From time to time, we’ll recommend software titles for various purposes. I’m listing some of the ones we more commonly cite, right here, so you can refer to them as needed.
At the outset, the overall purpose of this page is to suggest software that’s free for home use. Even so, a few of our recommendations will be for paid software, especially if we think the charge is both minimal and worth it. I’ll make sure to note when there’s a charge.
Note, I won’t bother listing here any software by the major industry players such as Microsoft, Apple or Adobe, except to mention potential replacements or substitutes for their titles. They can well afford their own advertising.
I include, here, commands to install these using package managers, where available. See my guide on using those, if you’re interested.
Lastly, since the focus here is on home users, this list only mentions Windows and Mac OS. Many of these titles are also available for Linux, if you’re running that.
For home users with Windows computers, we used to recommend third-party paid antivirus, however, as of a couple years ago, we no longer do. The Windows Defender antivirus service is nearly as good as anything you can purchase, is lightweight, and has the advantage of being built into Windows. In other words, you don’t need to install it or do anything in particular to manage it. It’s already there.
For several years, too, we’ve recommended Sophos antivirus for home Mac OS users. At one time this was a free title, but as far as we know, its free edition is no longer available. It can be installed for free on a trial basis, though.
This is the standing recommendation of The Villages Apple User Group. It’s new to us, but it has a wide fanbase.
In conjunction with the above antivirus recommendations, don’t forget to implement web filtering and shielding (which can be done easily for your entire network, and for free). See my guide to setting that up, if you haven’t already gottten it in place.
Oh, and … while I made two recommendations for Mac OS antivirus, I don’t intend for you to install both of them on the same machine. Install only one, or the other. It’s never a good idea to have two antiviruses running on a single computer.
This is a replacement/substitute for Microsoft Office. It’s an “office suite” which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, drawing tool, and even a database manager. It’s a branch from the much-older OpenOffice (which had been known as Star Office) but is now found in more places than its predecessor and is more widely supported, overall.
Note that its offline help (a very-optional extra) is a separate installer (to get it, click on the “Help for offline use: English (US)” link for the version of LibreOffice you downloaded).
For the most part, LibreOffice does a good job of reading/editing files from Microsoft Office applications. There are a couple of exceptions, though:
This is another free, open-source replacement/substitute for Microsoft Office. It has an avid fanbase, but is less well-known than LibreOffice. Like LibreOffice, it can read and save files in Microsoft Office formats (also known as “Office Open XML”) or as Open Document files.
This is a replacement/substitute for Microsoft Project. It’s nearly as complex as MS Project and is capable of reading most MS Project files (although you might run into a problem or two). Despite the name, there’s no connection I know of between ProjectLibre and LibreOffice.
Keep in mind there’s a difference between this desktop software and ProjectLibre Cloud or ProjectLibre AI.
This is a replacement/substitute for Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress, or Microsoft Publisher. As such, it’s a page layout program as opposed to a word processor like Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Previously it had been a paid product (and although it was less expensive than InDesign or Xpress, it still wasn’t cheap), but was purchased by Canva (the online/cloud-based presentation editor) and recently made free of charge for home use.
This is another, simpler, replacement/substitute for InDesign, Xpress, or Publisher which isn’t quite as complex as Affinity. As such, you might prefer it to Affinity, which contains added elements such drawing tools.
Scribus has the advantage of being older and more widely supported than Affinity, although now that it’s free, Affinity is gaining ground in the publishing world.
This is a free, open-source replacement/substitute for Microsoft Visio, a diagramming application. It’s a bit less complex than Visio, but many people prefer it for that reason.
There’s also a package of additional shapes to use in Dia, get that from http://dia-installer.de/diashapes/index.html.en
This is a freeware poly-format graphic-file viewer and converter. It’s fast and versatile. A must-have for most home users, since it handles many different graphic file formats.
You’ll probably want to install both the program and its plugins package; there are links to both, on the above page. The winget ID for this plugins package is IrfanSkiljian.IrfanView.Plugins.
This is another freeware poly-format graphic-file viewer and converter. While IrfanView is great for working with single graphic files, XnView MP is better for cataloging multiple files and reviewing more than one at a time.
It’s free for home users, but commercial users must pay for a license.
You may have noticed I recommended graphic-file viewers that are for Windows only. But I didn’t intend to leave Mac owners out in the cold. Apple supplies Mac OS with an app called Preview, which does a very good job of handling most graphic file formats, including JPG/JPEG and TIFF files. It’ll even open .PDF documents.
No installation is required, and if memory serves, it’s already set as the default viewer for most of the formats it can read.
This is a relatively complete open-source multimedia (especially video) player. Once you’ve installed this, a lot of possibilities open up, including playing DVDs, assuming your computer has a DVD drive attached (they’re no longer commonly built into computers).
The aforementioned DVDs can sometimes be a problem because current operating systems (recent versions of Mac OS as well as Windows 10 or 11) no longer have any DVD-handling capability (in addition to the fact that computer manufacturers don’t include drives any longer). Watch DVDs in VLC doing this:
That’s it, the DVD should play in a VLC window (which you can make full screen through the “View” menu or hit F11).
