Most of the companies that develop antivirus software for the Mac are dedicated to security, with products including antivirus, security suites, VPNs, and the like. MacPaw, which makes CleanMyMac, is different. While CleanMyMac is clearly the company’s flagship product, other offerings include a photo cleaner, a universal archive opener, and even a wallpaper manager. CleanMyMac promises malware protection and detection, but it also encompasses a wide range of features to clean up and speed up your Mac. The cleanup features are useful, but the core antivirus lacks some standard features, and we found verifying its efficacy almost impossible.
The product’s description clearly states that it “fights off malware, adware, ransomware, and all them -wares.” A company representative contacted me about a review because they saw my other macOS antivirus reviews. I’m evaluating this product as an antivirus utility for Macs, one that happens to have a big collection of bonus tools to clean and tune your Mac. A review focused on the cleanup side would take a different slant.
What’s the Price of CleanMyMac?
A one-year one-Mac subscription for CleanMyMac costs $39.95, the same (or nearly so) as Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky, Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac, and Webroot. After that, it gets confusing. The list price for a two-device CleanMyMac subscription is $79.90, and for five devices it goes up to a whopping $199.75. But those prices are cut by both a volume discount (always active) and a coupon discount that varies day to day. Ignoring the coupon discount, you pay $59.95 for two licenses after the volume discount, about the same as F-Secure Safe for Mac. A five-device subscription will run you $90.85. Once you get past the discount confusion, this product’s pricing is in line with the competition.
Avast, Avira, and AVG are totally free, which is handy if you didn’t budget for Mac antivirus. At the other end of the price spectrum, Norton lists at $104.99 per year to protect five devices. That sounds high, but Norton is a full-scale, cross-platform security suite. In addition, that price gets you five licenses for Norton’s VPN and 50GB of online storage for your backups.
Like Bitdefender, Malwarebytes for Mac Premium, and others, CleanMyMac requires a macOS version of at least Yosemite (10.10). That should be an easy requirement to meet, given how simple Apple makes staying up to date. Some competing products require even more recent versions. Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac, for example, supports the current version and the two previous, meaning Monterey (12), Big Sur (11), and Catalina (10.15).
Some Mac users are stuck using an old macOS version, perhaps due to antiquated hardware. Don’t worry; protection is still available. For example, ProtectWorks AntiVirus for Mac supports version back to Mountain Lion (10.8), and Intego Mac Internet Security works with Mavericks (10.9) or later.
Getting Started
CleanMyMac uses the super-simple type of Mac app installation; you just drag its icon to Applications. I finished the process by activating with my installation code.
CleanMyMac doesn’t have the typical off-white or dark gray background. Rather, its various pages use gradient-fill backgrounds of many bold colors. The main page has a lavender background with a welcome message and a cartoon cat. I get the impression that the main page changes seasonally. Currently it shows what seem to be holiday gifts, with animated snow falling.
Down the left you find a list of all the feature pages, organized into categories: Cleanup, Protection, Speed, Applications, and Files. Clicking the Scan button on this page runs a Smart Scan, meaning it scans for junk files, takes a quick look for malware, and checks for ways to speed up your Mac. That scan finished in just over a minute. I took the program’s advice and ran a Deep Scan, but even that scan took no longer than two minutes.
No Lab Results, No PCMag Test Results
For my Windows antivirus reviews I closely track the regular reports from four antivirus testing labs around the world: AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, MRG-Effitas, and SE Labs. Two of these (AV-Test Institute and AV-Comparatives) also put macOS antivirus tools to the test. When I first started reporting on macOS antivirus, I selected only products that appeared in results from at least one lab. At present, almost half the macOS products I track don’t show up in test results from either lab. CleanMyMac is one of those.
At the other end of the spectrum, both labs report on about one in six products. Avast One for Mac and Bitdefender earned perfect scores from both labs. Several others, including Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac and Norton, earned a perfect score from the one lab that tested them.
Most macOS antivirus products include the ability to detect Windows malware, not because it could run on a Mac, but to be sure the Mac doesn’t serve as a carrier. Some of them are quite successful. Webroot detected and cleared 97% of my Windows malware samples, while Avira Free Antivirus for Mac and Sophos Home Premium for Mac managed 90%. CleanMyMac doesn’t attempt to remove Windows malware. Just to check, I copied six dozen Windows samples to a folder on a USB drive, transferred the folder to my test Mac’s desktop, and ran a scan. The scan came up clean.
