Free, MIT-licensed Rust suite of file-analysis tools: duplicates, similar images and videos, same music, empty folders and files, biggest files, temporary files, invalid symlinks, broken files, and more. GTK 4 GUI plus CLI; the GUI is superseded by Krokiet (Slint) while the shared czkawka_core engine and CLI continue.
Rust workspace: czkawka_gui (GTK 4 via gtk-rs), czkawka_cli, reusable czkawka_core crate; krokiet (Slint) and cedinia (Android) frontends live in the same monorepo
Created and still led by Rafał Mikrut (GitHub qarmin, winget publisher 'Rafał Mikrut'); community contributors supply translations and fixes. Active GUI development moved to Krokiet in the same repo; the GTK 4 frontend is maintained only at compile level per the README.
License
MIT
MIT (icons CC-BY-4.0; Krokiet frontend is GPL-3.0-only)
Price
Free
Free and open source; no ads, no paid tier
Launched
first_release_at
Repo created
GitHub stars
34,780 (as of 2026-11-02)
First release
Last seen alive
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 6 years
Source published
Yes
Release signing
Unsigned
Security contact
None found
Reproducible builds
Not yet checked
Telemetry
None
Runs elevated
Never
Auto-update channel
None
Recent activity
Last seen yesterday
GitHub releases ship bare binaries and zips (52 assets in 12.0.2) with no signatures or published checksum files
No SECURITY.md or security contact found in the repo root, .github/, or the README (checked 2026-11-02)
README: 'Czkawka does not have access to the Internet, nor does it collect any user information or statistics' (author claim)
Portable binaries only: no installer, service, or driver; winget manifest installer_type 'portable'
No self-updater in the released binaries or docs; upgrades via package manager or manual GitHub download
Author's launch-post comment: 'GUI GTK frontend - use modern GTK 3 and looks similar to FSlint'
Research notes
Analysis and finding suite rather than a cache cleaner: its tools find duplicates by name, size, or hash; similar images and videos; same music by tags or audio content; empty folders and files; the biggest files; temporary files; invalid symlinks; broken files; bad extensions and names; EXIF metadata; and videos to recompress. None of the genre-typical browser, cache, or registry cleaning - the README's own comparison table marks those cells blank against BleachBit.
Started by Rafał Mikrut (GitHub qarmin, reddit u/krutkrutrar) in September 2020 as a GTK + Rust learning project - 'GTK + Rust for beginner(I just learned this two technologies)' - and announced on r/linux two weeks after the first tag.
README positions the project as a faster, more modern successor in the FSlint/dupeGuru lineage and compares it feature-by-feature against FSlint, dupeGuru, and BleachBit.
GTK 4 GUI superseded by Krokiet (Slint, same repo, GPL-3.0-only while the rest is MIT): the README calls 12.0 'the last released version' for the GTK frontend and says its code is only compile-checked in CI, though the 12.0.1 and 12.0.2 patch releases still shipped czkawka_gui binaries.
The shared czkawka_core crate exposes the scanning engine to other apps; one external frontend built on it, CzkawkaTauri, is cataloged separately.
Among the most-starred projects in the catalog (~35k GitHub stars as of 2026-11-02), an order of magnitude above most peers; unusually broad platform reach too, from FreeBSD to RISC-V to Android.
Earliest author promotion found (sc search 'czkawka', 2026-11-02); video-demo post whose top author comment links the repo and lists the 1.0 feature set.
my new app written in GTK 3(Gtk-rs) and Rust for Linux — Tech bingo