Comparisons
Cling's free mode is genuinely usable, which is rare. Here is exactly where it stops.
Results. Free mode returns up to 500 matches. Pro raises the ceiling to 10,000.
External volumes. Persistent indexes for USB drives, external hard drives and network shares — the ones that keep working when the volume is unmounted — are a Pro feature.
Everything else about the search engine is the same. This is not a crippled demo; it is the full finder with two ceilings on it.
It depends entirely on how you search.
If you type invoice-2026-q3 and expect one file, 500 is not a limit you will ever meet. If you type png to survey what is on your disk, you will hit it immediately and the count will be wrong.
The honest test: think about your last ten searches. If most were narrow, the free tier is your tool and the licence is optional. If several were broad surveys, you want Pro, or something without the cap.
For comparison, so this page is not one-sided: Everywhere shows 200 rows. It counts every match and tells you the true total, but it renders the top 200 — because resolving a full path and an icon for thousands of rows is work nobody scrolls through. Different ceiling, same underlying reason. Neither app hands you a hundred thousand rows.
If you keep an archive on a drive that is not always plugged in, this is the line that matters. In free mode, unplug the drive and its files leave your search results. In Pro, the index persists and a search still tells you the file exists and which volume it is on.
That is a real and useful feature, and it is reasonable to charge for it.
Pro features are unlocked for 14 days from first launch. Fourteen days is long enough to hit the free tier's ceilings naturally, which is a fair way to sell a licence: you find out from your own use, not from a feature table.
If you search by filename several times a day, yes, obviously. It is a one-time purchase for a tool that removes a small friction many times daily.
The question is not whether Cling is worth €12. It is whether a filename-only finder is what you need — which is a different question, answered on the content search page.
Up to 500. A Pro licence raises the ceiling to 10,000 results.
For persistent indexes that keep working when the drive is unmounted, yes — that is a Pro feature.
14 days of Pro features, after which the app keeps working in free mode rather than stopping.
Everywhere keeps track of every file on your Mac — including the folders Spotlight hides and drives you have unplugged. Free for a day, then $19 once.
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