The 20 best open-source alternatives to popular software on Windows (2024)

When you use your computer for work, there are a few apps that are essential to the workload you're doing. Things like the Microsoft Office suite or Adobe Photoshop are always the first ones to come up because they're the most popular and arguably the most convenient to get. But because of that, they can also have exorbitant price tags, predatory subscription services, or generally poor practices from the large corporations that own them. That's why open-source software is so great.

There are plenty of free alternatives to these popular apps, but even then, free apps can be owned by shady companies or change their monetization strategy at any point. Some would argue that open-source software is the only way to give power back to the community of users and developers. And that's why we've compiled this list of the best open-source alternatives to popular software on Windows. When you're tired of the Adobes and Microsofts of the world, these solutions offer great functionality while being far more transparent and open than what those companies offer.

Photo and image editing

When it comes to editing images, everyone will be familiar with Adobe's Photoshop, or even things like Illustrator, but those are also some of the most expensive pieces of software you can get. And Adobe isn't exactly known for the best practices, with its recent scandals around the usage of user projects to train AI models. But thankfully, there are some great alternatives out there.

One of the more popular options is GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Project, a raster image editing tool with a a lot of the same capabilities you'd expect from a professional photo editor, giving you options for simple retouches to more advanced composition. There's also Inkscape, which is a vector graphics editor allowing you to draw up images that can easily scale in size, making it perfect for graphic designers. And if you're an artist, Krita is an excellent drawing and illustration tool, too. All of these are excellent open-source tools to deserve all the credit they get. And of course, if you want to improve them, you can do just that.

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  GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

  GIMP is a powerful open-source image editing tool, and a great competitor to Adobe's Photoshop, with a wide range of tools available a lot of extensibility options. It also plays nice with other apps, like Inkscape.

  See at GIMP

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  Inkscape

  See at Inkscape

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  Krita

  Krita is another great option for editing images, specifically rasterized images with set resolutions. It's also an excellent program for artists, with tons of painting and drawing tools that let you bring your visions to life.

  See at Krita

Video editing

Adobe is also a very prevalent name in video editing thanks to Premiere Pro, though great alternatives exist, like DaVinci Resolve, which is free for personal use. Even still, if you want something that's truly open, there are also great options here, even though this is a type of app that would seemingly be more complex.

One of the more popular choices for video editors of the open-source variety is Kdenlive, which offers all the features you'd expect, like multi-tack video and audio editing, color grading tools, and very in-depth capabilities for any video editor. Other great options include ShotCut and OpenShot, both of which offer a whole lot of features, with active development on both ensuring that the experience will continue to be great in the future. Both Kdenlive and OpenShot support Windows, Linux, and macOS, while ShotCut is exclusive to Windows.

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  Kdenlive

  Kdenlive is a great free and open-source video editor with advanced features such as multi-track editing, support for almost any file format, and a highly configurable interface.

  See at Kdenlive

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  Shotcut

  Shotcut is a fully capable non-linear video editor with an open-source approach. It supports a lot of video and audio formats, and even some support from Blackmagic Design to provide all kinds of capabilities, such as device capture. It also has a fairly modern UI.

  See at Shotcut

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  OpenShot

  OpenShot is another fantastic open-source video editor with plenty of tools at your disposal and with a relatively easy-to-understand user interface. It supports unlimited tracks, video effects, 3D animations, and more.

  See at OpenShot

Audio recording and editing

If you have a podcast, having the right tools to record your audio is crucial. That being said, it just so happens tha tone of the best tools for audio recording and editing is already an open-source one. It's called Audacity, and it's been around for a long time, so things have been nailed down by now. You can record from any of your microphones, use audio monitoring, adjust levels, and do things like playing a loop of only a segment of a recording.

Recently, Audacity even added some AI filters to reduce noise and enhance your audio overall. And that's on top of a lot of filters and plug-ins you can already use with Audacity, so there's a big ecosystem of tools at your disposal to make your audio clips sound as good as possible.

Audacity

Audacity is one of the most popular audio recording and editing tools on the market. It has extensive plug-iin support and plenty of tools in a simple interface, and it's built with open-source code.

See at Audacity

3D modeling and rendering

Much like with audio editing, arguably the most popular tool for 3D modeling and rendering is already open-source. Blender is a very popular tool for 3D modelers everywhere, and for good reason. This project is sustained by hundreds of people and the feature set is incredible, from basic modeling and rendering to sculpting, animating, creating VFX, and even running 3D simulations thanks to libraries like Buller and MantaFlow. If all of that isn't enough, there's even a relatively basic video editor.

Wrap all of that in a highly customizable interface, add scripting support, and you can clearly see why so many people love using Blender, from relative newbies to professionals. Even if we weren't focusing on open-source software, this would be a top recommendation.

Blender

Blender is arguably the most popular 3D modelling and rendering tool, and its capabilties go even further beyong that. From sculpting to animation and even some light video editing, this is an incredibly versatile tool.

See at Blender

Office suite

If you write documents, work on spreadsheets, or make slideshow presentations, you almost definitely have used Microsoft Office at some point. And while there are plenty of solid Office alternatives that are cheaper or free, not many are completely open-source. That said, one of the most popular options around is: LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is a fork of the old OpenOffice.org project of the early 2000s, and it includes most of the basic tools you'd see in Microsoft's Office suite, including a text editor (Writer), spreadsheet editor (Calc), presentation maker (Impress), and database manager (Base). It also includes a graphics editor with Draw, and an application specifically for creating mathematical formulae, called Math, which can then be added into projects in the other apps, such as Writer or Calc.

Another fork of OpenOffice.org is Apache OpenOffice, which has most of the same capabilities, but doesn't have the same kind of support backing it.

