices.

Piriform Ltd is a software company founded in 2005 and based in UK. Although it also released other optimization and cleaning software, such as Recuva, Defraggler, Speccy, CCleaner remains their most popular product, with more than 2 billion downloads so far.

CCleaner was initially designed for PCs and the Mac version of the software was only launched in 2012.

System requirements:

CCleaner for Mac requires an Apple Mac running 64-bit. It works with OS X 10.6 to 10.11 El Capitan.

There are 2 versions of the product for Mac home users: a free one and a Professional one. There are also business packages, for companies of all sizes (small, medium or large – 100+ endpoints).

You can use the free version for as long as you want. If you want more than what it can offer, you can always choose to upgrade. Piriform also offers 30 day money back guarantee.

Both the Free and Professional versions include privacy protection and tools for speeding up your Mac. Professional CCleaner also comes with automatic browser cleaning, real-time junk monitoring, automatic updating and priority support.

CCleaner’s user interface is simple and well designed. It is somehow minimalist and very-user friendly.

You can choose to use CCleaner with the default settings (there are some preselected categories in the default mode, for System and Safari: Trash, Recent Documents, Recent Applications, Recent Places, Logs, Directory Service Cache, Internet Cache, Internet History, Cookies and a few more) or select whichever apps you want to be cleaned.

Once you choose whatever it is that you want cleaned, you click on “Analyze” and view the results. If there are files you don’t want deleted, you have to uncheck them from the left, because once they are deleted, the process is irreversible. There are no restore points. You can also choose which cookies should be kept and which should be deleted.

After the analysis is complete you click “Run Cleaner” and let the app do its job.   

The Professional version of CCleaner adds some more features such as the abovementioned automatic browser cleaning and the real-time junk monitoring.

One of the things we liked best about CCleaner was the fact that it is very fast. It has an impressive scanning and cleaning speed. It only needs a couple of seconds to complete its job.

Other tools that can be accessed are the Uninstaller and the Startup Optimizer. The latter lets you choose how to use the program. You can either opt for hiding the CCleaner on startup or have it removed from the list of apps that launch after you turn on your Mac.

If you want to be sure that deleted files are deleted for good, you can use the Erase Free Space tool. The only problem is that it doesn’t work if you have an SSD in your Mac.

As the name suggests it, CCleaner is first and foremost a cleaning app, so you shouldn’t expect a lot more from it. The important thing is that it performs really well on its area of expertise and you can really see an improvement in your Mac’s speed and performance, after using this program.