Czkawka
120 likes
Czkawka is a simple, fast, written in Rust and easy to use app to remove unnecessary files from your computer.
License model
- Free • Open Source
Application types
Country of Origin
Poland
EU
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Flathub
Features
Czkawka News & Activities
Highlights All activities
Recent News
- POX published news article about CzkawkaCzkawka 9.0 brings faster duplicate file search and many other performance improvements
Czkawka, a free application designed to efficiently remove unnecessary files from computers, has la...
- POX published news article about CzkawkaCzkawka 7.0 unveils new 'Krokiet' GUI, performance improvements, and more
Czkawka, the widely used application for discovering duplicate files, empty folders, and similar im...
Recent activities
- ignacypasikonik liked Czkawka
What is Czkawka?
Czkawka information
AlternativeTo Categories
OS & Utilities, Photos & Graphics, File ManagementGitHub repository
- 24,447 Stars
- 761 Forks
- 481 Open Issues
- Updated May 10, 2025
Comments and Reviews
Linux first, but also supports Windows. Regularly updated - unlike most software in this category.
Not great. In my first attempt to use it I found (and reported) two serious bugs. One is that the app often incorrectly identifies a unique file as a duplicate by showing two entries for the same file path. If you select either entries your file is gone for good. Since I'm scanning a few terabytes of files, I can't afford to check every buggy entry.
The other bug regards the symbolic link feature. As of version 6.1.0 (on Windows) It never creates the symbolic links, it just deletes the file. If you run this over a few terabytes of data you're sure going to fuck your data up.
At this rate, it's unusable.
Frankly, the app doesn't leave a good first impression, but its second impression is remarkable. I let it loose on 15,000 on a 150 GB disk. Czakwka completed its job in 13 minutes. In comparison, Wise Duplicate Finder didn't finish overnight.
Performance aside, this app could use a much better UI.
Questionable installs, bad user interface, and warnings about disappearing files from reviewer(s). I gave it a quick look, but decided to not try a file search. "Best" download I found was from Softpedia. MajorGeeks & Sourceforge install wouldn't work. Run by clicking czkawka_gui.exe. UI is a turnoff.. darkmode with barely visible text.. no setting to change this
Windows GTK version has Trojan inside. Don’t use it. Not only version 7.0, but also previous versions. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/82a886eeb7b4bb0bcf56b218e0a65093b65d9ed4656bc6fe62662b6380a0a806
That "trojan" is only 1/65 anti-malware vendors, and an unknown one at that - most software reviews I've read put that kind of ratio as a "false positive". Good that people are checking! But also important to not give too much weight to one, two, or even three bad results from minor companies. Seen a few come and go from VT.
Tricky to install, as is everything in Github unless you know where to look. GUI uses teeny tiny font which is difficult to read. Doesn't seem to include subfolders and I can't find an option to include subfolders. So pretty useless to me, I'm afraid.
A lot of your critique is still pretty valid, especially the tiny font, and not knowing which Github install to download.
A fix for the tiny font can be found here: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/issues/787 and here: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/issues/993#issuecomment-1586164746
Funny name but it really does the job! Also it's available as app image.
Awesome program and easy to understand!
Just dragging folders on it doesn't work (tried also adding folders per CLI, also failed).