It’s been a busy time for the guys at Avast! Last year they integrated AVG into their business and in 2017 they’ve gone out and purchased Piriform, a company better known for their freeware CCleaner, which is one of the more popular system cleaning tools, downloaded by over 130 million PC users.

Avast! claims that CCleaner will remain as a free product (it’s worth noting that there is a Professional edition available for $24.95 with a few additional features), along with the other Piriform products, such as Speccy, Defraggler and Recuva.

In more recent times, Piriform has migrated into products for business users, including CCleaner Business which is designed to clean your workstations across a network. There’s also a cloud-based version of CCleaner, again aimed at business users, which enables you to clean your workstations from a web browser.

It’s unknown what made Avast! purchase Piriform. They already own and publish the commercial AVG Tuneup, which was built up from the highly regarded TuneUp Utilities, which was purchased by AVG in 2015. Indeed, Avast! claims that the Piriform range will remain separate from the Avast products and will be expanding the current London office.

Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast added “The CCleaner brand fits very well to Avast, for various reasons. We both believe in high-quality free products. People won’t just use a product because it is free. It’s quite the opposite, if you are providing a free product, you need to convince people that your product is free, but not cheap”

Head to the Piriform website for more information.