01 The short version
DaisyDisk costs $9.99 as a one-time purchase, and you can scan
and look for free, but deleting files inside the app needs the
paid license. It draws a circular sunburst, scans cloud-storage
accounts, and still runs on Intel Macs and macOS going back to
10.13.
Delve is free, including deletion. It draws a rectangular
treemap, shows on-disk size next to logical size with APFS
clones and hardlinks counted once, and wires into Spotlight,
Shortcuts, and Quick Look. The trade: it needs macOS 26 and an
Apple Silicon Mac.
03 Where DaisyDisk wins
We won't pretend otherwise. DaisyDisk runs on Intel Macs and on
macOS versions going back years, so if you're not on recent
Apple Silicon, it's the obvious choice and Delve isn't an option
for you at all. It also scans connected cloud-storage accounts,
which Delve doesn't. And the sunburst is a genuinely lovely way
to see a disk; some people simply read radial better than
rectangular. Ten dollars for a tool this polished is a fair deal.
04 Where Delve wins
It's free, deletion included, with no trial wall in front of the
one action you actually came to perform. The treemap gives every
file area in proportion to its size, so a thousand small files
read as the one big block they add up to. And Delve does the
APFS bookkeeping: when you've duplicated a 4 GB folder and
the copy is a clone, Delve shows you that deleting it frees
almost nothing, instead of promising back gigabytes that were
never really there. The
long version of that math
is in the build notes.
Our honest recommendation
On an Intel Mac or older macOS, or if you need to scan cloud
accounts: buy DaisyDisk. It's good, and we mean that.
On Apple Silicon with macOS 26, if you want a free native
treemap and numbers that match what you'll actually recover:
use Delve. It costs nothing to find out.