Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications All those utility apps

It appears, increasingly, there are a bunch of Utility applications that do much the same thing and do it quite well. I'm not enough of a tech to pull this off, but I wonder if someone has done a feature grid of the likes of Onyx, Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner, CleanMyMac, Tech Tool Pro, MacPilot, et al.
I would like to confidently make choices about which are useful and which duplicate effort.
Any takers?
Rick in Maine

I'll just mention the two i keep around:

-DiskWarrior
-AppleJack


Personally, i'm comfortable on the command-line (i.e., Terminal.app) and wandering around the filesystem... so my experience with OnyX, Cocktail, *CacheCleaner, etc., is pretty limited (if any).

Your question mixes so called ‘tweaking’ utilities (see the older but still useful 'Tweaking' utilities roundup) with disk utilities like TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and DiskWarrior, etc. Despite some (minor) overlaps here and there, the difference in scope and functionality between these two groups makes comparisons difficult and not necessarily all that helpful.

Perhaps closest to what you want is the comparison feature chart Koingo Software compiled for its MacPilot utility and some competitors like Cocktail, OnyX, TinkerTool, iTweax and Secrets (database). There is no direct link to this comparison chart, but you can access it from the (left) sidebar on the MacPilot product page.

Various utilities provide a feature list that comes in handy (scroll down):
- CleanMyMac
- Cocktail
- Drive Genius
- Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner
- TinkerTool

This list is obviously far from exhaustive, but it can get you started with a better comparison.

You are mixing entirely different classes of apps in your list.

1. There is one class of apps that do little more than provide a GUI front end for exactly the same underlying GUI "housekeeping" commands. These include Cocktail, OnyX, the various cache cleaners, TinkerTool System and others. Since they all use the same Unix commands to do their thing no one is any better than another, but each offers some unique features (for example TinkerTool System has wonderful facilities for custom tailoring Access Control Lists [AACLs]). To me the choice here boils down to
   1. Personal preference for the look and feel of one over another
   2. in a few cases does the particular app have the specific functionality you are needing and
   3. if it has the functionality can you find it in the apps menu structure?
2. TechTool Pro, Drive Genius, and Diskwarrior are in an entirely different class as each uses its own proprietary tools to perform its volume repair and system testing functions. Diskwarrior is unparalleled in repairing the volume structure on a drive. TechTool Pro and Drive Genius will both repair the volume structure and both offer a suite of hardware tests and diagnostics. In point of fact for any given situation any one of the three might be able to repair a damaged volume one or both of the others would fail on and TTP or DG will perform tests and optimization functions not available in DW. DW is unquestionably the most widely used but I have and use both TTP and DG.
3. MacPilot and Tinkertool are both configuration tools and each provides unique functions but where Tinkertool has dozens of basic system UI settings MacPilot has roughly 1,000 otherwise hidden preferences for OS X and the various OS X apps.

So even though you will inevitably end up with some overlapping functionalities, my attitude is "so what". Otherwise you will be missing out on some other functions. Many of which you may use only once and others you will use with some degree of regularity.