01 The short version
GrandPerspective is free, open source, and will delete
things. It draws a treemap of the whole volume, moves
files to the Trash, and asks nothing of you. It looks like a tool
from 2009 because it largely is, and it has been quietly
maintained ever since.
DaisyDisk is $9.99, and the free download can't
delete. That's the detail most comparisons skip. The
scan is fast, the circular sunburst is genuinely lovely, and the
Collector — drag files into a tray, review, then purge —
is the nicest cleanup flow in the category. But removing a file
needs the paid licence, so the free version is a viewer.
So the question isn't really "is DaisyDisk worth $9.99." It's
whether you want to clean up inside the app, and how
much the polish is worth to you once you know the free option
already does the deleting part.
03 What $9.99 actually buys
Mostly: the feel of it, and the Collector. DaisyDisk's scan is
quick, the sunburst animates as it fills, and drilling into a
segment is a genuinely pleasant piece of interaction design. The
Collector is the real feature — you drag suspects into a
tray, keep exploring, then delete the whole batch once. That's a
better cleanup model than "find a file, delete it, rescan," and
nothing free matches it.
It also scans connected cloud accounts, which neither
GrandPerspective nor Delve does. If your Google Drive is the
thing that's full, that alone may decide it.
04 What free actually costs you
Looks, mainly. GrandPerspective's window is plain, its
preferences are dense, and nothing animates. There's no batch
tray: you find something, you delete it, you scan again. The
colour-by-type legend is there but there are no totals per type,
so "how much is video, in gigabytes" isn't a question it answers.
What you don't give up is the actual job. It maps the volume, it
shows you the big rectangle, and it moves it to the Trash. For a
lot of people that is the entire requirement, and it's worth
being clear that the free option here is not crippled —
which is more than can be said for the free DaisyDisk download.
05 Where both get the numbers wrong
Neither deduplicates APFS clones or hardlinks across a scan.
GrandPerspective reports logical size; DaisyDisk reports a single
size figure. On a Mac with Time Machine local snapshots, Xcode
derived data, or a cloned VM image, both can show a folder as
dramatically larger than the space you'd get back by deleting it.
That gap is the reason
"disk full but space available"
is such a common complaint, and we wrote up the whole mess in
counting bytes. It's
also, honestly, why we built a third one.
Our honest recommendation
If you want to spend nothing and you're comfortable with a
plain window: GrandPerspective. It deletes,
it's open source, it runs on anything.
If you'll clean up regularly, want the Collector, or need to
scan cloud accounts: DaisyDisk is worth its
$9.99 and it's a lovely app. Just know that the free download
won't delete.
If you're on Apple Silicon with macOS 26 and you want the
numbers to be honest about what deleting will actually give
back: that's the gap Delve was built for.
$4.99 with a 14-day free trial, and deletion is included.