WinDirStat has been downloaded more than 9.2 million times from the official source since the original release in October 2003. As of July 2014, it is the second most downloaded "Filesystems" software on SourceForge with over 13,000 downloads per week. The tool is still up to date and its usage is designed for all platforms.
Project status
The most recent release was in September 2007 and development stopped for some time after that. However, the project's blog noted that development resumed in May 2009 and some updates to the code were added in 2016.
FossHub reported 6,912,000 in January 2019, being the most downloaded software from "Disk Analysers" category." Steve Bass of PC World provided a brief review of the 1.1.2 release of WinDirStat, summarizing its usefulness: "Windirstat is colorful and nifty tool to check the makeup of your hard drive -- especially if you're looking for immense files. It scans your drive and produces a treemap that shows each file as a colored rectangle that's proportional to the file's size..." In 2006, WinDirStat was "Download of the day" on Lifehacker. Reviewer Adam Pash praised WinDirStat for its ability to easily clean up unnecessary files, by stating: "If you find a large file or two taking up loads of space that you had forgotten was there and don't need, it's easy to clean up directly from WinDirStat. " CNET reviewed the most recent release of WinDirStat and gave it 5 of 5 stars. It called WinDirStat a "great piece of freeware" and noted: "It's one of those tools that you didn't know you needed until you started using it, but once installed, it's hard to imagine life without it..." Gizmo's Freeware directory featured WinDirStat in a January 2010list of best free disk analysis software with a 4 of 5 stars review, noting: "The open source program WinDirStat is outstanding program. It uses three ways to display the disk usage: a directory list, a file extension list and a rectangular treemap. The visual presentation, overall usability and scan speed makes this a great tool to visualize disk usage." The Germancomputer magazine c't published a review of WinDirStat with it bundled in a CD in October 2006. In 2011, Jack Wallen from TechRepublic called WinDirStat: "one of those simple little apps you are going to be very thankful you have when you need it." He also highlighted its usability: "If space is an issue you will see just how much time this tool can save you." However, Jack Wallen criticized the documentation, stating: "The biggest issue with WinDirStat is the documentation. The minute you try to create your own user-configured cleanup routines you will quickly experience a complete lack of documentation, which makes the task rather challenging, if not impossible."
Derived Programs
Because WinDirStat is open source, other programs have been created based on WinDirStat. A popular version called was started in 2015. This software removes some features from the original, but features massively faster speed. Development is ongoing.
