DaisyDisk Alternatives for Developers (Honest Comparison)

We are building a competitor to some of these apps, so read this with the appropriate scepticism. What follows is our honest read; we have tried to make the case for each tool as its own users would make it, and we say plainly where ours loses.

The actual problem with disk analysers

Every Mac disk analyser shows you a folder called DerivedData occupying 62 GB, and then stops.

It cannot tell you what that folder is, whether deleting it is safe, which projects it belongs to, or whether it comes back. That is not a flaw in the drawing — the maps are excellent. It is that a generic file-size tool has no model of what developer tooling does.

Meanwhile the developer-specific cleaners know exactly what DerivedData is, and present it as a row in a table of checkboxes with no sense of scale. You cannot tell from a checklist whether the box you are about to tick is worth 400 MB or 40 GB.

Nearly every tool below sits on one side of that split.

GrandPerspective — free, open source

A treemap, drawn well, and it has worked the same way for twenty years.

Good: genuinely free, no upsell, no subscription, no account. The treemap is dense and accurate, and it is fast. Open source, so it is not going anywhere.

Less good: the interface is unapologetically from 2005. No developer awareness whatsoever. No concept of “this regenerates” versus “this is irreplaceable.” You are entirely on your own for interpretation.

Use it if: you want a free map, you already know what every folder on your Mac is, and you do not care how it looks.

DaisyDisk — around $10, one-time

The best-looking disk analyser on any platform, and it has earned that reputation.

Good: the radial sunburst is genuinely a better visualisation than a treemap for drilling into nested folders — you can navigate several levels deep and keep your bearings. Fast scans. Drag files to a collection area and delete in one action. One-time purchase, no subscription.

Less good: completely developer-blind. It shows you ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator and a size, and that is all the help you get. No labelling, no safety classification, no idea that a folder is a build cache.

Use it if: you want the nicest possible general-purpose disk map and you are happy doing the interpretation yourself. It is a good app and worth its price.

Disk Inventory X — free

The classic macOS treemap, and the one most people used first.

Good: free, and the treemap is the canonical implementation.

Less good: development has been intermittent for years and it feels its age on modern macOS. Slow on large drives. Handles APFS and modern permissions less gracefully than newer tools.

Use it if: nostalgia, or GrandPerspective refuses to run for some reason. Otherwise GrandPerspective is the better free treemap in 2026.

The developer cleaners — DevCleaner, CleanDev, CodeCleaner, ClearDisk

A cluster of tools that all solve the second half of the problem. ClearDisk is free and open source; the others are paid, generally in the $10–20 one-time range.

Good: they know the paths. Xcode, Docker, npm, Gradle, CocoaPods, Cargo, pip — dozens of ecosystems each, correctly identified, with one-click cleaning. If you just want the space back and you trust the tool, they work.

Less good: they are lists. A table of checkboxes with sizes in a column conveys nothing about proportion — you cannot see that one row is a hundred times another. And a list only finds what it was told to look for; the 40 GB in a folder nobody anticipated stays invisible.

Use it if: you want the caches cleared, you do not need to see your disk, and a checklist is enough. ClearDisk in particular is free and open source, which is hard to argue with.

CleanMyMac — subscription

The mass-market option, and the one developers tend to bounce off.

Good: polished, broad, aimed at people who do not want to think about any of this.

Less good: it is a yearly subscription for what is fundamentally a maintenance utility. The developer coverage is shallow — it will find ~/Library/Caches but has no useful model of Xcode or Docker. And it has a house style of urgency, badges and warnings that most engineers find grating.

Use it if: you want general Mac maintenance and do not mind the recurring cost. If your problem is specifically build caches, it is not aimed at you.

DevCruft — ours

The bet is that the split above is the whole problem, and that you want both halves at once: a map you can read at a glance that already knows what everything on it is.

Good: the disk drawn to scale, with build caches labelled by name, classified as regenerable or irreplaceable, and attributed to the projects they belong to. Finds every node_modules and target/ on every volume, not just in the folders someone predicted. Free tier is the complete map, permanently. Pro is $14 once — no subscription — for one-click reclaim.

Less good, honestly: it is new, so it has neither DaisyDisk’s decade of polish nor the open-source track record of GrandPerspective and ClearDisk. DaisyDisk’s sunburst is a better navigator for deep folder hierarchies than any treemap, ours included. And if you are not a developer, most of what makes DevCruft different is irrelevant to you — buy DaisyDisk.

Use it if: the reason your disk is full is that you write software.

The short version

	Draws a map	Knows dev tooling	Price
GrandPerspective	Yes	No	Free
Disk Inventory X	Yes	No	Free
DaisyDisk	Yes, best in class	No	~$10 once
ClearDisk	No	Yes	Free, open source
DevCleaner / CleanDev / CodeCleaner	No	Yes	~$10–20 once
CleanMyMac	Partly	Shallow	Subscription
DevCruft	Yes	Yes	Free / $14 once

And the free answer

If you would rather not install anything, the commands work:

du -sh -- ~/* ~/Library/* 2>/dev/null | sort -hr | head -25
du -sh ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
find ~ -type d -name node_modules -prune -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 -n1 du -sh | sort -hr

The full developer storage guide covers every source with the command to reclaim it, no purchase required. We would genuinely rather be the site you trusted than the app you resented.