When comparing Nektony App Cleaner & Uninstaller vs Hazel, the Slant community recommends Hazel for most people. In the question“What are the best app uninstallers for Mac OS X?” Hazel is ranked 1st while Nektony App Cleaner & Uninstaller is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Hazel is:
Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. Have Hazel move files around based on name, date, type, what site/email address it came from (Safari and Mail only) and much more. Automatically put your music in your Music folder, movies in Movies. Keep your downloads off the desktop and put them where they are supposed to be.
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Pros
Pro It uninstalls apps completely
Pro Clean clear interface, quick sensible price
Pro It mostly works
Most of the time it works fine, the user interface is very good and it certainly removes more items than a user would have done by simply dragging the app manually to the wastebin, along with any extra files found simply using intuition.
Pro Automatically cleans up and maintains folders
Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. Have Hazel move files around based on name, date, type, what site/email address it came from (Safari and Mail only) and much more. Automatically put your music in your Music folder, movies in Movies. Keep your downloads off the desktop and put them where they are supposed to be.
Pro Very customizable
More so than alternatives.
Pro Cleans up after uninstalling an application
When you delete an application Hazel will pop up and show you a list of attached files belonging to the deleted app to clean your uninstall more correctly.
Pro iLife Support
Hazel features new actions to import your files into iPhoto or iTunes. And with Hazel 3, you can import into Aperture projects and folders as well.
Pro Process files depending on their content
Its in-file search criteria allows it to extract dates from files (e.g., to add to the filename) and to categorize recurrent files (e.g., receipts) into subfolders (or to treat them in some specific way).
Cons
Con Company does not honour previous "one-time" purchases.
Apparently, for this company, the term "one-time" means "until we decide to change the version number and re-charge you"! A previously bought Pro license for the previous version of the application worked fine for a couple of years until upgrading to macOS Big Sur. The previous version no longer worked and the application wanted to install the latest one. The app no longer accepted the original license key, saying that it was valid only for the "old" version and prompting the purchase a new license, at full cost ($19.90, €21.90) obviously.
Con Not always working properly
The app failed to clean up all remnants when trying to remove a full installation of Xcode, found out after trying to re-install just the Developer CLI tools and the installation would fail by stating that Xcode is already installed. The situation was resolved by following a guide found on Github for manually removing Xcode, which fortunately worked.
For certain applications whose installation is tightly coupled to the operating system, the "App Cleaner & Uninstaller" app should detect them and use specifically customized unistallation scripts, instead of relying on their generic scanning algorithms only.
Con Expensive
Con Doesn't work well with subfolders
The rules don't work very well with subfolders and working with archive files (zip, rar, gz, 7z, etc) is also limited.
Con Rules creation is a time consuming process
To really enjoy the power of Hazel, you will need to progressively create more and more rules to manage each specific kind of file, but this process is slow, quite annoying when you have many similar rules, and can only be learned on the way, as you find new uses for it.