To be fair, detecting Windows malware is not a central feature for a Mac antivirus utility. I don’t zing a product that lacks this ability. But I can’t help noticing that almost every other competing product does have this ability, to one extent or another.
Another feature found in many macOS antivirus products is the ability to steer the user’s browser away from malware-hosting websites. Most of them accomplish this using browser extensions, though a few do their work below the browser level. This feature almost always includes detection of phishing sites, fraudulent sites that try to steal your passwords. I don’t have the resources to find websites specifically hosting macOS malware, but phishing is platform-agnostic, as is my phishing protection test. Once again, though, it isn’t a feature that CleanMyMac offers.
In my phishing detection test, some Mac-centric products have performed very well indeed. McAfee, Norton, and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus for Mac all managed a perfect 100% score.
The lack of any browser-level protection is a more serious flaw. All the best macOS antivirus tools include this ability, and, as noted, some are very, very good.
With no results from the labs and none of my own hands-on tests workable, I have no way to verify that CleanMyMac does anything at all to remove malware. Its deep scan runs extremely quickly, finished in less than two minutes. Is it really scanning? How could I confirm that?
As it turns out, there’s a solution. The EICAR test file is a small, simple, harmless file that almost every antivirus company has agreed to detect as malware. It’s at the core of many of the feature check pages provided by AMTSO, the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization. I downloaded this file (dodging other antivirus and browser attempts to block the download), copied it to the Mac, and ran a scan. Success! CleanMyMac detected and removed the file.
Privacy Protection
Under the Protection category in the left-rail menu you find Malware Removal and Privacy. The latter doesn’t reference any strong protection against attacks on your privacy and personal information, though. It doesn’t actively block advertising trackers and other trackers, it doesn’t seek your personal information on the Dark Web, and it doesn’t remove your personal data from data aggregator websites.
Just what does CleanMyMac do for your privacy? For one, it clears traces of your browsing history from popular browsers, among them Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Admittedly, it does a thorough job. In addition to the expected clearing of history and cookies, it sweeps clean such items as Autofill data, saved passwords, and download history. It can also clear recently used file lists from Finder and Wi-Fi networks that your Mac remembers. The privacy scan simply reports these findings; it’s up to you to choose which ones actually get wiped.
There’s one more category of privacy data that’s not quite like the rest. CleanMyMac scans for apps that have specific permissions such as access to the camera, documents folder, and microphone. Many apps, including CleanMyMac itself, legitimately need these permissions to function, so you shouldn’t just wildly delete permissions. On the other hand, if you revoke something that an app requires to function, it will simply ask you again to grant that permission when needed.
Application Features
CleanMyMac’s application features don’t all relate directly to security, but the Updater is definitely important. Malicious coders pore over popular applications, seeking security holes that they can exploit. The creators of those applications work hard to patch those security holes and push out updated software. But if you fail to install those security updates, your Mac remains vulnerable. It’s true that macOS defaults to a rather robust automated update system. This scan didn’t find any unpatched apps on my test system.
Uninstalling applications doesn’t improve your security, but decluttering is smart. CleanMyMac promises to perform a thorough uninstall of any apps you choose for removal, without any leftovers. Speaking of leftovers, it also finds bits and pieces left over from imperfect uninstalls. My test Mac had a dozen or so of them, including files from Avast, McAfee AntiVirus Plus for Mac, and an unspecified VPN. Crusty old antivirus files can interfere with installing other antivirus products, so getting rid of them is a big plus.
That leaves the Extensions scanner. As you use your Mac, you can wind up installing all kinds of widgets, plug-ins, and other extensions. CleanMyMac scans for and reports on extensions to Spotlight, Safari, and Preferences, as well as internet plug-ins. Have a look at the list, and feel free to remove any that you’re not actually using.
CleanMyMac Assistant
This product has so many features, you might not even get around to using them all. That’s where the Assistant comes in. Each time you finish a process such as clearing up uninstall leftovers or scanning for malware, the Assistant slides in suggesting three more actions you could take, things like uninstalling unused apps, running an optimization scan, or performing maintenance tasks. It reminds me, to an extent, of the AutoPilot feature in Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac. In both cases, the app prompts you to make full use of its features.
You can click to fully open the Assistant. In this mode, it shows six suggestions and also displays stats about the app’s successes across the bottom. At any time, you can bring up the Assistant (or dismiss it) by clicking a link at top right.
Cleanup and Speedup Features
This product’s name is CleanMyMac, and indeed it does more than clean away malware. A full collection of cleanup and speedup features should expand your free disk space and get your Mac running at its most efficient.
