Macpaw.com Website Review & Ratings + MacPaw CleanMyMac Coupons

CleanMyMac does exactly what the title says. It "cleans your mac". This product works very simply; just tell it to scan your mac, and it will immediately scan for unnecessary files, caches, plugins, etc. on your mac. This scan takes a little less than three minutes, and afterwards, it asks which files you want to delete. It sorts all files in different genres:

• Caches
• Logs
• Language files
• Universal Binaries
• System Junk
• Trashes & leftovers

Each one of these genres also has a tree hierarchy of files under them, for example: Trashes & leftovers is divided into Application leftovers, Trashes, Broken Preferences, iPhoto Trashes, Broken Startup Items, Widget leftovers and iOS Software Updates. You can then check or uncheck any categories or applications from which the you don’t want the files to be deleted. It also automatically locates the files that could cause a negative change in user experience, and unchecks them. If you then choose to check it anyway, it warns you once more.

Next to the cleanup feature, it also has some basic utilities: manage extensions, uninstall applications, and quick erase files.

Here are some features of MacPaw CleanMyMac has that concurrents often don’t.

• First of all, it has a very easy to use interface. This is the kind of interface a kid can understand. It is good for casual users, who might just click the “clean” button right away leaving the preferences in default, while a more experienced user can go in and change the preferences to what they like.
• Also, this program has a feature called “uninstall programs”. If you drag a program there and uninstall it, it will also delete all related “hidden” files (cache files, system preferences panes, library files, etc.) that would otherwise stay in their place and keep occupying hard drive space.
• Another feature CleanMyMac has is Quick Erase Files. Using this feature, you can delete files completely at once, without moving them in the trash and then having to clean the trash afterwards.
• Lastly, there is Manage Extensions. Here you can manage widgets, preferences and plugins and possible remove them.

Onyx

When you look at forums or reviews on the web, you often see Onyx mentioned as a good competitor to CleanMyMac. Even though I like CleanMyMac, there are some Pros and cons to CleanMyMac and Onyx. I’ll go through the pros first:

• CleanMyMac has a much easier to use interface than Onyx.
• CleanMyMac does a lot more automatically than Onyx.
• With CleanMyMac, you can go way more specific on which files you want to delete and which files you don’t want to delete.

Now, for the cons:

• Onyx is free, unlike CleanMyMac, which costs $15 per 6 months.
• According to different user reviews, CleanMyMac sometimes “cleans too much”, removing files necessary to run programs nicely.
• According to different user reviews, your computer speed increases a lot more after a scan using Onyx than after a scan using CleanMyMac.

I think Onyx is a better choice for more experienced users, but if you really don’t know anything about computers, CleanMyMac does a lot more for you.

 Onyx website: http://www.onyxmac.com/

MacKeeper

Next to Onyx, MacKeeper is a big competitor to CleanMyMac, also providing a user friendly interface, and roughly the same features. Let’s go through the pros for CleanMyMac

• MacKeeper is a little more expensive than CleanMyMac (about $40).
• With CleanMyMac, it isn’t hard to choose what license you want, you just look at the amount of macs you want to install it on. MacKeeper, however, has 3 licenses, from which you have to find out which one fits best for you.
• MacKeeper has a little easier to use interface than CleanMyMac

Now here are the cons against CleanMyMac:

• MacKeeper has a lot of user reviews that show that MacKeeper scans increase your macs speed more than CleanMyMac does.
• MacKeeper doesn’t “clean too much”, as mentioned before in the comparison with Onyx
• For MacKeeper, you only have to pay once, while for CleanMyMac you have to pay every six months.

Overall, I think for experienced mac users Onyx is the better choice, while for less experienced users, MacKeeper can turn out to be better than CleanMyMac.

Factoidz MacKeeper review: http://product-reviews.knoji.com/mackeeper-product-review-price-and-support-service/

CleanMyMac is a very cheap product (only $15 every 6 months), but I don’t think this app is really worth the price, especially because you have to pay multiple times. If you compare the pricing to MacKeeper and Onyx, the other options really seem a lot more interesting. I think if MacPaw would terminate the pay-every-six-months-plan, and replace it with a pay-once-plan, and then maybe drop the price to $10, they would sell a lot more than they do now. Especially if you take the negative user reviews into account, and the many complaints about CleanMyMac “cleaning too much”. This program might seem cheaper than MacKeeper in the beginning, but after a while, it will cost more, because you have to pay every six months. Honestly, I really don’t think CleanMyMac is worth its current price, at least until they fix the before mentioned issues users have been having.

At the first sight, this product appears to be a handy little tool to clean up all those unnecessary files on your mac, but when you do a little research, you can see that there are enough alternatives that are better, for experienced users as well as non-experienced ones. For the more experienced there’s Onyx, which is free, and for the less experienced users that need a little more done for them, there’s MacKeeper, which costs a little more in the beginning, but eventually turns out cheaper. Also, none of the examples that I’ve shown have the bugs of “cleaning too much” ("After I cleaned my mac though, my mac was having some serious problems, programs did not launch, and lots of other problems." quote from a review at http://applereviews.com/cleanmymac-review/)  and bad user reviews CleanMyMac has. To wrap it up in a few words, this program is quite good, but the concurrents are better.