Mac cleanup tools are a crowded category with a bad reputation, most of it earned by a previous generation of software that inflated numbers and bundled things nobody asked for. The current field is better, and the useful comparison is not about which one frees the most gigabytes.
The questions that actually separate them
- Does it show you the file list and byte count before it deletes, or does it show a progress bar and a total afterwards? This is the single biggest difference between tools you can trust and tools you cannot.
- Is the deletion permanent or routed through the Trash? Both are defensible, but you should know which you are getting, because a tool that reports freed bytes while moving files to the Trash is reporting a number you have not received yet.
- Is it hardlink aware? If not, its totals are inflated on any machine with local snapshots or a pnpm store.
- Does it install a background helper running as root? A privileged daemon that persists after the app quits is a much larger surface than a tool that asks for authorisation per operation and exits.
- Can you read the source? For software with filesystem write access, this is the difference between trusting a claim and checking it.
What the categories are good at
Commercial all-in-ones like CleanMyMac cover the most ground and have the most polished onboarding, at a recurring subscription cost, with a closed codebase and a background agent. If you want one thing installed and never want to think about it, this is a reasonable trade.
Single-purpose free tools are usually better at their one job. Pearcleaner is a sharper uninstaller than most suites include. DaisyDisk's sunburst map remains the nicest disk visualisation on the platform and costs ten dollars once. iStat Menus has far more sensors and configurability than any cleaner's monitoring tab. If your problem is precisely one of these, buy the specialist.
The gap is when you have four of these problems at once and do not want four apps, four update mechanisms, and four licences.
Where Burrow sits
Burrow covers cleanup, developer artifacts, duplicates, similar photos, leftover installers, app uninstall, orphaned files, disk mapping, live status, ports, network, and connectivity in one window, free and MIT licensed. Every action shows the files and the bytes first, sizing is hardlink aware, and there is no background root helper: when a task needs admin rights, macOS's own dialog asks you and the process exits afterwards.
It also does something none of the others do, which is expose the whole surface to coding agents over MCP, so Claude Code can ask your machine what has been happening rather than guessing.
It is not better at disk visualisation than DaisyDisk or at sensor coverage than iStat Menus. It is one window, one licence, and source you can read.