3 Windows apps that prove you’re overpaying for software
Not every great app costs hundreds of dollars a year in subscription fees. Whether you’re looking to edit photos or work with PDFs, here are some of the best free Windows apps available.
Kdenlive is a great alternative to Adobe Premiere
Adobe Premiere is one of the most popular premium video editing apps available for Windows, but comes with a pretty hefty price. If you buy Premiere alone, you’ll spend at least $23 per month with an annual commitment—$276 in total. That is a pretty hefty sum, especially if you’re not a professional that needs it day in and day out.
Once again, the open-source community has a fantastic alternative. Kdenlive is produced by the KDE Community, which is the same group that produces the Plasma Desktop, KDE Connect, Kate, and Krita—all of which are fantastic.
Kdenlive is arranged in roughly the same way as Adobe Premiere, which makes it easy to pick up. It features the same sort of timeline positioned along the bottom, with normal tools for cutting and editing the audio and video tracks. When you start going through the drop-down menus, you’ll find the expected features that allow you to apply filters, adjust the interface to your liking, and manage assets you’ve imported into the project.
Most of the user interface elements closely resemble those you’d find in Premiere or other video editing programs, which helps reduce the amount of time it takes to get using the program.
If you’re looking for something free, lightweight, and open-source, you’re not going to do better than Kdenlive. If you prefer video editing software that uses nodes, you could also try DaVinci Resolve. I’ve noticed that DaVinci Resolve is more resource-hungry, so it may be less performant on low-power systems.
Kdenlive is available from the Kdenlive website, or through Discover if you’re on Kubuntu. Kdenlive is also available as a portable app too, and I keep that version on an external flash drive just in case.
Affinity is like Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign all in one
Photoshop, much like Premiere, is the digital elephant in the room when you talk about photo manipulation and editing, and it costs a few hundred bucks annually. Luckily, Affinity—a graphics design program from Canva—is now completely free for home use.
Affinity’s user interface is different from Photoshop, mostly because the modern Affinity integrates the equivalent of Illustrator and inDesign as well. I’ve actually come to prefer Affinity’s user interface because it feels less cluttered than Photoshop. Once you get past the cosmetic differences, Affinity is a great program. I’ve been using it for months now, and I haven’t run into a situation where it couldn’t do what I needed.
Affinity also comes with an Assistant, which will automatically tweak settings as you go to try and help you get the desired result. For example, if I tried to paint without a layer in the document, Assistant would automatically create one without prompting me.
It has intervened a few times for one small thing or another and without exception, I’ve found it helpful. If you do find Assistant is doing something you dislike, you can go into the Settings and manually disable whichever automatic behavior you don’t want.
The only slight downside to Affinity is that it requires you to log in, but that is a small price to pay compared to the hundreds of dollars that Photoshop costs.
This newly-free Photoshop alternative convinced me to cancel Adobe
Adobe has a serious challenger, and I’m never going back.
Affinity is available from the Affinity website.
NanaZip is a minimalist WinRAR
WinRAR has been a classic Windows app for decades, and for good reason—it works really well. However, it technically isn’t free. That’s why you’re reminded every time you open it that your trial period has expired, and it says “Evaluation Copy” along the top.
If you’re looking for something that is completely free and open-source, I’d recommend NanaZIP.
NanaZip is a modern fork of 7-Zip, which is itself a classic Windows open. However, NanaZip takes things a step further and more closely aligns 7-Zip with the design choices you’ll find in Windows 11. For example, the NanaZip user interface is extremely minimalist. There are only 11 icons along the top, and none of them use up any more space than they have to.
NanaZip also integrates directly into Windows 11’s new right-click context menu, providing convenient access to most of the functions you’ll need to use regularly.
I do keep WinRAR around because it has a few unique features that aren’t found in NanaZip, but if you’re looking for a completely free, open-source option that doesn’t have a popup, NanaZip is a good option.
NanaZip is available directly from GitHub, or you can download it from the Microsoft Store.
You don’t need to fork over hefty annual subscriptions to get the most out of Windows. Today, there are more great free or open-source options available than there has been, and they’re increasingly competitive with the paid options.
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