CleanMyMac X vs Sensei: The Battle of Mac Performance Tools

Articles • Feb. 10, 2022

In today’s day and age, your storage drive is constantly grinding out bits and bytes, exposing deleted files you didn’t mean to reveal. All this can jack your computer’s performance, leaving you frustrated with over-the-top loading times. Sometimes you need more than just one app to get rid of all the garbage on your Mac. But don’t sweat it – you are in the right place if you are looking for the best optimization tools for your Mac.

CleanMyMac X and Sensei are a few of the well-known performance tools for Mac. It’s no surprise that Mac needs regular maintenance and cleanup to run smoothly. CleanMyMac X is a powerful yet straightforward and fast Mac cleaner. It will help you remove junk files hiding on your computer so that it can run faster, smoother, and more stable.

Also, Sensei is a compelling Mac optimization app that helps you do more than clean your hard drive and uninstall apps. It also provides valuable hardware and battery meter updates to monitor CPU/GPU/RAM statistics and more. So, read the blog further to choose one over the other for your Mac.

CleanMyMac X vs Sensei – UI

CleanMyMac X is an all-in-one app for keeping your Mac clean and clutter-free. The app has a simple yet elegant user interface that is intuitive and has minimal options. The user interface uses a basic two-column concept: it has well-designed icons, along with a verbal description, to designate the six options under “clean up” and the five under “maintenance”.

It has a four-step system that involves maintenance, optimization, cleanup, and repair to help ensure your Mac stays running at its peak performance. These sections include cleanup, privacy protection, space lens analysis and defragmentation, memory optimization, application management, and security features. It also has a built-in uninstaller that can eliminate applications you no longer need.

On the other hand, Sensei — the name is a play on “senior” — helps keep older Macs running smoothly, optimizing login items and launch agents, uninstalling apps, clearing the contents of internal or external drives, and more. Its unique and user-friendly interface provides you with advanced features that allow you to use your Mac in a better way. It also features a series of tools dedicated to improving your Mac computer’s functionality and overall user experience.

This app provides you with all the tools you need to tweak and enhance your Mac works. Sensei is a free dashboard widget that runs on your Mac and helps you understand what’s happening with your CPU, GPU, and memory.

CleanMyMac X vs Sensei – Mac Cleaning

CleanMyMac X is made to keep your Mac clean and ready to take on any app. With time, your Mac would keep on gaining trash and other files that are not needed. You might even install apps that you don’t need, which would be sucking performance from the background.

So, CleanMyMac X would help you clean all of that and keep your Mac running like brand-new. You just need to click on the “Scan” button and allow it to scan through all the junk and clean them. It can also clean your storage and help get a better experience with your device. Check our beginner’s guide on how to use it here.

Sensei too has most of the same features as CleanMyMac X. It too can help you clean and optimize your Mac. However, Sensei is better at cleaning trash and other unused files from your storage drive. But, it doesn’t have the in-depth control that CleanMyMac X offers.

Overall, I’d say both of the apps do a great job at cleaning your Mac. So, it won’t matter much if you choose to run either of them. However, if you want better control, I recommend using CleanMyMac X.

CleanMyMac X vs Sensei – System Monitoring

The primary function of both apps is cleaning, but it has a few other useful features to help you with general system maintenance.

CleanMyMac X lets you monitor your Mac’s system indicators, such as available disk space, RAM deficit, and frozen apps. It also offers to remove applications for you when you drag them to the trash. The System Dashboard provides a quick overview of the health of your Mac, including storage space, memory, battery, and processor activity. Health Monitor automatically runs malware checks on your Mac to ensure no infection has slipped. It doesn’t displace Malware Removal scans but can be a lifesaver for your computer.

CleanMyMac X app is a simple solution for your Mac management needs. On the other hand, Sensei is a more comprehensive solution that provides you with an extreme amount of information about your computer to help you make the right decisions.

Sensei is a good choice if you want to find out if the fans on your MacBook Pro are not working correctly. For example, you can use Sensei to check your MacBook Pro’s storage space, temperature, graphics performance, cooling, and many other aspects. Similarly, Sensei can provide advanced data about battery and SSD health sections.

