Software company Piriform may not be a household name, but the company has been offering a handful of popular, powerful, and free apps for Windows computers for years. Piriform is the developer behind the popular CCleaner application for clearing up disk space, Defraggler disk defragmenter, and several other useful tools.

And now all of those tools are going to be part of the Avast software family. Avast, a company probably best known for its free antivirus solutions, has acquired Pirifom.

Avast says it’ll continue to offer products under the CCleaner name, as well as related tools sold under the Avast name, including Avast Cleanup and AVG Tune Up (Avast bought rival antivirus software maker AVG last year). But with Piriform’s developers joining Avast, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company eventually merged the two suites of applications.

While CCleaner and Defraggler are probably the best known tools from Piriform, I’m also a fan of the company’s other freeware applications for Windows PCs: Recuva can help you recover deleted files from a hard drive, SSD, or flash drive, and Speccy is a handy utility for viewing a computer’s specs and related stats (such as the CPU temperature).

Neither of those are tools you’re likely to use on a daily basis. But it’s great to have reliable (and free) options when you need them.

Piriform also has a range of business solutions and a mobile version of CCleaner. It’s unclear what the future holds for those products. But buy acquiring Piriform, Avast gets some new potential revenue streams as well as Piriform’s existing user base and brand recognition. So there’s at least some incentive for the company to keep supporting all of Piriform’s most popular offerings.

via VentureBeat

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12 replies on “Avast buys Piriform, maker of CCleaner”

  1. The alternative we use in linux is called BleachBit. Better(simpler, but powerful) than CCleaner in my opinion. It’s also Mafiasoft compatible.

    1. *goes to look up whatever happened to MPC*

      Ah, that’s terrible news. Sad day, indeed.

  2. these comments about ads when they already push google chrome and ccleaner pro in the free version

  3. I view CCleaner as more of an anti-malware app.

    It’s really great at removing persistent malware that slips by McAfee, malware Bytes, and Spybot S&D.

    1. Sadly it will now *be* malware, once they bring AVG’s god-awful ads to the CCleaner name. Best start looking for an alternative now.

      1. Avast bought AVG, not the other way around. What makes you think that Avast would apply their acquisition’s old practices to another acquisition? I used Avast with my previous computer and found it to be quite acceptable.

        1. “old practices”? Go do a Google search to clear up that misconception; AVG hasn’t reduced that practice *at all* under Avast ownership, and might have even ramped it up further.

          Feel free to do a Google search for “Avast ads” as well; they are hardly free themselves of the dubious practice. You’re kidding yourself if you think the next version of CCleaner won’t have popup ads. This is *exactly* Avast’s business plan.

          1. Fine, delete “old” from that sentence. I guess that the custom install of Avast I had through Ninite didn’t have any issues with ads. Still, I am sorry to see that they have pursued this path.

    1. Actually, to be fair to Avast, they don’t popup their upgrade/more services ads very often, and they do provide a solid service for free otherwise. They’re not a charity after all.

      I have one minor objection and one major objection to the way they operate.

      The minor one is their less than straightforward path to renewing your free license (as opposed to pushing you towards their paid version). It’s easy enough if you know what you’re doing, but I have to do it for my parents because they find it difficult to navigate to the right screen for the free renewal.

      The major one is Avast, by default, injecting ads into my outgoing emails. That one is a highly objectionable business practice since you can go months without realizing they are doing it. Fortunately you can turn it off, but that was nearly the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.

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