We all have the requirements to use popular software like Microsoft Office in our daily workflow. But most of them are having high price tags and some are with monthly subscription plans.
If you are tight on budget and don’t want to spend too much money on paid popular software, then the question is, What are the free alternatives? The good news is, there are free alternatives to paid popular software that you can use in your daily workflow.
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BEST AND FREE ALTERNATES TO POPULAR SOFTWARE
Software from companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and others can be quite pricey! Especially those with monthly and yearly fees that can add up over time. Let’s explore free alternatives to popular software.
OFFICE SUITE FREE ALTERNATIVES
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is a free alternative for Microsoft Office. It is compatible with all Microsoft Office file types. It lets you open Microsoft Office documents, edit them, and you can even save your documents in a format that can be read by people that use Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite that is compatible with other major office suites and is available on all operating systems. It is an independently-developed version of the OpenOffice.org suite.
OnlyOffice
OnlyOffice is another free alternative to popular Microsoft Office. It is also compatible with all Microsoft Office file types. OnlyOffice has been gaining popularity over the last couple of years.
OnlyOffice offers complete compatibility with the popular Microsoft Office formats. In addition, it allows for real-time collaboration with others, which is handy if you’re working in a team environment.
Apache OpenOffice
Apache OpenOffice is a leading open-source office suite that offers free applications for word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, graphics, databases, and more. All data is stored in an open standard format, though Open Office can also read and write files from other common office software.
PHOTO EDITING FREE ALTERNATIVES
GIMP
GIMP is the best free alternative to popular software Photoshop. It features free expansive tools allowing you to do everything Photoshop can, but there is a high learning curve.
It includes professional-level tools that allow you to work with layers, manipulate colors, add gradients, and a lot more.
GIMP is a free program for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. Essentially, it’s the closest software to Photoshop you can get for free.
Krita
If you’re someone who’s a digital painter, another free photo editing software is KRITA. It is feature-packed as well. With over 100 brushes and stabilizers, and allows you to work with layers.
Krita is a professional Free and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone within concept art, texture and matte painters, illustrations, and comics.
Photopea
Photopea is a free online photo editing software. It is an online photo editor, which can work with PSD and Sketch files. Convert between PSD, JPG, PNG, and many other formats.
VIRTUAL MACHINE FREE ALTERNATIVES
VIRTUAL BOX
Virtual Box is the best free alternative for the VMWare Workstation. It is available for all three of the major platforms, Windows, Linux, and Mac.
While they do provide a user manual, it can be quite difficult for newbies to get started. You can try out any other operating system that you want.
QEMU
QEMU (short for “Quick Emulator”) is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization.
It also provides an accelerated mode for supporting a mixture of binary translation (for kernel code) and native execution (for user code), in the same fashion as VMware Workstation and VirtualBox do.
QEMU can also be used purely for CPU emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to be run on another.
VIDEO EDITING FREE ALTERNATIVES
Davinci Resolve
A comparable free alternative to popular Adobe Premier Pro is Davinci Resolve.
It offers multi-cam support, transitions, color, and audio correction along with everything else you can edit and trim your videos.
It is also a great free alternative to Adobe After Effects. It lets you create high-quality visual effects and motion graphics.
They have two versions available, Davinci resolve and Davinci Resolve Studio. Davinci Resolve is the free one, while the Studio has a subscription and purchase plan.
Light Works
Lightworks is an editing powerhouse, delivering unparalleled speed and flexibility, fully integrated with the other members of the Complete Collaboration family.
Lightworks is an Academy and Emmy award-winning professional-grade video editor with over 20 years of history in the film and broadcast industry.
Having cut hundreds of films such as Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Centurion, Shutter Island, The King’s Speech, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Mission Impossible, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart, and Batman.
It includes a full feature set of editorial tools — from advanced trimming and media management to stereoscopic support and realtime effects, including multiple secondary color correctors.
If you are a video editor, you can find more on our article Video Editing Software
VECTOR GRAPHICS SOFTWARE FREE ALTERNATIVES
Inkscape
Inkscape is the best free alternative to popular Adobe Illustrator for creating vector graphics. It includes a ton of features for object creation and manipulation. Inkscape does have a steep learning curve, thankfully they do have tutorials on their site that will teach you how to use it.
Unlike Illustrator, Inkscape is completely free and open-source, and it uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as its native format. This lightweight app is usually recommended if you don’t have a powerful computer, as it also has many of the useful features from illustrator, including layers, grouping objects, drawing, shape, calligraphy, pencil tools, path simplification with variable threshold, bitmaps, and boolean operations.
Vectr
Vectr is another free graphics editor. It is collaborative like Google Docs, and runs both in your web browser and on your desktop as a native app. With an intuitive interface, Vectr is easy to learn and use.
Vectr is a simple, yet powerful cross-platform graphics editor to bring your designs into reality. Get started immediately without the massive learning curve.
Whether you’re working on graphics for marketing, logotypes, icons, website UI designs, brochures or vector art, Vectr’s intuitive tools let you focus on what truly matters – creating beautiful graphic designs.
Mypaint
MyPaint is a fast, distraction-free, and easy painting tool for digital artists. It supports graphics tablets made by Wacom, and many similar devices.
MyPaint is a fast painting program with an emphasis on full-screen use. It lets you focus on the art instead of the program.
You can work on your canvas with minimum distractions, bringing up the interface only when you need it. MyPaint supports pressure or tilt-sensitive graphic tablets and comes with an easy-to-use brush collection.
BEST FREE SCREEN CAPTURE/RECORDER FREE ALTERNATIVES
OBS Studio
OBS Studio is the best free screen recording alternative to popular Snagit.
It is easy to use and includes a number of useful features to record and stream on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Their community forum is a great place to get help with any of your issues and if you’re just getting started, you’ve also got an OBS studio beginner’s guide that will help you as well.
ShareX is a free and open-source program that lets you capture or record any area of your screen and share it with a single press of a key.
It also allows uploading images, text, or any other types of files to over 80 supported destinations.
BEST AUDIO RECORDER/MIXER FREE ALTERNATIVES
Audacity
Audacity is the best free alternative to the popular Adobe Audition. It has been around since the year 2000 and quite frankly it’s so good that there really is no need to use a paid product like Audition.
With Audacity, you can record audio, import, edit, combine sound files, and remove noise. It includes hundreds of effects, and you can install plugins to enhance its functionality.
Audacity is free, open-source software for recording and editing sounds.
Oceanaudio
Ocenaudio is a cross-platform, easy-to-use, fast, and fully functional audio editor.
It is the ideal software for people who need to edit and analyze audio files without complications.
Ocenaudio also has powerful features that will please more advanced users as well.
BEST VIDEO CONVERTER FREE ALTERNATIVES
Handbrake
The great free alternative to the popular Unit Converter is Handbrake.
It supports most of the popular codecs such as h.264, h.265, AVC, and others.
It can convert videos to formats that work on your mobile phone, tablet, TV media player, game console, computer, or web browser.
