Open Source CCleaner Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to CCleaner.
The best open source alternative to CCleaner is Pearcleaner. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source CCleaner alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to CCleaner is BleachBit.
CCleaner alternatives are mainly System Cleanup & Optimization. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of CCleaner.
A free Mac app cleaner that uninstalls applications and hunts down the files they leave behind, inspired by AppCleaner and a privacy guide script.
Pearcleaner is a free, source-available Mac app cleaner that removes an application together with the files it leaves behind. Its author wrote it to learn how macOS handles application installation and uninstallation.
Applications go in by drag and drop, from a list or grid view with badges for web and iOS apps, from the command line, or by right-clicking in Finder with the bundled extension.
Around the uninstaller sits a set of related tools.
- Orphaned file search: finds leftovers belonging to applications that are already gone.
- Managers: separate views for Homebrew, packages, plugins, services, development environments and app updates.
- App lipo: strips unneeded architectures from universal apps without the lipo binary from the Xcode tools.
- Sentinel Monitor: a background watcher of roughly two megabytes that cleans up when an app hits the Trash.
- Customization: a theme system with custom colors, include and exclude directories, and adjustable search sensitivity.
Full Disk permission is required to search for files and a privileged helper to act on system folders, with macOS 13 Ventura through 26 Tahoe supported. The license is Apache 2.0 with the Commons Clause, which permits modification but prohibits monetization. Downloads come from the releases page or a Homebrew cask, and the author warns that other sites offering it are not his.
Development is on hold. The author cites a new job, joining a friend building a SaaS company, other life priorities, and no longer having a Mac for personal work, so issues, reviews and releases are paused indefinitely, though he says it is not abandoned.
A desktop cleaner that deletes junk files to free disk space and remove traces that would otherwise linger on a machine.
BleachBit cleans files to free disk space and to maintain privacy. It handles the caches, logs and leftovers a desktop collects over months, without asking anyone to hunt through directories by hand.
Cleaning follows a review loop rather than a blind sweep. You set preferences, select the options you want, click Preview, read the list of files it proposes to remove, adjust the options and only then click Delete. A command line interface is available for scripted use, with its own help output.
The repository shows how the project is put together.
- Python 3: the application runs straight from source once system dependencies are installed.
- Cleaner definitions: cleaning rules live in a separate CleanerML repository rather than inside the code.
- Winapp2.ini: a companion repository carries rules from the Winapp2 cleaner list.
- Translations: strings are translated on Weblate and built locally with a make target.
- Docker builds: one script runs the tests and builds packages for Debian, Fedora or openSUSE.
BleachBit itself, source code and cleaner definitions alike, is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later, with the bundled markovify under MIT. Dependency installation auto-detects Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Arch, and developer targets cover tests, linting and formatting, with continuous integration running on both Linux and macOS.
