Avast Cleanup Premium Review: Overpriced or Worth it? [2019]

Avast is very well-known for their antivirus software, but that’s not all they offer. In late 2017, Avast Cleanup Premium was born, combining the efforts of Avast and AVG, who Avast recently acquired in September 2016.

Of course, the software isn’t free. At the time of writing, it costs $50/year. Is Avast Cleanup Premium worth paying for in 2019?

I thoroughly tested this software myself to see if it's actually effective at cleaning up and speeding up your computer.

Let’s get right into it.

If you just came here to have this question answered, the answer is it's good but overpriced. Honestly, there are other tools out there that do most of what Avast Cleanup Premium does for less.

Avast Cleanup Premium is also missing features such as customizing when automatic scans are run, and notification thresholds for things like low disk space.

However, Avast Cleanup Premium still has value to it. Things like cleaning up files in your computer, finding device and driver issues, and searching for disk errors are all useful. Avast also provides a great UI and makes it really easy to use their software.

Overall, I prefer Iolo System Mechanic to do almost everything Avast Cleanup Premium does, and more. It's the first PC cleaner to actually speed up my computer.

Check out my full review of Iolo System Mechanic.

So, what does Avast Cleanup Premium actually do? It features four types of scans: maintenance scan, speed up scan, free up space scan, and fix problems scan.

Avast Cleanup Premium’s maintenance scan focuses on tasks you should regularly do to maintain the health of your computer. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Is this actually useful? In terms of actually speeding up your computer, probably not. However, it’s a good idea to clean up your system junk and clear your browsing data once in awhile.

That being said, you can clear your browsing data for free or use CCleaner (you don’t even need the pro version).

The speed up scan looks for unnecessary programs installed, and background and startup programs that may be slowing down your PC. For the record, Avast Cleanup Premium uses a combination of blacklists, their own heuristics, and user ratings to determine whether or not a program is unnecessary.

I actually think putting background programs to sleep like Avast does is a dangerous feature. For example, users have complained that uninstalling Avast Cleanup after putting programs to sleep kills them. This is fixable, but it’s still a pain for users.

To avoid this, you should just close programs in the background you aren’t using instead of using Avast’s “sleep” feature. You can also manage startup programs yourself for free.

This scan is purely for deleting junk files on the PC such as files in the recycle bin, temp files, program setup files, and other Windows files.

This is an easy way to free up space and potentially speed up your computer. However, you don’t have to pay for Avast Cleanup Premium to do this for you. CCleaner’s free version does this as well.

This scan looks for things like disk errors, unusual Windows settings, and device and driver issues that may be affecting your computer.

I actually think this scan can be pretty useful. Things like device and driver issues, and hard disk errors can cause your computer to not work properly.

Although you can check these things yourself, Avast Cleanup Premium provides a nice all-in-one interface to diagnose and fix them.

Avast Cleanup Premium allows you to undo the following changes:

• Fixing broken registry items
• Fixing broken shortcuts
• Disabling startup programs
• Putting background programs to sleep
• Uninstalling unnecessary programs
• Fix problems scan changes

This is useful if you discover an operation like disabling a startup program or putting a background program to sleep messes things up. However, if you accidentally delete something in a maintenance or speed up scan you’re out of luck.

After all, if Rescue Center kept backup copies of your files laying around it wouldn’t really be freeing up space.

Avast Cleanup Premium also allows you to get desktop notifications for things such as:

• New broken registry items or shortcuts
• Reminding you to perform a maintenance scan
• New unnecessary programs to remove
• Low disk space
• PC problems to fix

I actually like this feature since you can pick and choose what you want to get notifications for. However, they’re not very customizable.

For example, I would like to set my own threshold for low disk space, and set how often I want to be reminded to perform a maintenance scan so I don’t get notification spammed.

Instead, if automatic maintenance is enabled, a maintenance scan runs every 7 days if it can do one of the following:

• Clean up more than 100 MB of files
• Fix 100 or more broken registry items
• Fix 100 or more broken shortcuts
• Delete 100 or more tracking cookies

These thresholds seem fairly arbitrary, and I wish I could configure them myself like you can configure automatic cleans with CCleaner.

Last but not least, Avast Cleanup Premium gives you statistics of how many items you cleaned, and how much space you regained.

Useful? Not really. Pretty and satisfying? I’ll give them that.

Avast shows some pretty impressive statistics on their main page about the results you can get with their product.

Pay careful attention to the “your results may vary” part. Mine sure did.

I tested boot time before and after running clean up, maintenance, fix problems, and speed up scans the same way they did, using Microsoft Performance Toolkit.

I used Novabench to benchmark my PC performance before and after these scans and optimizations (because PCMark is too expensive).

For reference, I’ve used this testing computer for about a year and a half, and never performed any kind of maintenance or cleanup scans on it before. The specs are:

• Intel Core i7-7700 @ 3.60GHz
• 16GB RAM
• 120 GB SSD and 1TB HDD
• GTX 1060 3GB

Avast Cleanup definitely does its job of freeing up space on your PC and fixing computer issues, but don’t expect it to speed up your computer much unless your PC is old and packed with programs. Like I said before, the only PC cleaner that actually sped up my computer is Iolo System Mechanic.

Avast Cleanup is safe in the sense it won’t install any viruses on your computer. The fix problems scan, free up space scan, and maintenance scan are all harmless. Additionally, with the Rescue Center you can always undo changes that may have caused you issues.

However, like I mentioned before, the speed up scan can be an issue if you uninstall Avast Cleanup after without waking your programs up. Check out this thread and this thread for how users were affected by this.

There are several other PC cleaners out there, like:

• CCleaner
• Glary Utilities
• Iolo System Mechanic
• Bleachbit

For an Avast Cleanup alternative, I highly recommend Iolo System Mechanic.

It allows you to have more control over your PC cleanings, and is much more powerful than Avast Cleanup Premium in terms of features and effectiveness.

For example, it has features Avast Cleanup doesn't have, like:

• Dynamically re-allocating system resources to programs being used
• Optimizing your internet connection settings
• Permanently and securely deleting files
• Customizing cleaning and scan schedules

Even though it's about the same price as Avast Cleanup, I think Iolo System Mechanic is great value for the money overall. 

Although Avast Cleanup Premium is overall useful, it is also expensive for what you get. It provides a great UI, is easy to use, and is effective at cleaning your computer.

However, it most likely won’t speed up your computer that much, unless it’s super old and is overflowing with junk programs. It also lacks customization options I like, such as being able to customize how often automatic scans run, and being able to set notification thresholds for things like low disk space.

Given the price tag, there's no reason not to get Iolo System Mechanic instead of Avast Cleanup Premium. It's about the same price, has more features, and is way more effective at speeding up computers.