Best 10 Disk Space Analyzers for Mac in 2022

If you use your Mac to save a lot of files and download many applications, you may eventually start to run out of disk space. You can address this issue by using an external storage device, but in many cases you will want to keep enough free space on your main drive to maintain high performance and not impact your ability to save new photos or videos. Using a Mac disk space analyzer can help you identify old and duplicate files that can be deleted to provide more free space for future activity.

10 Disk Space Analyzers for Mac

Now let’s look at 10 disk space analyzers that can help you understand how your Mac’s storage is being used so you can take the appropriate action to free up some space.

Apps to Check Disk Space for Mac Testing Statistics:

1. CleverFiles Cleaner

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: Yes | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: macOS 10.12.6 or later

Developed by the famous data recovery company, CleverFiles Cleaner is an intuitive tool whose purpose is to scan and analyze disk and folders for space hogs. You can then easily move them to Trash or remove them entirely. The tool can be configured to provide the perfect balance of performance and speed.

Key features:

• Fast visualizations – CleverFiles Cleaner does keep you waiting for visualizations to render. The app is blazingly fast even on older Macs.
• Multi-language support – The app is available in English, Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

2. Disk Space Analyzer: Inspector

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: macOS 10.10 or later

This tool is a disk visualizer for Mac that is available on the Mac App Store. It provides a simple disk analyzer that can be used by anyone with a Mac. You can easily find the largest files taking up space on your Mac, external storage, or your Dropbox account. It just takes a few minutes to scan your disk and review the chart displaying drive usage.

Key features:

• Analyzes all disks – With Disk Space Analyzer, you can analyze any disk, including your startup disk and mounted disk images.
• Impressive speed – The developers of Disk Space Analyzer have greatly improved the scanning speed on macOS Monterey.

3. Disk Cartography

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: Yes | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: Yes | OS Support: macOS 10.12 or later

Here is a free disk analyzer available from the Mac App Store that scans your disk to find the files and folders taking up all your valuable space. Once space stealing culprits are identified, you can easily remove them from within the tool. You can map any type of disk with Disk Cartography including hard drives, USB drives, and memory cards. Users can display disk usage by disk space, percent used, or file count.

Key features:

• Results filters – Disk Cartography lets you filter scan results in a number of different ways, helping you find what you’re looking for.
• Search feature – You can quickly find specific files using the built-in search feature.

4. Disk Inventory X

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: No | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: macOS 10.13 – 10.15

This simple freeware tool displays the size of files and folders in treemaps for easy viewing. The tool does not provide the functionality to remove files from within the tool and is essentially a one-trick-pony. If you want an alternative view of the files on your disk, this freeware solution might work for you.

Key features:

• Visual overview – Disk Inventory X displays a visual overview of storage space utilization, allowing you to see at a glance which folders take up the most storage space.
• Released under the GPL – The software is released under the GPL license, so you can use it without virtually any limitations.

5. DaisyDisk

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: OS X 10.5 through current macOS versions

DaisyDisk is a space analyzer that provides a map of your disk using a distinctive circular graphical display that is easy to understand. It provides real-time disk analysis so you can always tell if you have enough room to install a new app or download that movie you wanted. The user has complete control over what gets deleted and system files are protected against accidental removal.

Key features:

• Beautiful user interface – Gemini 2 can intelligently tell original files from their copies, and it remembers your choices to save you time during future cleanups.
• M1-ready – DaisyDisk is fully compatible with M1 Macs, so you can expect it to run smoothly and deliver accurate results without much delay.

6. Disk Analyzer Pro

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: Mac OS X 10.8 and all newer versions of macOS

Disk Analyzer Pro is a disk analyzer and cleaner available from the Mac App Store. It helps you organize the files and folders on your disks so you can make the most efficient use of storage space. Scan reports show usage statistics in terms of file count, size, and percentage of space used. Selected files can be copied, moved, deleted, or compressed. An integrated file explorer makes it easy to see and manage the files on your Mac’s disks.

Key features:

• Automatic categorization – Disk Analyzer Pro automatically categorizes discovered files based on their file types to help users achieve the desired results.
• Built-in file browser – Integrated into the application is a convenient file browser that you can use to browse your storage device.

7. GrandPerspective

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: macOS 10.9 or later

GrandPerspective is a utility designed to graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. It lets users easily identify files taking up the most space so they can be reviewed and deleted if necessary. The app uses treemaps to display files, with each item shown as a rectangle proportional to its size. Filters allow you to only view the filetypes you are interested in and files can be deleted from within the interface.

Key features:

• Regularly updated – GrandPerspective is regularly updated to maintain compatibility and fix bugs.
• Configurable display of views – You can choose how you want the software to display how storage space is utilized.

8. OmniDiskSweeper

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: Mac OS 10.4 or later

OmniDiskSweeper is a freeware tool that can analyze your Mac’s disk space to identify which files and folders are taking up the most space. The tool lets you choose specific folders to scan and allows the removal of selected files from within the app. It’s a simple tool that appears to do its job and helps you save space on your Mac.

