GrandPerspective Alternative: a Free Disk Analyzer That Also Cleans Up

GrandPerspective is free, open-source, and has shown Mac users one gorgeous treemap for over two decades. If all you need is to look at your disk, it’s a fine tool — we’d say that even though it’s a competitor of sorts.

But there’s a gap between seeing your disk and doing something about it. GrandPerspective shows you the map. It leaves the cleanup to you. DiskInsight is the GrandPerspective alternative that keeps the free map and adds the tools to act on it.

What GrandPerspective is

A free, open-source treemap for macOS: every file becomes a rectangle sized by bytes, colored by file type, modification date or folder. It filters, it focuses, it exports pretty pictures of your drive. It’s been around forever and it’s genuinely good at what it does.

What it doesn’t do:

• No cleanup flow — deleting files from a GrandPerspective map goes straight to the Trash with no staging list, no review pass and no “what’s safe to rebuild” guidance. Every call is yours, pixel by pixel.
• No duplicate finder — it never hashes file contents, so exact copies under different names just look like two files.
• Search is bare-bones — a filename filter, nothing more: no path, content, type or size-aware lookup from the map.
• No snapshots, no system monitor, no cloud — disk-scan only.
• No guided “what’s safe to delete” — you interpret the colors and make the calls.

That’s not a knock on GrandPerspective. It’s free software doing a focused job. It’s just a job that stops where the work begins.

The honest table

	GrandPerspective	DiskInsight
Price	Free, open-source	Free to analyze; Pro cleanup $9.99 once
Visualization	Treemap	Nine views (treemap, sunburst, flame, bubbles, mind map, age map, top sizes, list, folders)
Search	Name-only filter	Instant, names + paths
Find large files	Manual navigation	Ranked list, filterable
Duplicate finder	No	Content-hash exact (SHA-256)
Cleanup	Trash delete, no staging	Staged to Trash, your call
Developer caches	No	20 curated locations
Snapshots / monitoring	No	Snapshot diff + live monitor
Privacy	Local	100% local, zero telemetry

What you still lose by switching

Honestly: nothing you can’t replace in five minutes. GrandPerspective’s map view is genuinely good; DiskInsight’s treemap is one of nine ways to see the same scan. If you have a GrandPerspective setup with custom colors and filters you love, you’ll find the same data-driven coloring in DiskInsight — plus the controls.

And if you just want to be sure: every migration is reversible. DiskInsight Free costs nothing, scans in seconds, and never touches a file unless you tell it to.

If you want to keep GrandPerspective

Fine — really. It’s a good free tool. But you now have a choice for the parts it doesn’t do. When you’ve stared at the map and spotted the giant folders, DiskInsight is the tool that searches them, finds the duplicates inside, and stages a cleanup you can undo.

Try it

Analyze your whole drive free in under a minute, with cache sizes and cleanup candidates counted. Buy a license once if you want to act on what you see.

Download DiskInsight free · How DiskInsight compares to other tools · Find your largest files