MacKeeper, Onyx and CleanMyMac InspirationFeed are the 3 most prominent utilities for keeping, tidying up or just typically getting a Mac system to run faster and also more efficiently. Lets begin with Onyx. You need MacKeeper. It turns out you can teach an old Mac new tricks. With a suite of simple but powerful cleaning tools, your Mac will feel like it just came out of the box. Clean up my Mac.
- Mackeeper O Cleanmymac
- Mackeeper Ou Cleanmymac
- Mackeeper Vs. Cleanmymac
- Sensei Vs Cleanmymac
- Free Mackeeper License
- Should I Use Mackeeper
MacKeeper is a Mac cleaning application by Kromtech Alliance. According to the developer, the app has 1.4 million Mac clients using it. Without going into a long discussion about MacKeeper’s trustworthiness and business ethics, we’ll have an honest look at MacKeeper’s features. This application is full-packed with various Mac optimization tools.
The interface
Right after installing MacKeeper, you’ll see its trademark robot figure. This aims to show an automated approach to Mac cleanup; at the same time, MacKeeper lets you talk to a real human via Skype support, the link to which you’ll find in the top right corner. The whole right panel looks like a giant chat window. This space MacKeeper uses to sell you extra features and other add-ons.
The interface is pretty clean (for a cleaning application) with all the utilities placed in the sidebar to the left. The icons were easy to grasp as well as the names of the features themselves. On a different note, you’ll notice the abundance of pop-ups and dialogue boxes that constantly cry for your attention.
Before you get to clean anything, you got two main routes to choose from: either follow an automated cleanup script or start cleaning things manually. The latter option is good for experienced Mac users. The automated route is called Find & Fix mode.
What are the main MacKeeper features?
As we said earlier, MacKeeper features are so many that it is wrong to keep calling it a “Mac cleaner.” For example, it has a VPN tool, a tracking service, an ad blocker, etc. This makes it a swiss-army knife type of program for universal Mac maintenance. But before you get lost in the many options, here are some most prominent ones:
Junk cleanup
Duplicates finder
Memory cleaner
Update tracker
Login item manager
Internet security
Device tracker
Password protection
VPN service
Ad blocker utility
Find & Fix: A guided cleanup
MacKeeper suggests to automatically scan your Mac for issues with a feature it calls Find & Fix. This option is conveniently placed at the top, above other elements. The scanning algorithm in Find & Fix goes through 4 consecutive steps:
- Cleaning
- Performance
- Privacy cleanup
- Security or antivirus
Just as I tried to run my first scan, I was asked to give MacKeeper Full Disk Access in Preferences. This resulted in a few extra clicks, and I couldn’t go further without restarting the app — a rather cumbersome experience.
Mackeeper O Cleanmymac
The scanning process took about 10 minutes on my 250 GB MacBook Pro 2019. The app found 3.3 GB of junk files I could delete. Interestingly, MacKeeper’s alternative, CleanMyMac X found 5.3 GB.
MacKeeper also detected 13 adware threats — mainly other Mac cleaning tools it deemed potentially unwanted.
Bear in mind that MacKeeper is a paid application and in order to remove any items you’ll have to pass through a pay wall. Still, there were a couple of free tools that I was able to use in the trial version. One of those is Memory Cleaner, which belongs to the next group of utilities called Performance.
MacKeeper review: Performance tools
MacKeeper sports a RAM cleaner tool that shows occupied memory in real time. By pressing “Clean memory” you flush the occupied memory slots, releasing some fresh memory. This, in theory, should unfreeze some memory-demanding program that has hung up.
What else is taking its toll on Mac’s memory? Applications, of course. In the same group of utilities, MacKeeper has a tab called Apps & Processes. Surprisingly enough, the program doesn’t differentiate between these two. Anyway, users can force quit processes that demand too much memory. You can filter this very long list of processes by their memory appetites and also by their system status.
To minimize possible harm, MacKeeper will not close important system processes. Every single item from my System Processes was locked from intervention, which raises a question of why display them here in the first place. Here, the app seems to be following “you can look, but do not touch” principle.
Within the same group of tools you’ll notice the Update Tracker, which I found to be a bit out of place here, since it doesn’t directly affect Mac performance. With this tool you can update many apps at once, given you bought the paid plan.
Security features
MacKeeper takes Mac security seriously, which becomes obvious if you look at the sheer number of its security features. Here you have an Antivirus, an adware cleaner, and ad blocker. You can even check your email account for potential data leakage. For example, according to MacKeeper, my email has been leaked 19 times. Wow, that’s impressive! Immediately after I submitted by email for check, I received a foggy email about “Protecting my password” with MacKeeper. At that point I decided to stop experimenting with that feature.
According to the developer’s site, MacKeeper is able to detect spyware and viruses. Unfortunately, I couldn’t neither confirm nor deny this, as MacKeeper found 0 viruses on my Mac. According to Wikipedia, MacKeeper’s antivirus relies on Avira’s anti-malware database, which adds some weight to its security tool pack.
Is MacKeeper safe?
In the past, MacKeeper was known to be associated with infamous “Your Mac is infected” messages. Though the company distanced itself from such tactics, MacKeeper’s safe status remains controversial. For example, Malwarebytes considers MacKeeper a “potentially unwanted program” or PUP. On the other hand, according to MacKeeper’s website, it has its own anti-malware lab that studies “new and unknown threats affecting Mac.”