Key features:

• Individual folders – You can scan individual folders as well as entire storage drives.
• Permanent deletion – The software can permanently delete files without moving them to Trash first.

9. NCDU

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: No | Perform disk cleaning: No | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave

NCurses Disk Usage is a freeware disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. You need to have NCurses installed to use the tool, which may make it an unrealistic choice for some users. Individuals planning to use this tool need to be familiar with downloading and installing binary files from the Terminal command line.

Key features:

• Excellent performance – Because NCDU doesn’t have a graphical user interface, and because its algorithms are highly optimized, it performs well even on older Macs.
• Homebrew formulae – You can install NCDU using Homebrew, a popular package manager for macOS.

10. WhatSizeMac

Analyze disk space: Yes | Remove duplicate files: Yes | Perform disk cleaning: Yes | Provides additional tools: No | OS Support: Mac OS X 10.4 or later

WhatSizeMac is a disk management tool that analyzes your disks and displays their contents in an interactive chart. Users can easily drill down for further details to find space wasters that can be removed with a click. Duplicate files can be permanently removed, sent to the Trash, or replaced with hard links. The tool helps speed up your Mac by retuning free space to the operating system.

Key features:

• Chart display – WhatSizeMac visualizes your disk space utilization as an interactive chart.
• Cleaning tools – Included with WhatSizeMac are cleaning tools that you can use to remove common space-wasters, such as logs.

How to Choose a Space Analyzer Solution for Mac

Selecting the right hard drive analyzer for your Mac can be challenging. There are many products out there that claim to be able to do the job. Following are some factors to consider when choosing an app to analyze your Mac’s disk space.

• 🤗 User-friendliness. You should look for a storage analyzer that provides a user-friendly interface which simplifies finding the tool’s features. Having to wrestle with a command-line interface makes it less likely that you will use the application productively.
• 🤓 Ease-of-use. Related to the user-friendliness of a software solution is its ease of use when performing its role. You want to find a tool that is easy to run and provides an intuitive method of analyzing your Mac’s disk space. A complex command-line tool will not get used as often as a solution that lets you click through and analyze your disks easily.
• 💡 Features. The Mac disk usage analyzer you select should have a feature set that addresses your needs. Some tools may only report on disk usage, leaving you to manually delete duplicate files to free up space. Others might automatically delete files without giving you the opportunity to review the deletions. Look for a tool that gives you options in how to address the space issues on your Mac.
• 🧰 Additional tools. Some of the software tools that act as a disk inspector also provide other tools that can be extremely useful for a Mac owner. Disk analyzers are often bundled with tools like backup and recovery software. Look for a solution that gives you a variety of software utilities if possible.
• 💲 Price. Price should never be the sole determining factor when purchasing a software solution, but it does come into play. If two products offer similar functionality and user-friendliness, it makes sense to opt for the lower-priced solution. That being said, don’t fall into the trap of looking for the least expensive option at the expense of features or usability.

How to Free Up Disk Space on Mac Easily

If you are having problems with a lack of disk capacity, you want a tool that helps you free up space. We are going to use Disk Drill as an example and run through the steps required to identify and remove duplicate and unnecessary files from your Mac.

Use the following procedure to free up disk space on your Mac using Disk Drill.

1. Download and install Disk Drill for Mac on your machine.
2. Click on the Clean Up tool located in the left-hand panel of Disk Drill’s interface.
3. Select the drive you wish to analyze and click the Start Scan button.
4. As the scan proceeds, you will see the screen populated with the names of folders that contain files on your Mac.
5. You will be notified by a Scan complete message when the scanning process is finished.
6. Now you can select a folder or click on it to open it up and select subfolders or individual files to be deleted, to return free space to the operating system.
7. You can sort the files by type or size to make it easy to find the items you want to delete.
8. Check the box next to the items you want to delete and then click the Remove button.
9. The selected items will be deleted from your Mac and are sent directly to the Trash if they fit. To finish the clean up, empty the Trash to permanently delete the chosen files and folders.

Why Do You Need a Disk Analyzer for Mac?

When it comes to Apple products in general, extra storage space always costs a lot of money. That’s why many people opt for Mac with smaller hard drives. But even those who don’t eventually discover that filling up available storage space is much easier than reclaiming it by deleting unwanted and unnecessary files.

As you use your Mac, all kinds of junk accumulates on your hard drive, from leftover system and app data to duplicates to forgotten downloads. It can be an extremely time-consuming process to manually locate these files, which is where disk space analyzers come in.

A capable disk space analyzer can quickly and painlessly reveal where the largest files and folders are located, showing you where you need to focus your attention to achieve the desired results.

Conclusion

The use of a disk analyzer can help resolve issues with inadequate space on your Mac. Running a disk analysis will show you what files are taking up the most space so you can take action and remove them if possible. Even if you can’t remove some of the files, you may be able to compress them or move them to extended storage to free up space on your main disk. We suggest you analyze your disks regularly. You may be surprised at what you find!