CleanMyMac offers virus removal, but is it any good?

We’ve looked in depth at CleanMyMac as a great solution for reclaiming space and optimizing you Mac and it’s one of our top choices in our round up of the Best Mac Cleaning Software. Among it’s many tools is a Protection tool that can scan for malware on your Mac and remove it. In this article we are looking specifically at this feature to see if it can compete on the same level as the big guns in our round up of the Best Antivirus solutions for Mac.

Our big concern here is that sometimes a company can be lead by its marketing department who make promises the engineering team can’t deliver. We felt this was the case when we first looked at the antivirus aspect of CleanMyMac’s arsenal earlier in 2024, but it’s been updated since, so we wanted to take another look.

Like previous versions, the version of CleanMyMac we are testing (CleanMyMac 5.0.4) comes out swinging the first time you launch it, its opening animations offering tutorial elements to learn from. CleanMyMac installs cleanly, but doesn’t ask for Full Disk Access, which has to be assigned manually in the Privacy & Security settings, which proved a bit disconcerting.

Still, the software offers a good level of customization, and it’s easy to choose between the three scan modes (Quick Scan, Balanced Scan, and Deep Scan), each of them offering quick performance as CleanMyMac scans your hard drive and external drives. It’s easy to configure scan behaviors, such as whether or not to include external drives in your scans or target .DMG files, and whitelists can also be created to exclude specific volumes and folders from the scans.

Testing with CleanMyMac proved a mixed bag, and while the software teams up well with macOS’ GateKeeper feature, the two bringing down the hammer on questionable software that hasn’t been signed as safe/compatible by Apple and preventing installation or the running of questionable scripts and functions, it’s still possible to get a fair amount of malware past these systems and into your Mac.

Once installed, the Quick Scan feature found only three threats in the form of two elements from CrossRat and a threat in the form of the infamous AdWind malware. The Balanced Scan function was able to root out most of the Elite Keylogger malware, while the Deep Scan feature found the remnants of the AdWind malware, which had to be dug out with a third-party utility.

To its credit, CleanMyMac was able to catch some elements of malware as they were being opened for the first time, but there were questionable chunks of software that remained even after they’d purportedly been removed and the Mac had been rebooted. Case in point, the Elite Keylogger software had to be manually located and removed from the Login Items.

In addition to this, CleanMyMac offers no tangible warning against visiting questionable websites, and essentially waved me on through without any kind of warning to every questionable link to be found in my Gmail’s Spam folder, in one case allowing full access to a mock utility that pretended to scan my hard drive for infections and located dozens of samples with the intention of having me install malware to remove the purported infections. None of this is encouraging, and in the midst of MacPaw and CleanMyMac’s claims that the utility is a catch-all for just about everything on your Mac, this feels like a missing feature that could be capitalized on if executed well.

It’s not all bad news for CleanMyMac. To my surprise, the application was able to catch and remove no less than 216 malware samples that I’d copied on an external hard drive, hunting them down after they’d been decompressed from their .zip archives and taking them out effectively. This was an excellent find, but these malware samples seemed to have been largely ignored when they were on my local hard drive awaiting installation, and CleanMyMac weirdly wraps external hard drives into its larger scans without offering a targeted scanning feature that can be used with an external drive such as a thumb drive on the fly.

It’s a strange mix of zippy speed that can perform a Deep Scan on an SSD with more than 800 gigabytes of data on it in five to ten minutes, but also allows prominent chunks of adware and malware that remain installed unless you specifically locate the files and remove them or use a third-party utility to hunt down what CleanMyMac missed.

Yes, there are some good features to be had with the new version of CleanMyMac, the interface is excellent, and MacPaw makes good use of its potentially great MoonLock antiviral engine and its real-time malware monitor, but there’s too much that can be forced through that just ends up not being cleanly removed, and this is a problem.

CleanMyMac 5.0.4 caught a fair amount of viral activity, but still left adware and malware such as AdWind in place, which needed to be cleaned out with another utility.

CleanMyMac retails for $39.95/£30.95 for one Mac for a one year subscription, or a one time purchase of $119.95/£101.95 for one Mac (at the time of writing there is an additional 20% off those prices). It is available for a week-long free trial provided you give MacPaw your credit or debit card information to bill against.