Mackeeper Ou Cleanmymac
If you’re in doubt as to whether MacKeeper is safe to use on your Mac, you may consider some of its best-known alternatives.
The best-known MacKeeper alternatives
CleanMyMac X by MacPaw is another Mac cleaning solution and one of the oldest cleanup tools on the market. CleanMyMac X is an app that is notarized by Apple. Notarization is a process that confirms that an app is free from malicious files.
Here is a detailed MacKeeper review that compares its features with CleanMyMac X.
CleanMyMac X has a couple of Mac cleaning tools that MacKeeper lacks. For example, there is a space visualization tool, Space Lens, that builds an interactive map of your storage.
You can download free demo of CleanMyMac X here, from the developer’s site.
That was our take on MacKeeper — one of the most talked-about apps in the Mac world. In this MacKeeper review we’ve covered its features and also touched the question of whether MacKeeper is safe. Though we’ve been fiddling around with a free trial, you may get a paid version to get the real gist of it. Its yearly plan costs 95.40 euro. Or you may consider alternative cleaning solutions for your Mac.
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
Mackeeper Vs. Cleanmymac
- Helpful Manu Bar utility
- Several helpful modules to free up storage space or to clear out unnecessary software
Sensei Vs Cleanmymac
Our Verdict
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MacPaw has shot for the stars with its new version of CleanMyMac X, its catch-all Mac utility that serves as a software crud and gunk remover, as well as a malware scanner, macOS extensions manager, and a universal updater for your installed applications.
Since my initial review of CleanMyMac X, MacPaw made some nice improvements, although some features still fall short of what they could be.
Handy modules
MacPaw set out to make its Menu Bar utility much better and has succeeded. A quick click on the icon reveals handy information such as how much space is left on each of your drive partitions, your Mac’s CPU load, how much RAM is available, your computer’s operating temperature, and other useful information. This is a nice touch and the menu can be customized as you see fit.
The modules are the key to CleanMyMac and it’s handy to be able to quickly enable and disable macOS extensions with the Extensions module, or hunt down extraneous files with the Large & Old Files module, which lets you see which files are devouring space and erase them quickly. The Uninstaller module was able to quickly locate and pick off unnecessary applications during testing and accomplished something I’d never seen before in an application removal utility: it removed multiple applications at once, which is quite useful. The Maintenance module handles tasks such as clearing RAM, running maintenance scripts, clearing the DNS cache, and repairing file permissions quickly, tidying up the macOS’ underpinnings as needed.
CleanMyMac X 4.4.1’s new claim to fame is the Space Lens module, which offers a quick look at your hard drive’s most sizable folders. This is where the truth as to what’s eating your drive space comes out, as a 73GB Pictures folder inside your Users folder could stand to be slimmed down a bit.
Malware removal
Unfortunately, the Malware Removal module shot the previous version of CleanMyMac X in the foot, and in the latest version, it does so yet again. MacPaw cites extensive changes to this feature, and I was curious to try it. After installing every questionable piece of adware and malware I could find, I ran the Malware Removal module to see what the utility would find, categorize as suspect, and what it would remove.
Free Mackeeper License
The results were not what I had hoped for. In spite of CleanMyMac X 4.4.1 locating 21 potential threats, it missed several suspect programs, including the infamous MacKeeper and Advanced Mac Cleaner, which, once installed, loads itself into your Mac’s startup items, informs you of how many threats it’s noticed, then offers a phone number to call for 24/7 live tech support.
Upon noticing the malware that was still left over after rebooting, I switched over to a free copy of Malwarebytes, which picked up 11 threats during its scan, including questionable applications such as Advanced Mac Cleaner, Advanced Mac Tuner, and MacKeeper, and proceeded to tear them out by the roots.
Even with CleanMyMac X 4.4.1 and Malwarebytes working together, there were some chunks of adware and malware that still needed to be hunted down and removed on their own. A search engine utility had to manually remove from the Safari > Preferences > Extensions settings and a questionable PDF reader had to be uninstalled through CleanMyMac X 4.4.1’s Uninstaller module, which became another chore.
Should I Use Mackeeper
Neither CleanMyMac X 4.4.1 or Malwarebytes was perfect for the task at hand, but after months of development and promises of significant releases and improvements in this feature, the end result was a letdown. Granted, MacPaw isn’t working to be a malware prevention or security company, but they’ve touted this feature as a prominent component of CleanMyMac X and I feel that it gave far too much questionable software a complete pass, leaving behind software that will happily change your search engine settings to route your web traffic through questionable engines or inform you that your Mac is entirely infected and only a strange firm that charges $30 a month to remotely “clean” your Mac is to be trusted.
CleanMyMac X retails for $34.95 for a one-year subscription or $89.95 as a one-time payment for a single user; the MacPaw store offers different purchase tiers depending on license needs. The software is also available in a trial version, which lets you test its modules and clean up to 500MB of system junk at a time.
Bottom line
CleanMyMac X 4.4.1 has seen some nice improvements and it’s a reliable, speedy way to remove gigabytes of gunk from your hard drive. Its Uninstaller and Updater modules have become admirable in their functionality and utility, but the Malware module is still a wash and five months of development haven’t brought it to a level where I’d feel comfortable recommending it to other Mac users for its intended purpose.