Windows comes loaded with software to meet most of your needs out of the box, but if you like free and open-source projects, or if you just want alternatives, there are plenty of great options out there.
These are a few free and open-source apps I install right away on every new Windows PC I get.
9
Open Broadcast Software (OBS)
Windows 11 has two built-in screen recorders: the Game Bar and the Snipping Tool.
However, despite improvements to both over the years, I’ve never really liked them for capturing video.
For that, I prefer Open Broadcast Software (OBS) instead. OBS is a bit more complicated to set up than Windows’ native options, but it is incredibly powerful, versatile, and, best of all, completely free.
It also allows you to quickly snap in game footage, much like NVIDIA’s Shadowplay, or stream your game to the platform of your choice. It is an incredibly versatile tool that can’t easily be replaced, which is why I always install it.
8
Firefox
You don’t usually think about browsers as open source projects, but many are.
Google Chrome is built on the open-source Chromium project.
However, my favorite is Firefox, which places a much greater emphasis on user privacy and control. Additionally, with recent changes to Google Chrome, certain extensions I frequently use are no longer accessible.
Plus, it is important that we don’t put our cyber eggs in only one digital basket—most browsers these days are built on Chromium. Firefox is one of the few remaining browsers out there that isn’t.
7
VLC
Windows 11 has more ways to play back video and audio than I care to count, but none of them are as fully featured as VLC, an open-source video player.
VLC has been a favorite of mine for years, mostly because it is the Swiss army knife of media players. I have yet to encounter a file format it can’t play, it has tons of helpful tools for tweaking audio or video settings, and it is lightweight, which means it runs well even on low-power systems.
6
VSCodium
VSCodium is the fully open-source variant of VSCode, Microsoft’s popular text editor. VSCodium isn’t an integrated development environment (IDE) exactly, but the enormous number of extensions get it pretty close.
The only major difference between VSCode and VSCodium is the telemetry: VSCode has some Microsoft telemetry that you can’t disable. Otherwise, they’re pretty much identical.
It is lightweight, flexible, and easy to use, which makes it my go-to text editor on every Windows and Linux PC I have.
5
BitWarden
Everything requires an account these days, and best safety practices say that I should have a unique password for every single site. In my case, that is more than 500 passwords—an impossibly large number for me.
Bitwarden is a free and open-source password manager that is available for every major operating system, and it has a browser file extension.
I also subscribe to their $10 annual plan, which comes with a few extra perks, including an an Authenticator function.
4
PowerToys
PowerToys, despite an increase in popularity over the years, is still underappreciated and underused.
PowerToys contains more than 25 distinct tools that do everything from add extra snipping zones to Command Palette, which is very similar to Spotlight Search on MacOS.
It is the swiss army knife of Windows programs, and every Windows user should have it installed even if they don’t have an immediate use—something will come up eventually.
3
VeraCrypt
I carry a portable SSD everywhere I go. One half of the drive is set up to be a portable Windows installation, but the other half is a mix of personal and work files that I need to access regularly.
However, it isn’t smart to walk around with sensitive information just on a drive—if it were to be lost or stolen, I wouldn’t want that information “out there.”
That is where VeraCrypt comes in. I use VeraCrypt to securely encrypt the drive so that no one can access the contents of the drive, even if I lose it somewhere.
As an added bonus, VeraCrypt runs on all major operating systems, which means the drive work on my Linux laptop as readily as it does my Windows desktop.
2
System Informer (Process Hacker)
System Informer, formerly called Process Hacker, is one of my favorite utilities for Windows.
In many ways, it resembles the Task Manager: it allows you to monitor programs and their resource uses and debug programs to figure out what they’re doing.
However, the level of detail it offers is well beyond anything that Task Manager is capable of showing you, which makes it invaluable if you’re trying to iron out a particularly annoying bug or figure out what an application is doing.
As an added bonus, it has the ability to submit a process to VirusTotal for analysis integrated by default. That means I don’t need to manually search for an executable name to figure out where it comes from and whether it is malicious—determining that now only takes a few clicks.
1
Rufus
Windows 11 lets you perform basic drive formatting options through the built-in tools, like the Disk Management utility, but it still doesn’t do everything I need.
For anything more complicated than quickly formatting a flash drive, I use Rufus, an open-source program that lets you create bootable, portable drives with any number of settings that can help ensure your drive works as intended.
There are certainly flashier programs out there, but Rufus’s no-frills, no-nonsense approach won me over years ago, and I haven’t regretted it for an instant.
As an added perk, Rufus can also be used to make a bootable Windows 11 ISO that bypasses most of Windows 11’s overly-burdensome requirements. That alone has made it my favorite way to create new Windows 11 installation media.
Though paid equivalents of these programs exist, I’ve almost never found myself reaching for them, and until Windows starts including more sophisticated tools built-in, I’ll keep installing the free and open-source options.