Comparisons
Cling requires Sonoma. The Macs most likely to be buried in files are often the ones Apple stopped upgrading.
Cling requires macOS 14.0 Sonoma or later. On Ventura or older it will not run.
Sonoma dropped support for a swathe of Intel Macs — 2017 MacBook Pros, older iMacs, the 2013 Mac Pro. Those machines are still in daily use, often as the archive machine: the one with the external drives attached and a decade of accumulated work on it.
Which is to say the requirement excludes disproportionately many of the people who most need a file index.
Everywhere runs on macOS 13. Its own index, live FSEvents updates, external drives included, and content search in folders you choose. $19. It is ours, so weigh that.
Find Any File goes back to macOS 10.13 High Sierra. No index, so searches are slower, but it is inexpensive and it works on machines nothing else supports.
EasyFind is free and supports very old systems. It scans rather than indexes, so expect minutes on a large drive rather than milliseconds.
If your Mac supports Sonoma and you have simply not upgraded, that is the simplest route to Cling, and Cling is good.
If Apple has dropped your Mac, OpenCore Legacy Patcher exists but is not something to run on a machine holding your only copy of anything. A search tool is not worth an unsupported OS install.
On Ventura: Everywhere or Find Any File. Older than Ventura: Find Any File or EasyFind. Cling is not an option until you are on Sonoma.
No. Cling requires macOS 14.0 Sonoma or later and will not install on Ventura.
Find Any File supports macOS 10.13 and later. Everywhere supports macOS 13. EasyFind runs on older systems still, at the cost of speed.
No. If your Mac supports Sonoma and you were going to upgrade anyway, fine — but there are indexed finders that run on Ventura.
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.
Download for MacVersion 2.14.3 · macOS 13+ · 3.8 MB · notarised