The state of the open-source software community has never been better, with Windows being arguably the biggest platform for open-source apps.The most popular desktop operating system in the world has hundreds of fantastic open-source tools and utilities, with the best of them being able to compete with, and sometimes beat, their premium closed-source peers.Add How-To Geek on Google Add as Preferred Source Follow on Google Discover Not only that, but the best open-source apps are also used by millions of people around the world, proving that open-source software isn’t limited to people who are active members of the open-source community.
Considering the breadth of outstanding candidates, creating this list was anything but easy.In the end, I settled on a mix of well-known options and ones I believe more people need to hear about and start using.Blender A free and open-source 3D software suite that competes with the giants of the market Close While I haven’t used Blender aside from its benchmark tool, I have a few friends and acquaintances who have been using the best open-source 3D modeling suite for what feels like decades, swearing by it and preferring it over premium, closed-source offerings such as 3ds Max and Maya.
The reason is simple: Blender is an accomplished, feature-rich option that works well and packs everything you might need into a single app.You don’t have to use different apps for animation, sculpting, texturing, rendering, and other parts of the 3D pipeline; you have access to it all from the get-go, and everything is free.Blender’s so good, in fact, that it served as a key production tool for major award-winning animated indie projects, proving it can stand toe-to-toe with big-studio software like 3ds Max and Maya.
The team behind Blender doesn’t rest on its laurels and is instead constantly improving it.With Blender 5.0, released last November, the app got HDR and wide-gamut color support, improved material compilation performance, and an ACES-friendly workflow that makes it much easier to keep colors consistent throughout your projects, as well as with external software.And Blender 5.2, released this July, added experimental physics for procedural hair and cloth.
Related If Blender is so good, why isn’t Hollywood using it? Does Hollywood blend? Posts 1 By Sydney Butler OBS Studio The go-to app for most streamers out there is free and open source Close I remember that during my Twitch-watching stint, which lasted for a few years starting in 2017, every streamer I followed used OBS Studio.Almost a decade later, the open-source streaming and recording tool is still the first choice for most live streamers, despite the immense growth the streaming space has enjoyed since then.Many big-name streamers still use OBS Studio, while plenty of others prefer Streamlabs, which is, in fact, built on top of OBS.
This is a crowning achievement for an app that’s completely free and open source, showing that you can create the best tool in the business without hiding its source code or paywalling it.Now, OBS Studio hasn’t achieved its staggering popularity just because it’s free.The app supports every major hardware encoder, including NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF, and Intel Quick Sync, and it can encode in AV1 too.
It also supports most streaming protocols and multi-track audio, and has a thriving plugin ecosystem.On top of that, its scenes and sources system allows you to set up any live-streaming environment you like.Almost a decade and a half after it came out, OBS is the king of its game, and there are no signs of that changing.
It’s the most-used streaming tool for newbies and professionals alike.VLC Arguably the best video player of all time is also one of the most famous open-source apps around If open-source software had its own Mount Rushmore, VLC would definitely be on it.The poster child of the open-source community is, and has been, one of the most popular Windows apps for decades, and for good reason.
VLC can play pretty much any video or audio file you throw at it, comes with a plethora of features, works great, and gets regular updates.It also has a UI that’s easy to learn while hiding a bunch of extra tools for power users who are ready to go the extra mile, such as video conversion, screen recording, or LAN streaming.VLC is probably installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs around the world, and it’s the default video player on many of them.
It has earned that with a reputation that isn’t marred by ads, paywalls, or data collection scandals.While there are other great open-source players such as MPC-HC and mpv, VLC is the ruler of the Windows video player realm.LocalSend By far the best cross-platform file-sharing app I've ever used Close It’s funny how the closest thing we’ve got to Apple’s AirDrop on Windows hasn’t come from the likes of Microsoft, Google, or any other software giant.
Instead, the best local file-sharing app for Windows started out as a project of a single developer who not only created LocalSend and made it work seamlessly between your devices, but also made it available on all major platforms.I’ve got LocalSend installed on my Windows desktop, four different Windows handheld PCs, a Steam Deck that runs Linux, a Mac mini running macOS, and multiple Android phones.I first installed it on my Steam Deck and Windows desktop to see whether it would be a worthy replacement for the Winpinator and Warpinator combo I’d used at the time, and it has been working flawlessly ever since.
LocalSend beat all my expectations, which is why I now have it on every device in my home that I send files to and from.Even though I’ve been using it for more than half a year, I’m still amazed at just how easy it is to use, and how reliably it does its job.I’m using it virtually every day to share files between different devices, and after sending thousands of files between them, I’ve yet to encounter a failed transfer, which sounds unreal but is true.
And it all works over my local network; I don’t need to use a cloud server, I don’t even need an internet connection.All I need is a router and devices connected to it, and I can share anything from a simple text file to hundreds of photos to video files weighing tens of gigabytes.Better still, each transfer is encrypted, and since everything goes through my Wi-Fi 6E router, the speeds are darn fast.
Honestly, I still can’t believe that something this good and reliable is free, but the open-source community is always ready to surprise me in the most positive way possible.ShareX The sheer number of features hiding in this screenshot tool is staggering, and they all work great ShareX is relatively simple on the surface.It’s a screenshot tool you can use to grab and annotate screenshots, with the ability to use custom keyboard shortcuts for different actions, like grabbing the whole screen or just part of it, along with a few other features, right? Well, once you start digging, you’ll quickly realize that ShareX is so much more than that, offering a deluge of tools that put most other screenshot apps to shame.
The app lets you capture the entire screen, a region of it, a freeform shape, or a specific monitor, and it even supports scrolling capture, which allows you to grab an entire webpage or a long document.You can then edit the captured screenshot to your heart’s content thanks to ShareX’s robust set of editing tools.But that’s just a slice of what ShareX offers.
You can also create a custom workflow that kicks in after each screenshot, assign a different workflow to each hotkey, record your screen as a video or a GIF, grab text from images with OCR, generate and scan QR codes, measure objects on your screen with a built-in ruler, combine or split images, resize and convert images, and much more.The best thing is that it all works great.In my experience, ShareX is stable and performant, you can jump between features without worrying you’re going to break something, and it gets regular updates that iron out the experience and introduce new stuff.
Just note that the latest version, ShareX 22.0, rewrote the entire interface, and its developers warn it may be less stable than usual.The only downside is that it’s hard to get around everything it offers, making the learning curve relatively steep if you want to maximize ShareX’s utility.The good news, though, is that the app is easy to learn if all you need is a screenshot tool with a powerful suite of editing utilities.
The open-source Windows app ecosystem is stronger than ever This is just the tip of the iceberg of open-source apps that are at the top of their game.Aside from the ones above, there are dozens of other brilliant apps beating their closed-source rivals where it matters.If you want to find out the cream of the open-source crop, I recommend checking out the definitive open-source list over on GitHub.
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