12 Free Software that are Better than Windows Apps! 2026

When it comes to the built-in software in Windows, they range from somewhat decent to downright terrible. So coming up, I'll share with you 12 free programs that are superior to the apps made by Microsoft. Hopefully you find at least a few of these alternatives to work better for you. Let's get into it. With 12 to share with you, I'll be flying through these quicker than usual. First up, the Photos app built into Windows is quite disappointing with a very limited feature set and limited support of image formats. I gave up on this one a few years ago and replaced it with something better. Earthen View is a huge step up with support for Windows 11 going all the way back to Windows XP. You can quickly load images with support for dozens of image formats. While its interface does look dated, it's packed full of features. You can batch convert images, organize your photos and make basic edits. Plugin support is also available to enhance Earthen View's functionality. To play the video files on your computer, there are three apps built into Windows that you could use. And sadly, none of them are that great. There's the app called Media Player. There's the movies and TV app to watch content purchased from the Microsoft Store that will also play video files on your PC. And for those of you feeling nostalgic, Windows Media Player is still around. They changed the name of it to Windows Media Player Legacy. And to find it, you'll have to do a search on your computer. All three apps have the same issues with video file support and have numerous playback issues with certain files. If you want a better media player for playing videos, I have two recommendations. First of which is the freeware media player called Pop Player. It will play just about every audio or video file that you throw at it, and it optimizes your media for seamless playback. One complaint some people have about Pop Player is that it has too many options, including settings and customizations, which can be confusing to new users. For pure simplicity, the free and open source VLC Media Player is the best choice for most. It has excellent file support and it's available on just about every platform, including iOS and Android. The bottom line is VLC just plain works. The snipping tool built into Windows is decent for taking basic screenshots and can now capture video of what is on your screen, but the feature set is very limited. For taking screenshots, the free and open source Flameshot is a good one that a lot of people use that's highly customizable with a good amount of in-app screenshot editing tools. Another free and open source screenshot utility is ShareX. This is the one I actually use every day. As I've mentioned several times over the years, ShareX has an insane number of ways to take a screenshot. It could also record video of what's on your screen. It also includes other tools that are quite useful, including a color picker, video converter, image editor, and a whole lot more. Real quickly, instead of using the video capture in the snipping tool, the free and open source OBS Studio is a far superior choice. In addition to recording video that's on your screen, it also allows you to stream live to various services, including YouTube and Twitch. On Windows, searching for files and folders on your computer can be a tedious process. A free and open source program, I highly recommend for doing this, is simply called Everything. I first showed this a few years ago in our free software series, and those of you that tried it out agreed it was a lot better experience overall in finding files. Just by typing in the search box, everything will quickly find files and folders, unlike Windows File Search. The next two are for power users, so I'll mention them briefly. Windows has a built-in compression tool that works just fine for basic packing and unpacking of zip-like folders. The free and open source 7-Zip offers more advanced features and the ability to handle more than a dozen compression types and includes a built-in file manager. And for power users, One Commander is an upgraded file manager when compared with Windows File Explorer. While File Explorer has improved with tab support, One Commander also has folder tabs along with color-based tagging, easy folder management with multi-pane views, easy file previewing, and a whole lot more. Next up is Windows Default Web Browser, Microsoft Edge, which is built on Google's Chromium and now has everyone's favorite AI Assistant co-pilot built in. While Edge is an improvement over Internet Explorer, over the past couple of years, it's become heavily bloated, using up more system resources, and it nags a lot to get you to try out its various so-called features. There are several browsers we could recommend as alternatives to Edge, but I'll mention a few here. The Brave browser is great for those of you that are focused on privacy. For productivity and the largest number of customization options to make it your own, nothing tops Vivaldi. And for those of you that don't want a browser built on Chromium, Firefox is still hanging around with useful features that don't use up too many system resources, and it's also good for privacy-minded people not wanting any telemetry being sent back to Microsoft or Google. If you want to control the individual volume for apps, Windows makes you go through its volume mixer in the Settings app. Your trumpet simply puts that control in your taskbar with sliders to adjust the volume for games, music, browsers, system sounds, and other stuff. After you install it, you'll find it in the system tray on the right side of the taskbar. Its icon looks very similar to the Windows volume icon. If you don't see it here, it may be in the Show Hidden Icons menu. You would just need to drag it down from here to the system tray for convenience. When you click on it, the slider for the master volume is here at the top. Below that are sliders for the system sounds and the apps that you have open. In addition to left-clicking with your mouse to adjust the volume, you can also use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to select what you want to adjust. Then use your middle mouse wheel to adjust the volume up or down. When it comes to editing videos, essentially all you can do in Windows is trim a video, which for some of you might be the only feature that you need. If you need additional features, Microsoft now owns Clipchamp. While it does offer some features for free, it's an online-only editor that does require an internet connection to use and can be quite sluggish at times. Another downside of using it for free is that they'll slap their branded watermark on your exports and they'll limit the export resolution unless you pay for a premium account, which is around $12 per month. A couple of free and open-source programs I recommend that don't have any limitations and are easy to use include Kdenlive and the other free and open-source video editing program is Shotcut, which is what I used when I first started making videos for YouTube. The absolute best free video editor is DaVinci Resolve. While it does offer more high-end features for professionals, it will take more time and effort than the other two mentioned to learn how to use it. They do offer a paid version. They call it DaVinci Resolve Studio. Unless you're making the next Hollywood blockbuster, the free version should be all that you need. This will be a quick one. While Notepad has made a few minor improvements over the past couple of years, if you need something with more advanced text functions, for example, when writing code, it's best to upgrade to something better. The free and open-source Notepad++ is the better choice for syntax highlighting, code folding, and auto-completion for scripting and programming while using less CPU power than Windows' built-in Notepad. Did you know that Windows has an audio recording app that they call Sound Recorder built-in that will record audio coming from your screen or microphone? If your answer is no, you're not alone and should probably forget I just mentioned it. For recording audio on your computer, Audacity is far superior to the Windows Sound Recorder. This free and open-source program also has an audio editor built-in. It supports all major audio file formats, features multi-track mixing, and to enhance its functionality, it has third-party plug-in support. Thanks for watching. Links are in the description. If this video was useful for you, give it a thumbs up and share it with others. Let us know the software you use that you think are better than the apps built into Windows. And if you're new to our channel, subscribe and click that bell to not miss out on our latest free software videos and other tech-related stuff here on Brett in Tech.