CCleaner 7.11.1509

The free build of CCleaner clears junk files, browser traces and broken registry entries for as long as you want to keep using it, with no trial clock.

What it does not include is most of what the Professional tier advertises, and that line moved when CCleaner 7 arrived.

Here is what free actually gets you, which build your version of Windows needs, and where a lighter tool would serve you better.

What CCleaner Actually Cleans

Custom Clean is the heart of the app and it is fully free. You tick the categories you want gone - temporary files, thumbnail caches, memory dumps, browser history, download records, cached images, saved form data - and CCleaner leaves everything else alone.

The cookie list is the part worth spending a minute on. You can move the cookies for sites you stay signed in to over to a keep list, so a clean does not log you out of everything you use daily.

Browser cleaning covers Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and the other Chromium builds, plus a long tail of desktop applications. Recent releases added Thunderbird and the Neo browser to that list.

The registry cleaner looks for broken file references, invalid entries and orphaned settings left behind when software is removed. It offers to back up the keys it touches before it removes anything, and taking that backup costs you nothing.

Piriform holds US patent 8,463,758 over the file and registry cleaning technology and the Performance Optimizer, so the registry engine is not the generic scan-and-scare routine that most free cleaners ship.

The startup manager and the uninstaller are free as well. The startup list shows scheduled tasks, services and, since version 7.09, the programs that add themselves to your right-click menu.

Free Versus Professional

This is the part the marketing copy tends to blur, so here it is straight, taken from CCleaner's own plan comparison.

What Is New in CCleaner 7.11

Version 7.11.1504, released on 25 August 2026, is a tidying release rather than a feature drop. The right-click Scan and Clean shortcuts now respect the rules you actually selected in Custom Clean, instead of running everything.

Duplicate Finder now names the files it could remove when some are locked, rather than throwing one generic error over the whole batch. The Uninstaller wording was rewritten to be consistent, the startup flash was removed and resizing from the top edge no longer leaves a white stripe.

The rest is security and accessibility work: hardened local communication and file handling, better screen reader announcements, a fixed tray icon toggle, and a fix for the scan percentage appearing mirrored in Arabic.

The bigger changes landed earlier in the 7.x line. Version 7.0 in October 2025 brought the redesign, light and dark themes, ARM64 support and a new uninstall engine with batch removal and Temporary Uninstall.

Version 7.01 renamed Disk Analyzer to Duplicate Finder, and 7.03 added the warning before cleaning rules touch your Downloads folder plus a setting for how long a temporarily uninstalled app stays gone.

Which Build Your Windows Needs

CCleaner 7 runs on Windows 11, 10 and 8.1, in both 32-bit and 64-bit form, and on ARM64 devices since version 7.0. Most people want the standard installer.

Windows 7 is a different story. Piriform now publishes a separate sunset build, CCleaner 6.41, as the last version for those machines, and this page mirrors it alongside a 6.40 build kept for the same reason.

Windows XP and Vista stop at CCleaner 5.64, which is mirrored here too. It has not been updated in years and should be treated as a last resort on a machine that is already offline.

There is no portable CCleaner 7. The portable zip on the vendor's builds page is still the 6.41 branch, so a portable copy on a technician's USB stick is a version behind the installer by design.

Who Owns CCleaner Now

Piriform sold CCleaner to Avast in 2017, Avast merged with NortonLifeLock in 2022, and the resulting company renamed itself Gen Digital. CCleaner's copyright line reads Gen Digital Inc today.

That history is why some long-time users are wary, and the 2017 supply chain incident, in which a compromised build was distributed for about a month, is the reason the wariness stuck.

The practical answer is that the product is still developed and still shipping monthly releases, with security hardening in most of them. The published version history is the place to check that for yourself rather than take anyone's word for it.

If corporate ownership is the sticking point, that is a reasonable line to draw, and there is a good open-source answer to it below.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell is simple. If you opened CCleaner expecting the updater tools and found them greyed out, you wanted a different product, and there are free ones that do those jobs properly.

Want open source with no telemetry and no paid tier at all: BleachBit. It cleans the same categories, its source is public, and it has no upgrade path to sell you.

Want something from Microsoft itself: Microsoft PC Manager handles junk files, startup apps and memory in one click, with fewer options than CCleaner and no paid tier.

Want the whole toolbox free: Kudu bundles more than fifteen cleanup and optimization tools as open source, and HDCleaner adds defragmentation, file shredding and benchmarking.

Want cleaning on a timer without paying: Wise Disk Cleaner schedules its own cleans, which is the single most requested Professional feature.

The full drive cleaners category has the rest, including a few built for specific jobs rather than general maintenance.

Going Further on Privacy and Bloat

CCleaner's browser cleaning is solid, but it stops at the browser. Glary Tracks Eraser reaches activity traces in more than a hundred Windows applications.

For deletion that survives a forensic recovery attempt rather than just clearing the entry, Privacy Eraser Free overwrites the data it removes.

Pre-installed Windows apps are a separate problem, and no cleaner touches them. Win11Debloat removes them from a script that shows you every change before it makes one.

If you would rather click than run a script, FlyOOBE does the same job with an interface, and CrapFixer targets the ads and telemetry Windows enables by default.

CCleaner's own CCleaner Browser is worth a look if browser traces are most of what you are cleaning, since it drops less of that data in the first place.

Uninstalling and Drivers Without Paying

CCleaner 7's built-in uninstaller is free and it does remove leftovers, but it is not the deepest option available. Revo Uninstaller Free watches an uninstall as it happens and sweeps what the program leaves behind.

Revo Uninstaller Pro adds installation tracing and forced removal for programs whose uninstaller is broken, on a trial rather than a permanent free tier.

Drivers are where the free build leaves the biggest hole, and the answer is not to pay for CCleaner Professional. Snappy Driver Installer Origin updates drivers from downloadable packs, entirely offline, which also makes it the right tool on a machine with no working network driver.

Quick questions

Download CCleaner 7.11 and see what it clears off your drive, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.