CCleaner

Also known as: Crap Cleaner

Freemium proprietary cleaner from Piriform (now Gen Digital): browser and cache cleaning, registry cleaner, app uninstaller, startup manager, duplicate finder, and scheduled maintenance; paid Pro tiers add driver/software updating. First released in 2004, it is the reference point most newer Windows cleaners define themselves against.

Platforms

Interface

Tech stack

Other

Closed source; presumed C++

Features

Dev-junk cleaning

Not a focus

Development

Company team · acquired

Originally built by Piriform (2004); Piriform was acquired by Avast in 2017 and is now part of Gen Digital.

License

Proprietary

Proprietary; free tier plus paid Pro/Pro Plus

Price

Freemium

Free tier; paid Pro subscriptions (~$30-45/year depending on bundle)

Launched

2004

first_release_at

First release

2004

Last seen alive

Oct 19, 2026

Checks

Mechanical checks derived from the fields above. Each row is one fact; "not yet checked" means exactly that, not a failure. There is no composite score; read them together.

Track record	about 22 years
Source published	No
Release signing	Signed
Security contact	Yes
Reproducible builds	Not yet checked
Telemetry	Present, can opt out
Runs elevated	Only when needed
Auto-update channel	Signed
Recent activity	Last seen 12 days ago

2017 Floxif supply-chain incident: a compromised signed build reached ~2.3M users through the updater itself
Parent Gen Digital runs a responsible-disclosure program; usage-data collection is opt-out in settings

Research notes

2017 supply-chain incident: a compromised signed build (Floxif) was distributed to ~2.3 million users through Piriform's own update infrastructure - the canonical example of the trust users extend to cleaners.
Name started as 'Crap Cleaner'; Piriform was acquired by Avast in 2017 and is now part of Gen Digital.
winapp2.ini, a community-maintained cleaner-definition file (github.com/MoscaDotTo/Winapp2), was written for CCleaner's format; the winapp2 README lists six other consumers (BleachBit, System Ninja, Avira System Speedup, R-Wipe&Clean, HDCleaner, FluentCleaner) - a de facto interchange format, not a CCleaner-only extension.

Sources

URL	Role	Status	Checked	Archive
www.ccleaner.com	homepage	200	2026-10-20

Wrong, stale, or missing something? Flag this listing: corrections reach the site operator, not CCleaner's developer.