The Best Free Programs for Productivity and Entertainment Software

Looking to supercharge your productivity without spending a dime? Discover a gold mine of free programs that rival the best-paid software, and transform how you work and play.  

From streamlining your workflow to enhancing your creativity, these hidden gems offer top-notch functionality at no cost. Ready to unlock their potential? 

Dive in and see how much you can achieve for free! 

Alternatives to Microsoft Office 

FreeOffice TextMaker

FreeOffice TextMaker 
If you're interested in working with Microsoft Office's Word, FreeOffice TextMaker is the perfect tool. It's a free word processor that, in addition to being very similar to Word, has its own advantages: more advanced spell-check, more options for inserting content, and a more detailed paragraph and character styling. 

FreeOffice PlanMaker 
Another popular Microsoft Office program is Excel. As an alternative, PlanMaker is one of the best free spreadsheet programs available. Moreover, almost all of its templates are compatible with Excel 2019, making the transition easy. 

Free Alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Other Audiovisual Creation Tools 

Pixlr

Pixlr is a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop that is very easy to use. It’s a photo and image editor that works from any browser and is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. 

It features advanced tools like filters and supports PSD, PXD, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG formats. Additionally, there’s a light version for smartphones that takes up minimal space and, while not as feature-rich, allows for basic editing adjustments. 

Canva

Canva is arguably the most famous free alternative to Photoshop on the market. It offers a very intuitive editor that lets you easily drag and drop elements. It’s also ideal for creating more than just photos and images, helping you design presentations, social media posts, greeting cards, posters, marketing material, and virtually any audiovisual content.

Blender

Blender is another well-known alternative to Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere. It also allows you to create 3D graphics, modeling, VFX, animation, and much more. Completely free and open-source, it’s available for Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. 

Blender includes rendering, modeling, animation options, and its own video editing tools. It can even be used to create video games, all within a customizable interface that adapts to your needs. 

DarkTable

For many, DarkTable is the closest free alternative to Lightroom. It’s available for free and is an open-source project. It’s a workflow application for photography that offers RAW development, image editing, and retouching. Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. 

Krita

Krita is one of the best free digital painting programs, designed specifically for artists working with illustrations, concept art, and painting. It’s multiplatform, with versions for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It features an intuitive user interface with movable and customizable panels, stabilizers for brushes, a pop-up palette, brush engines, wrap-around mode, and a resource manager. 

Other Highly Useful Free Programs 

MuseScore

MuseScore is a professional software for musical notation. It’s completely free and unrestricted. With it, you can create, play, and print sheet music from your computer or smartphone. It’s open-source and allows MIDI keyboard input, making it easy to transfer data to/from other programs in various formats. 

OBS Studio

OBS Studio is likely one of the most well-known applications for video streaming, acting as an intermediary between your webcam and computer to add multiple options to the camera. It’s a free and open-source application. Besides streaming, it also lets you edit your videos.

OneNote

OneNote is an incredibly versatile tool due to its flexibility. It has both paid and free versions. It’s designed for creating notebooks, sections within these notebooks, and pages within those sections. You can combine sections, share notebooks, protect and color-code your notes, create tags for organization, and much more. It even includes its own calculator and spreadsheet system. 

OpenToonz

Used by Studio Ghibli for most of their films, OpenToonz is a software for 2D animation production that is completely free today. It’s available for Windows and macOS. The program allows for efficient sequential scanning and is compatible with black and white, color, with or without binarization modes.

Plex

Plex is one of the best applications for organizing all your multimedia content in one place on your computer. It recognizes all types of multimedia files located in a source folder and organizes them into different categories for your convenience. 

The application is free and lets you access files on your computer from any device sharing the same internet connection. 

QuickLook

QuickLook is a media file viewer, the Windows alternative to macOS's Quick Look. It’s a simple, incredibly fast, and lightweight program. When you select a file in the file explorer, you can press Space and the file will open.

Calibre

Calibre is ideal if you have an e-reader, especially if it’s a Kindle. With Calibre, the best e-book library manager, you can keep your virtual library organized and convert books into different formats. 

You can also download newspapers or read directly from the app. Calibre allows dictionary searches, viewing books from your PC, syncing your books in the cloud, or editing e-book metadata. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux. 

We hope these free programs help you save money while increasing your productivity. And speaking of saving money, don’t forget to check out our website for the best mobile plan deals!