MacPrune vs DaisyDisk: Which One Fits Your Mac?

Short answer: DaisyDisk is a disk space visualiser, a tool for seeing what fills a disk and deciding for yourself what to remove. MacPrune also has a disk map, and adds a cleaning scan that sorts caches, logs and old downloads into groups by how careful you should be. If you only want to see where the space went, either will do. If you also want help deciding what is safe to remove, that is the part MacPrune adds. We make MacPrune, so read this as the maker's view, and check DaisyDisk's own website for its current features and price.

Start with what macOS shows you

Before installing anything, look at the built-in view.

1. Open System Settings > General > Storage.
2. Wait for the coloured bar to finish calculating.
3. Click the info button beside a category such as Applications or Documents to see its biggest items.

This is enough for many people. Its limit is that it groups by category, not by folder, and it lumps a lot into System Data.

See folder sizes in Finder

1. Open your home folder in Finder with Go > Home.
2. Switch to list view with View > as List.
3. Choose View > Show View Options and tick Calculate all sizes.
4. Click the Size column to sort, then open the largest folder and repeat.

Measure folders in Terminal

For a quick total of each folder in your home folder, open Terminal and run:

du -sh ~/*

Each line shows a size and a folder. To include the Library, where caches and app data live, run du -sh ~/Library/*. This reads sizes only and changes nothing.

When a visualiser is the right tool

A visualiser such as DaisyDisk turns that folder-by-folder digging into one picture, so a single huge folder stands out at once. It suits you if:

• your space is mostly taken by your own files, such as video projects, photo libraries, games or virtual machines;
• you know your way around the Library folder and can judge what a folder is for;
• you want to explore external drives as well as the startup disk and decide item by item.

The picture tells you how big something is. Whether it is safe to remove is your call, which is fine when the files are yours and harder when they belong to the system or an app.

What MacPrune does

The Disk page in MacPrune v2.0 is a treemap: every folder is a tile sized by the space it takes, with further views by kind of content, by folder and by file type. The map is for looking only. Nothing is deleted from it.

Removal happens on other pages. Clean runs one scan and sorts the results into three groups:

• Safe to clean: user caches, browser caches, the Trash, system logs, Xcode data and package manager caches.
• Review before cleaning: large files, downloads older than 90 days, duplicate downloads and mail attachments.
• Handle with care: iOS backups and Docker data.

Large Files lists files above a size you set, and Apps uninstalls an app together with its related files. Whatever you choose moves to the Trash after a confirmation, and the space is freed when the Trash is emptied.

MacPrune suits you if most of the lost space is in caches, developer data and forgotten downloads, and you would like them named and grouped. The basic version is free and Pro is a one-time purchase, described on the pricing page.

Which to choose

Pick a visualiser if you want the clearest picture and are happy to decide everything yourself. Pick MacPrune if you want a map plus a grouped list of what can go. Nothing stops you using both. For the manual route, see how to free up Mac storage, Mac storage full with nothing to delete and how to clear System Data.