MacClearings vs Mole

What each app is for

Mole is two products under one name. The Mole CLI, mo, is a free, open-source terminal tool that cleans, uninstalls, optimizes, analyzes the disk and shows live system status. Mole for Mac is a separate native app, sold once, with five tools: Clean, Software, Optimize, Analyze and Status, plus a menu bar display. Its pitch covers a lot of ground: a System Data group in Clean, cleanup of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, uninstalling with leftovers, app updates, login items, maintenance tasks, a treemap of the disk, and a system monitor with fan control. It is actively developed, with new releases of both the app and the CLI in October 2026.

MacClearings is a disk analyzer and cleaner, arranged around three questions. Why is my disk full? is Breakdown, Map and Find. Make room is Suggestions, Duplicates, Applications and Compress. What changed is History. It has no command-line tool and no system monitor beyond each running app's CPU and memory.

Where Mole is the better choice

• Price. Mole for Mac costs $19 once and activates on 2 Macs, and the CLI is free. That is less than MacClearings' $25, though more than its $12.50 for the first 25 buyers.
• A free, scriptable CLI. mo has a dry run for every destructive command, JSON output, and a skill for coding agents that previews with --dry-run. MacClearings is a Mac app only.
• More than disk space. Mole's app manages app updates and login and background items, runs maintenance tasks, and shows CPU, memory, disk, network, power and processes, with fan control on supported Macs. There are Windows versions too.
• AI coding tools. Its AI Cleanup covers caches and old versions of the Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok and Copilot command-line tools, and lists Ollama models. MacClearings clears Cursor's editor caches but doesn't touch local AI models today.
• Older Macs. The app runs on macOS 14 and the CLI on macOS 12. MacClearings needs macOS 15.
• Try it first. Scanning is always free, and each paid tool works twice without a license.

Where MacClearings is the better choice

• Everything goes through the Trash. Mole's docs say the Mac app removes caches permanently by default, with a setting to send them to the Trash instead, and that emptying the Trash and some maintenance steps are permanent. MacClearings has no permanent path at all, and a check that runs before every build of the app refuses any code that could remove a file another way.
• It never empties the Trash. Mole's README says mo clean empties the Trash by default. MacClearings leaves that to you, so anything it moved can go back until you decide.
• Undo and Put Back. Mole keeps an operations log you can read with mo history, but documents no undo; recovery goes through Finder's Trash for items that went there. MacClearings' History has Undo for each cleanup and Put Back for each item.
• Caches start unchecked. Mole's AI Cleanup starts with caches selected, and mo clean cleans its cache categories unless you whitelist them. MacClearings checks items for you only when they are safe to lose and won't come straight back, because apps rebuild caches within days.
• Space that lasts. MacClearings measures each cleaned place again after a day, a week and a month, shows how much stayed free, and orders Suggestions by it. We didn't find an equivalent in Mole's README or product reference.
• Duplicates. MacClearings finds duplicate files and always keeps at least one copy. We didn't find a duplicate finder in Mole's docs.
• Explanations inside the app. Both explain. Mole groups System Data in Clean and publishes many web articles and per-app pages. MacClearings puts a field guide of about 220 folders inside the app, in the Map's inspector, tooltips, Find and Suggestions.

Developer cleanup in both

Both go deep here, and it's fair to say so. Mole's CLI covers npm, pnpm, Yarn, Bun, pip, uv, Poetry, Go, Gradle, CocoaPods, Homebrew, JetBrains, Xcode and simulators, Docker build caches and more, and mo purge finds project build folders. MacClearings' rules cover Xcode DerivedData, archives, device support and simulators, npm, Yarn, pnpm and Bun, pip, uv and Poetry, Homebrew, Cargo, Go, Gradle and Maven, CocoaPods and Swift packages, Playwright and Cypress browsers, JetBrains, VS Code and Cursor, and project build folders. The difference is where the files go: in MacClearings, all of it lands in the Trash with Undo. More on the developer page.

What happens to the files you remove

Mole. Both the app and the CLI show what they will remove before acting; the CLI has --dry-run on every destructive command. In the CLI, mo uninstall, mo analyze and mo slim use the Trash by default, while mo clean, mo purge and mo installer delete permanently, and mo clean empties the Trash unless it is whitelisted. In the Mac app, Uninstall, Analyze and AI Cleanup use the Trash, and cache cleanup is permanent unless you change the Cache Removal setting. Every action is written to an operations log.

MacClearings. Checked items wait in the Cleanup tray, which remembers them between launches. Review & Clean Up lists every staged item with its size, and only Move to Trash in that list moves anything. Right before moving, each item is checked again: if it has gone, changed since it was measured, is open in an app, or is now protected, it is skipped and you are told why. The rest goes to the Trash, and History records where each item went. The safety page has the full rules.

Price

As of October 2026, Mole for Mac costs $19 once and activates on 2 Macs, with free updates and refunds within 14 days. The Mole CLI is free and open source under GPL-3.0. Mole for Windows is a separate license.

MacClearings costs $25 once, or $12.50 for the first 25 buyers, with one license key and a 30-day refund window. Details are on the pricing page.

Moving over from Mole

There is nothing to export or import. A few things to know first:

• MacClearings needs macOS 15 or later.
• If you keep the Mole CLI, add the Trash to its whitelist. Otherwise mo clean empties the Trash by default, and with it anything MacClearings moved there.
• Caches arrive unchecked. Check them yourself if you want them gone, knowing apps will rebuild them.
• Keep Mole for monitoring, app updates or AI tool cleanup if you use those; MacClearings doesn't replace them.

Download Mole only from mole.fit or its GitHub repository. Mole's own README warns that some lookalike domains are not Mole.