DaisyDisk alternatives: seeing and fixing a full Mac

When DaisyDisk is the right choice

If you know your way around your files and just want to see what's big, DaisyDisk is hard to beat for the price. You find the folder, decide yourself, and delete it.

Free alternatives

• GrandPerspective shows the same information as a treemap and is free from its website.
• Finder can get you surprisingly far: in a Finder window choose View, then Show View Options, and turn on Calculate all sizes. Sort by size and work down.
• Terminal: du -sh ~/* | sort -h lists your home folders by size.

The gap a map leaves

A map tells you that ~/Library/Developer is 40 GB. It doesn't tell you which parts are safe to delete, how they come back, or whether the tool that made them has its own cleanup command. That judgement is where people get nervous, and where mistakes happen.

How DiskCity differs

DiskCity is in development. It's also a map, drawn as a city where height is size and dust shows how long since you opened something. On top of the map it adds:

• Rules for developer and AI clutter that say what each item is, how safe it is to remove, and how it comes back.
• Two kinds of cleanup: rebuildable items are removed straight away and counted as freed now; personal files wait 30 days in a Recycling Yard, shown separately as reclaimable.
• The Mayor, which turns a request like "free 30 GB, don't touch my code" into a plan you review on the map before anything happens.
• In Pro, Autopilot to keep space free over time and the Harbour to move old projects to your own NAS or SSD.

It costs more than DaisyDisk: the scan is free, cleaning is $29 once, and Pro is $49. If you only need the map, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective will serve you well. If you want help deciding and cleaning, join the DiskCity waitlist to hear when it launches.