This is an open-source raster graphics editor which is a substitute/replacement for Adobe Photoshop. “Raster” is a technical term referring to graphics that are plotted pixel-by-pixel on a screen or in print. It’s nearly as complex as Photoshop, and can even handle most Photoshop plugins, but it’s free to use.
This is a freeware raster graphics editor which originated as an improved replacement for the Paint application built into Windows. It’s not as complex as GIMP, but has a lot of capabilities, and it can do more than Windows Paint can. You might prefer it to the GIMP.
This is a photograph-management application, a replacement/substitute for Adobe Lightroom. Like Lightroom, it’s capable of managing, and to an extent editing, raw photo files from high-end cameras.
This is an open-source Adobe Illustrator substitute/replacement, a vector drawing program. Rather than plotting pixels, vector drawings are instructions about paths and shapes to create and fill. Vector drawings have the advantage of being easily scalable; they look the same at almost any size. Inkscape is capable of producing graphics in a number of vector-graphic formats, including SVG which can be used in Web pages (among other places).
This is open-source audio workstation (or sound-editing) software, on a slightly lesser scale than Apple Logic Pro, which is widely supported and frequently used by professionals. It’s complex and its capabilities are massive, if you take the time to explore it.
Note that if you want to work with MPEG Layer 3 files (file extension .mp3) you’ll have to install something called “FFmpeg” separately. If you’re even bothering to install Audacity it almost goes without saying you’re going to want that, the process is described here: https://support.audacityteam.org/basics/installing-ffmpeg.
The winget ID for the FFmpeg plugin is Buanzo.FFmpegforAudacity. For Homebrew it should be ffmpeg.
This is open-source software that does what it says on the label, it’s a video editor. Although professionals usually use Adobe Premiere or Apple Final Cut, most of them occasionally use this, and they’re typically familiar with it.
This is another replacement/substitute for video editors and composers like Adobe Premiere. It’s proprietary software (not open-source) but comes in both free and paid versions.
This is an open-source replacement/substitute for the venerable WinZIP as well as for compression capabilities built into Windows. Rather famously, Windows’ own compression tools will not open password-protected .ZIP files, making utilities like this a virtual necessity.
Note, you may hear this is “Russian” software and you might even be told to avoid it, for that reason. Its author, Igor Pavlov, is Russian and for a very short time, his 7-Zip software repository was in Russia. Its repository left Russia long ago, however. Currently it’s in Germany and the software is also hosted on SourceForge which has global cloud hosting.
Notably, 7-Zip is faster and overall better software than the paid title WinZIP. Strangely, many Web sites that host .ZIP files often falsely tell people they need WinZIP. However, this “need” for WinZIP hasn’t existed since 2000 in the Windows world (and it wasn’t true in the Mac OS world even before then).
This is a free, open-source replacement/substitute for Notepad which is included with Windows. Microsoft is adding functionality to Notepad which it previously hadn’t possessed, such as Mardown capability (that’s not a bad thing, in and of itself), and Copilot features that many users find unwelcome. Notepad++ can handle very large text files, among other improvements on Notepad.
Note: There is a “Notepad++ for Mac” but it’s not produced by the same developers. Essentially it’s a knockoff (or in its own words, “an independent community port”).
This free application modifies Windows — mostly via edits to obscure and/or otherwise-unknown registry entries — and thus alter its workings and appearance. Many of these roll back changes that have been made recently especially in Windows 11. For instance, the full range of options in the Windows Explorer “right click” menu can be restored, using this tool.
Fair warning: Since this utility makes changes to Windows at a very basic level, it can have detrimental effects. Keep track of any changes you make, using it, and be prepared to roll them back.
When I say “use WinAero Tweaker at your own risk,” I mean that. It’s included here only for technically-savvy users who can handle any problems that might result from it.
This free application is a successor to Classic Shell, which in its day rather famously restored the Windows 7 (and older) start menu to Windows 8 (that, quite frankly, was a debacle). Windows 10 partially kept the Windows 8 style start menu, and not long after it was released, Open Shell succeeded Classic Shell (which is no longer developed and should no longer be used, by anyone). If you liked the Windows 7 start menu, you’ll like Open Shell.
Windows 11’s start menu has been modified and (some say) improved, so you may no longer consider Open Shell necessary, at least not to the degree it was needed with Windows 8. Install it only if the Win 11 start menu still annoys you.
This is a suite of small utilities that tackle a wide range of functions. They are hosted (now) by Microsoft. I can’t really hope to cover all that these utilities do. I can only suggest that anyone interested in exploring the inner workings of a computer, might wish to look into them and, perhaps, take advantage of what they can offer. As with WinAero Tweaker mentioned above, these are recommended only for the tech-savvy. Each individual Sysinternals tool is available in a standalone download, as well.
Installing the entire raft of Sysinternals tools as an application (via winget) isn’t really recommended, even though it can be done and I’ve provided the command that would do it. Better to download the full suite, which comes as a .ZIP archive file, and save them to a directory on your drive (say, in C:\Sysinternals), then run them from there.
The many Sysinternals tools are all individual .EXE files that come in two forms each, one of which ends in “64.” This would be the 64-bit edition of the utility; assuming your operating system is 64 bit (and chances are, it is), that’s the one you’ll wish to run.