Cleaner Guru vs Sift
I make one of these, so read this accordingly. Here is the comparison written the way I would want to read it if I had made the other one.
Where Cleaner Guru wins
Start here — it is the shorter list, but only in count.
- Track record. Over 95,000 ratings at 4.5 stars, and roughly a million downloads a month. Sift is new and has neither of those yet. If you want a tool thousands of people have already stress-tested, that is a real reason, and I do not have a comeback for it.
- Contacts. Theirs is more developed than mine — it handles incomplete entries and merges across synced accounts more thoroughly.
- Secret storage. A PIN or Face ID protected folder for media. I have a vault too, theirs is just more mature.
- It is finished. Years of edge cases have been found and fixed in their app that have not been found in mine yet, simply because nobody has hit them.
Where Sift wins
- What it costs. Cleaner Guru is a subscription. Sift offers a monthly, a yearly, and a one-time lifetime purchase — multiply any weekly price by 52 before you compare the two.
- Nothing is uploaded. No account, no server, nothing to sign into. Test it yourself in airplane mode — that is a claim you can check in a minute, not a promise you just have to take my word for.
- It learns what you keep. Every swipe trains a small model right on your device, so the queue gets ordered by what you actually bin, not a fixed ruleset. Nobody else in the category does this locally.
- It tells you what it could not check. Photos stored only in iCloud have no local copy to read. Sift counts them and says so, rather than quietly reporting a total that leaves out half your library.
- It finds exposed secrets. API keys, private keys, wallet files, photos that carry your home address. Nothing else in this category even looks.
Side by side
| Cleaner Guru | Sift | |
|---|---|---|
| Duplicates & near-copies | Yes | Yes |
| Blurry photos | No | Yes |
| Screenshots | No | Yes |
| Video compression | Yes | Yes |
| Contacts | Yes, deeper | Basic |
| Secret vault | Yes, deeper | Basic |
| Learns your preferences | No | Yes |
| Exposed-secrets scan | No | Yes |
| Works offline | Partly | Entirely |
| Ratings | 95,000+ | New |
Which to pick
Cleaner Guru if contacts and a locked media folder are what you came for, or if you would simply rather use something proven than something new. Both of those are fair reasons.
Sift if you object to subscriptions, want the work happening on your phone, or want a tool that adapts to your judgement instead of applying someone else’s.
Either way, run whichever one you pick in airplane mode once. It tells you more than any review, including this one.
Sift — Clean up photo storage. See what it does →