In the Cleanup category, it cleans System Junk and Mail Attachments, and empties the Trash. The System Junk scan is self-explanatory; it also runs as part of the recommended Smart Scan. By default, it performs “smart selection,” choosing which items can be deleted without consequences. You can also dig into its findings and mark more items for deletion, things like downloaded files (all of them or just some), unused disk image files, and file versions saved by data editing programs.
The Mail Attachments scan checks for unnecessary local copies of messages and attached files associated with the Mail app. You can clear these local copies without causing trouble—Mail will just download them again if needed. Finally, CleanMyMac can empty the trash, and not just the main Trash but trash bins associated with specific apps such as the photo library.
Some files are clearly junk, like old cache files and temporary files. Other files require your consideration as to whether they’re necessary or worthy of removal. In the Files menu category, CleanMyMac offers three features: Space Lens, Large & Old Files, and Shredder. Space Lens maps file usage on your Mac, showing folders in circles whose size matches the amount of space used. You can use this feature to delete unwanted files, if you wish. In testing I found that almost every folder was protected against deletion due to the presence of essential system files.
Really, you’ll get the most benefit by deleting files that are both unnecessary and large. That’s where the Large & Old files scan comes in. And unlike Space Lens, it doesn’t report on system files. Deleting one or two “whales” with this tool could save you a lot of disk space.
What if the file you want to delete is super sensitive? Your plans for world domination, perhaps, or the stolen specs for a methane micro-laser? Simply deleting a file can leave data on disk that’s subject to recovery with forensic software. If you want to make sure the NSA can’t find traces of a deleted file, use the Shredder. In testing, I found that this component offered two choices, Remove Immediately and Remove Securely. A little research revealed that the former performs ordinary file deletion with the added ability to delete files locked by Finder or another program. If you want to totally hide your traces, you must choose Remove Securely.
That leaves the Speed category, populated by Optimization and Maintenance. The Optimization tool aims to regain computing power for your Mac by ending unnecessary processes. You can take control of programs that automatically launch every time you log in, kill applications that are hung, and consider whether you need apps listed as heavy resource consumers.
The list of Launch Agents isn’t quite as easy to grasp. CleanMyMac calls them “satellite applications” and notes that “in some cases you may consider removing or disabling them.” I was surprised to find numerous items related to no-longer-present antivirus tools from AVG, BullGuard, Clario, MacKeeper, and McAfee. I thought I cleaned up those leftovers with the Uninstaller tool?
The Maintenance tool simply offers nine scripts that perform maintenance tasks on your Mac: Free Up RAM; Free Up Purgeable Space; Run Maintenance Scripts; Flush DNS Cache; Speed Up Mail; Reindex Spotlight; Repair Disk Permissions; Time Machine Snapshot Thinning; Verify and Repair disks. Selecting each script gets you a description and, in some cases, advice on when to use it. Several include warnings that the process is lengthy. Don’t just check them all off and hit Run unless you’re prepared to leave the Mac alone for a while.
Just one more thing (as Columbo would say): On several occasions while using the program, I encountered a link to try Gemini, an app designed to save space by eliminating duplicate files. The suggestion to try Gemini also appeared as the final advice pane in the Assistant. Gemini ($19.95 per year) turns out to be a separate purchase from MacPaw, which seems odd. I haven’t seen duplicate searching as a feature in other macOS security products, but various Windows-based programs such as Avira Prime and TotalAV Antivirus Pro simply lump duplicate removal in with other cleanup features.
Pretty Cleanup Tool, Malware Defense Limited
With its colorful backgrounds and attractive pages, CleanMyMac is a lot better-looking than the average macOS antivirus. It also boasts a wide range of features for tuning and cleaning your Mac. The one thing I couldn’t find was clear proof that it works as an antivirus. The labs don’t test it. It doesn’t offer phishing protection, something found in most competitors. Nor does it attempt to detect Windows malware. I think it works; I did see it remove the EICAR test file. But I can’t recommend it without more proof.
Our Editors’ Choice macOS antivirus products all come with ample proof of their abilities. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac earned perfect scores from two labs. Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac and Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac each earned one perfect score. They also earned excellent scores in our hands-on tests. Bitdefender and Kaspersky cost about the same as CleanMyMac. Norton costs more, but gives you five security suite licenses, five VPN licenses, and 50GB of online storage for your backups. Unless your focus is system cleanup rather than security, one of these will be a better choice.