Sensei is a benchmarking suite, a tool for advanced statistics, and an SSD health checker built into one handy app. For example, you can use Sensei to monitor the recent version of your SSD and analyze the statistics better. So, it helps you understand the current performance of your drive analyze the stats in more depth. You can also see the current health and temperature of the drive. Going further, Sensei can notify you before the disk falls into some trouble. So on any day, Sensei is a great way to keep your Mac in check.

CleanMyMac X vs Sensei – Performance Optimization

Macs are great for multi-tasking, but sometimes your computer might slow down. CleanMyMac X can help you spot the problem and stop the performance drop before starting. It has a visual dashboard to see what slows down your Mac and controls apps that waste CPU cycles.

CleanMyMac X lets you enjoy a lightning-fast performance with a clean system. CleanMyMac X uses scanning and cleaning algorithms to fix hard drive clutter and optimize disk permissions, resulting in a Mac that’s noticeably faster. With its advanced options for detecting large and old files, as well as re-indexing your Spotlight database, CleanMyMac X ensures that your Mac remains speedy for years to come.

Here’s the optimization list that CleanMyMac X gathers:

Login items- One of the lesser-known Mac features is Login Items, which launch every time you boot your computer.
Launch Agents- Launch Agents prolong the functionality of a Mac program but may use up your processor time and memory.
Hung Applications- Hung Applications may be unresponsive and slow down your computer. CleanMyMac X can terminate them, so you can keep using your Mac.
Heavy Consumers- These are applications that take a lot of your computer’s resources, including CPU power. To optimize the capabilities of your Mac, you may want to quit applications that use a lot of CPU power.

On the other hand, Sensei is an all-in-one optimization application, targeting both software and hardware. It has functions such as cleaning up disks, uninstalling applications, analyzing battery and disk health, monitoring CPU/GPU/RAM statistics, and optimizing startup speed. The Optimizer feature in Sensei helps you speed up your Mac’s performance and boot speed by offering a simple and easy way to manage your Mac’s startup items — even ones that are usually hidden. It provides you direct control of the things that load when you start up your Mac.

Sensei is one of the most visually pleasing ways to keep an eye on your Mac’s hardware activity, along with tools to clean your system drive. However, an unfortunate incompatibility with Thunderbolt-connected storage devices makes it less useful than it should be.

The cleanup mode in Sensei helps avid users free up gigabytes of stored data to increase their storage space. The “Optimize” utility removes login items and launch agents, while the Uninstaller utility purges apps that they installed alongside their related system files.

Also, the “Clean” utility clears out space occupied by older files and system detritus. Unfortunately, there are no scheduling options, but the included disk-cleaning tools are otherwise on par with CleanMyMac X.

Which is the better mac performance tool?

CleanMyMac X is an all-in-one solution for Mac maintenance, including cleaning up system junk files, eliminating duplicate files, and scanning for malware. With it, you can erase your trash securely to protect your privacy, clean up iTunes and Safari browsing history, and remove Google web history tracks from Chrome. This app also supports essential management tools such as disk usage analyzer, duplicate file finder, and app uninstaller. It cleans up all the unnecessary stuff on your Mac and boosts the overall performance of your computer.

Sensei is a new Mac app that gives you many ways to keep your Mac fast and efficient. Sensei’s developers give their app the label “pro-Mac cleaner” on their website, and I would label it a performance management tool. It has four primary functions:

Freeing up disk space by removing large unused files and apps that are taking up too much space (App Uninstaller)
Protecting your privacy by securely erasing trash content (Trash Eraser)
Cleaning up your browser history (Browser Cleanup) and finding duplicate files (Duplicate Finder).

The app also includes other valuable features: cache cleaner, startup manager, and app uninstaller.

Final verdict

Both CleanMyMac X and Sensei have their own feature set. So, you should check out the features of both pieces of software and see which one has more options that appeal to you. But we think that Sensei could have included more options to improve the performance. As you may have seen, more than half of the app focus on statistics and analysis. It’s also one of the reasons why Sensei can’t compete face to face with CleanMyMac X.

Also, Sensei doesn’t offer much customization, making it challenging to choose what files to delete and leaving the user in a dilemma. We think Sensei should provide other ways to scan, such as individual file selection, and thoroughly analyze the results.

As CleanMyMac X automatically cleans up your hard drive after a certain period, but Sensei only does this when you tell it to do so manually. So, if you want your computer to run faster without any effort on your part, then CleanMyMac X is the software for you.