Why We Removed CCleaner from Our Recommended List (Updated)

CCleaner was on our recommended-list for years. It did one thing, did it well, and did not push extras. That changed slowly and then all at once — additional installers were bundled by default, an in-app news feed was added, and the free version's registry cleaner started nagging for a paid upgrade after a scheduled scan.

Individually those are small things. Together they cross the line we set for a listing on this site: the free tool should be the same tool that gets used, and nothing should be silently added to your machine that you did not ask for.

For the same job, we now list two options in Uninstallers and one in System Utilities. All three are actively maintained and free of the behavior above at the time of writing. If any changes, we will pull it and update this note.

The catalog page for the older CCleaner listing has been redirected to this post so anyone landing from a bookmark understands the change.

Further reading: Wikipedia — PDF format overview.