01 The short version
CleanMyMac is an all-in-one maintenance suite: junk cleanup, an
app uninstaller, malware scanning, startup items, plus a Space
Lens view of what's using your disk. It's a subscription, and it
does a lot of things.
Delve does exactly one of those things. It maps your disk, tells
you the truth about how much space you'd actually reclaim, and
lets you clear it safely. $4.99 once. If you want the whole
maintenance suite, Delve isn't a replacement and we won't pretend
otherwise. But if what you actually opened CleanMyMac for
was “where did my disk go,” you're renting a lot of
app for one answer.
03 Where CleanMyMac wins
Breadth, and it isn't close. Delve will never uninstall an app
and its leftovers, scan for malware, manage login items, or flush
caches on a schedule. CleanMyMac does all of it from one window,
it runs on Intel Macs and older macOS, and MacPaw has been
shipping it for well over a decade. If you want one app that
handles Mac housekeeping generally, buy that app.
04 Where Delve wins
Honest numbers, and not paying rent for them. APFS clones and
hardlinks make the naive size figure misleading: the same bytes
get counted in several places, so a folder that claims 80 GB
may return 12 when you delete it. Delve shows on-disk size next
to logical size with those counted once, so what it promises is
what you get back. The
accounting details are
in the build notes.
It's also a different posture toward your disk. Delve never
deletes anything on its own and has no automated rules. You
stage what you don't want into the Collector as you browse,
watch the reclaimable total climb, and send the batch to the
Trash in one reviewed action where a wrong call is still one Undo
away. Nothing leaves your Mac, and there's no account to make.
Our honest recommendation
If you want general Mac maintenance (uninstalls, malware, cache
cleaning, on any Mac), CleanMyMac is the tool and Delve doesn't compete with it.
If you opened it to answer “what is eating my
disk,” and you're on Apple Silicon with macOS 26, Delve
answers exactly that for $4.99 once, with a 14-day trial and
no subscription.