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  LibreOffice

  LibreOffice is the premier open-source Office alternative, with tools for writing documents, working on spreadsheets, making presentations, and managing databases. It's a fork of the OpenOffice.org project, which was discontinued in 2011.

  Download LibreOffice

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  Apache OpenOffice

  Apache OpenOffice is a continuation of the old OpenOffice.org project, just like LibreOffice. It offers all the same tools but with a more old-school design. Community support is not as robust as LibreOffice, but it's still a great option.

  See at OpenOffice

Coding and text editors

Developers are spoiled for choice when it comes to text editors they can use for their coding projects, and there are a few good free apps. But if you specifically want something that's open source, then you'll want to look to options like Neovim, Pulsar, and VSCodium. That last one is fairly interesting in that it's basically a community-compiled version of Microsoft Visual Studio Code, an already free tool with an open-source base. The thing is, while VS Code is implanted with some extra Microsoft things, including telemetry data, VSCodium bypasses all of that, making for a cleaner tool that doesn't phone home to Microsoft.

Neovim is another great and popular option with a long history and tons of options and extensibility, and a lot of the same things can be said about Pulsar. Whichever way you go, these are excellent tools for working on your projects. And while you're at it, maybe you can even contribute to the development of the IDE itself.

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  VSCodium

  VSCodium is a community-made compilation of Microsoft's VS Code, which removes all of Microsoft's telemetry collection. It offers a robust set of tools for coding projects, and it's based on one of the more popular free IDEs around.

  See at VSCodium

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  Neovim

  Neovim is another excellent open-source IDE with excellent extensibility and comprehensive documentation to make it easy to get to grips with the software. It's a successor to Vim, and fully compatible with the Vim editing model and Vimscript v1.

  See at Neovim

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  Pulsar

  Pulsar calls itself a "hyper-hackable" text editor for developers, featuring a built-in package manager, smart autocompletion, support for multiple panes, and more features useful for working on your projects.

  See at Pulsar

Password managers

As internet security threats become more and more prevalent, keeping your passwords safe is also increasingly important. And you don't want to leave something so sensitive in the hands of shady companies, so an open-source solution may be the best. Thankfully, there are quite a few popular options in this field, including Bitwarden, which is already one of the more popular password managers in general. Bitwarden's basic functionality is totally free, though there is a paid tier with some extra features.

There are others, though. KeePass is another popular open-source option (there's even a fork called KeePassXC), and of course, Proton Pass, from the same team who brought us the popular Proton Mail client. These are all fairly well-known and reliable solutions that don't rely on a big corporation, so you can take whichever you prefer for a spin.

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  Bitwarden

  Bitwarden is a free, open-source password manager, and one of the more popular solutions out there. The free version of Bitwarden comes with all the essentials, but you can also upgrade to the paid version for some added features.

  See at Bitwarden

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  KeePass

  KeePass is another great open-source project for a password manager that keeps your passwords truly safe by giving the power to the user. It's a popular choice, and there's even a fork of the project.

  See at KeePass

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  Proton Pass

  Proton is a password manager from the well-known team behind Proton Mail and Proton VPN. With this kind of pedigree, you know you can expect an extremely reliable tool that will keep your passwords safe while making it easier to remember them.

  See at Proton

File archiving and extracting

With the latest updates to Windows 11 version 23H2 and the upcoming version 24H2, Windows can already handle most file archives by itself, but if you want a third-party solution (which is potentially much better), then there are great options in the form of 7-Zip and PeaZip. 7-Zip is easily one of the most popular solutions around, even including options outside of open-source software. It's a super-powerful tool that can handle basically any file format you can think of, and it compresses and extracts files very quickly.

PeaZip is a more simplified tool, but still a great one in terms of performance and basic functionality. You can't go wrong with either of these.

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  7-Zip

  7-Zip is arguably the best file archiving and extracting solution, supporting just about every archive format under the sun. It also happens to be almost fully open-source, so anyone can contribute to the project.

  See at 7-Zip

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  PeaZip

  PeaZip is a more simplistic approach to file archiving and extracting, but it still provides all the functionality you'd expect, and iit's a very lightweight app with great performance.

  See at PeaZip

Grammar checker

With tools like Grammarly garnering some criticism for their handling of user data, finding an alternative grammar checker is important, and that's exactly what LanguageTool is. LangguageTool si free with an optional premium subscription that adds improved detection, but it's still an open-source tool with its code available on GitHub. Transparency is always great to see (pun intended).

LanguageTool

LanguageTool is a comprehensive grammar checker that can be added to your browser and avariety of writing tools, including the aforementioned LibreOffice. It's also a open-source and mostly free, though there is a premium version if you want more advanced features.

See at LanguageToolSee at Chrome Web StoreSee at Firefox Add-ons

Note-taking

Finally, for those who need to take notes, we have a great alternative to options like OneNote or Evernote. Joplin is a name you might have heard before, and indeed, there's a lot on offer here. This tool lets you organize your notes into notebooks and sections and mark them with tags to make things easier to find. And the notes themselves are pretty in-depth, with options for adding checklists, tables, images, and other attachments.

Combine all that with a fairly friendly user interface and apps for mobile devices so you can keep your notes in sync, and you have something pretty great here.

Joplin

Joplin is an open-source competitor to Microsoft's OneNote, and it's completely free. It has plenty of capabilities, too, with complex formatting options, support for multiple notebooks and sub-notebooks, as well as pages and tags to organize your content.

See at Joplin

Open-source apps for everyone

No matter what kind of work you do on your PC, you're bound to find some of these apps useful. It's great to have such a large ecosystem of users and developers maintaining all these apps and ensuring that no matter who you are, there are tools that help you get your work done without having to spend a ton of money. Paid tools can be great, but everyone deserves to have access to such useful tools, and the open-source community is happy to provide.