CCleaner alternative Clean Master released for Windows PCs

Clean Master Phone Boost is a very popular app for Android that enables users to delete temporary data from the device to free up storage space and remove traces from the phone or tablet at the same time.

The company behind the product, Cheetah Mobile, has released a first public version of Clean Master for Windows PCs today.

Reason enough to take a first look and compare it to the most popular program of its kind for Windows, CCleaner.

A portable version is not available at this point in time. After you have installed the program on your system and started it up, you will notice that it starts to scan various locations right away.

These locations are sorted into groups such as web cache, system cache, social software junk or Registry junk. The programs and locations that use the most storage space for junk data are highlighted right away in the interface with all remaining locations and programs are filed under others to improve the overview.

You have several options at this point. You can hit the clean now button to clean all data in one go. I'd only recommend this if you used the program for a while and are certain that only data that you don't require anymore is removed by it.

The program will clean log files for example or old system patches which should only be done if the files are no longer required.

You have options to clean up entries individually as well, add an entry to the ignore list so that it won't be cleaned, or check the details before you proceed.

The details list all files and information found during the scan. The design looks pretty but is not really usable as you will need to hit on "view more" multiple times before all entries are displayed. That, and the fact that there is no search limit the usefulness of the details view mode.

The program reminds you if an application is still running giving you options to close it for you or skip the cleaning for the time being.

Clean Master found 2.3 Gigabyte of junk files and Registry information on its first run. CCleaner with CCEnhancer enabled found a total of 4.4 Gigabyte instead. The difference can largely be attributed to Java Setup Files with a size of 669 Megabyte, Firefox HTML5 Storage with 341 Megabyte and Firefox Net Predictions with 298 Megabyte.

That's not the only difference though. There is for instance no option to add your own locations to the application.  In fact, there are not options or settings at all other than what has been mentioned already.

This does not make Clean Master a bad program though. It found 1 Gigabyte of junk after CCleaner deleted all temporary files that it found on the PC.

Closing Words

Clean Master is a great looking program that is easy to use and quite good already in terms of locations that it scans for junk files. While it is not on-pair with CCleaner combined with CCEnhancer yet, it does a good job on its own considering that it is a first version.

The lack of customization options is limiting Clean Master however. It lacks options to add locations manually for example which is one of the best options that CCleaner offers.