SweepyMac and Stackyard on the same Mac: where they overlap, and which to reach for

SweepyMac is a cleaner for any Mac. Stackyard is a developer's menu-bar tool that happens to include a cleaner. If you write code you may end up with both, and the first question is usually whether they are doing the same thing twice. Partly, yes. This post goes through the overlap so you know which one to open for which job.

What they share

Both apps are built on the same rule: nothing is deleted outright. What either one removes goes to the Trash, so a mistake costs you a trip to the Trash rather than a backup restore. Both show you what is inside a group before you press anything, both leave your cookies and passwords alone unless you ask, and neither sends your scan results anywhere.

The tools themselves overlap in six places.

Caches

SweepyMac's Cleanup pre-selects user caches, application logs and saved app state, the categories that are safe on any Mac. It lists developer caches, such as Xcode DerivedData, npm, Gradle and Cargo, but leaves them unticked, because to a non-developer a gigabyte of Gradle cache looks like junk and to a developer it is ten minutes of rebuild.

Stackyard's Dev Caches is the deep version. Xcode DerivedData, Device Support and simulators; npm, Yarn, pnpm and Bun; Gradle, CocoaPods, SwiftPM, Homebrew, pip, Go, Cargo, Playwright and Puppeteer; and browser caches. Select All Safe ticks everything that rebuilds on its own. And Projects lists each of your projects' own build folders, node_modules, .next, target, .venv and the rest, which SweepyMac does not look inside at all. The post on reclaiming disk from dev caches has the detail.

Reach for: Stackyard, if you are a developer. SweepyMac's Smart Scan for the everyday caches every Mac builds up.

Duplicates

Both compare file contents rather than names, both look at files of 1 MB and over, and both keep the oldest copy of each set and pre-select the rest. SweepyMac goes a step further on honesty: it labels hard links and APFS clones as freeing no space, because deleting one of those copies gives you nothing back. The duplicates post explains why.

Reach for: either. SweepyMac if your duplicates are photos and downloads that may include clones.

Large and old files

SweepyMac's Large & Old takes any folder, a size floor from 10 MB to 2 GB and an age, and deliberately skips hidden files, bundles, your Library and iCloud files that are only online, so a scan never triggers a download. Stackyard has Large Files, sortable by size or name, and Old Downloads, which lists files in Downloads older than the number of days you choose.

Reach for: SweepyMac for a careful sweep of a chosen folder; Stackyard's Old Downloads for the quick monthly clear-out.

Seeing where the space went

SweepyMac has two views: Space Lens, a live bubble map you can drill into and remove from, and Disk, a read-only treemap of the whole volume. Stackyard's Storage Map draws any folder, your home folder by default, as tiles sized by space, which is where the hidden developer folders show up: .nvm, .android, .cargo, .local. In the screenshot above, those are the three biggest tiles in the home folder.

Reach for: Stackyard's Storage Map for dot-folders, SweepyMac's Space Lens and Disk for everything else.

Uninstalling

Both find the support files, caches, preferences and launch agents an app leaves behind. SweepyMac's Applications module lists every app with its size and handles apps that need an administrator password. Stackyard's Uninstaller takes a dropped app, and if the app is running it offers Quit & Uninstall, or Force Quit & Uninstall for one that will not quit.

Both also list leftovers from apps you have already deleted. SweepyMac only offers support files untouched for sixty days, and leaves them unticked. Stackyard lists them with a warning worth repeating: some of those folders belong to command-line tools, so read the list first.

Reach for: either. SweepyMac's eleven places list is the more thorough.

What starts at login

SweepyMac's Performance module lists the launch agents in your own Library and disables one by moving its file to the Trash. Stackyard's Startup tab shows launch agents and daemons with the app each belongs to, whether it is running, and whether it restarts when quit.

Reach for: Stackyard to understand what an agent is; either to remove it.

Where they do not overlap at all

Only SweepyMac has the Smart Scan, the Mac Health score, the browser privacy cleaner, the malware scanner, the battery screen, the maintenance scripts and Cloud Cleanup.

Only Stackyard has per-app memory with Quit, the orphan list, every local server with a health dot, Share on LAN, Projects, Docker and Homebrew services, Guard, Meeting Mode and the 24-hour memory history.

So which one?

If you are not a developer, SweepyMac. If you are a developer and mainly want your machine responsive and your disk back from build artefacts, Stackyard on its own will do. If you are a developer who also wants a health check, a privacy clean and a malware sweep once a month, run both: Stackyard day to day from the menu bar, and SweepyMac for the monthly routine.