Comparisons
Running a second index of your own disk sounds redundant. There are specific reasons people do it, and specific cases where they should not.
Spotlight indexes contents, metadata, mail, messages, contacts, and runs conversions and calculations. It is a general answer engine that also finds files.
Cling indexes filenames and paths, and finds files. That is the whole product.
Comparing them on features is therefore misleading. The question is narrower: when you are looking for a file by name, which one gets you there?
It looks where Spotlight refuses to. ~/Library, package contents, dotfiles, application support folders, anything inside a .noindex directory. Spotlight excludes these on purpose. Cling includes them on purpose. This is the single most common reason people install it.
It does not silently fail. Spotlight's characteristic failure is returning nothing for a file that is definitely present, with no explanation and no error. The standard remedy is rebuilding the index and waiting. An app that owns its index does not have that failure mode in the same way.
Fuzzy matching. Spotlight matches words. Cling matches subsequences, so a half-remembered abbreviation still lands.
Contents. Spotlight reads inside your documents through importer plugins, across far more formats than any third-party tool ships with. Cling does not search contents at all — its own page says so. If you are searching for a phrase rather than a name, Spotlight is the tool, when it works.
It is already there. No install, no Full Disk Access prompt, no second index eating disk.
Everything else. Calculations, unit conversions, definitions, launching apps.
Keep Spotlight. Add a filename index only if you keep hitting the specific failure of a file you know exists not appearing.
If that is you, the two candidates are Cling and Everywhere, and the choice between them turns on macOS version, external drives, and whether you need to search inside documents.
No. Cling searches filenames; Spotlight also searches file contents, metadata, mail and more. Most people run both.
Because Spotlight deliberately excludes ~/Library, package contents and dotfiles. A second index that includes them finds files Spotlight will not.
The cost is disk space and one initial scan. Live updates through FSEvents are cheap — both tools do this rather than rescanning.
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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