Free Software

Computer America has curated this list of Free Software over the years to provide a one stop shop. Everything from Art, Productivity, Entertainment, and more can be found below. The lists are in no particular order.

Web Browser

  • Chrome – The most popular browser in the world. Made by Google, not open source.
  • Chromium – Basis of many browser today, open source.
  • Firefox – Browser that protects your privacy.
  • Opera – Pioneer of many modern features of browsers, very capable.
  • Brave – Dedicated to privacy, and fast browsing.
  • Waterfox – Open source version of Firefox dedicated to 64-Bit brower.
  • Dooble – Open source browser, light weight.

Image Editor

  • Krita – Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
  • OpenToonz – Based on the software “Toonz”, developed by Digital Video S.p.A. in Italy, OpenToonz has been customized by Studio Ghibli, and used for the creation of its works for many years. Dwango has launched the OpenToonz project in cooperation with Digital Video and Studio Ghibli.
  • Irfanview – IrfanView seeks to create unique, new and interesting features that is designed to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.
  • Gimp – Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.
  • Pixlr – Designed with just the right amount of easy to navigate photo editing tools, you are about to experience the next best online image editor built with cutting edge technology.
  • Inkscape – Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you!
  • Paint.net – Paint.NET is image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
  • Medibang – MediBang Paint is a FREE lightweight digital painting and comic creation program that comes loaded with brushes, fonts, pre-made backgrounds, and other resources.
  • Darktable – darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

3D Modeling

  • FreeCAD – An open-source parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size.
  • Blender – Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
  • Magicavoxel – A free lightweight 8-bit voxel art editor and GPU based interactive path tracing renderer. 
  • Makehuman – A completely free, innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters.
  • Fusion 360 – Eliminate your disconnected product development process. Unify design, engineering, and manufacturing into a single platform.
  • Sketchup – Your free 3D modeling software. Make anything you can imagine, without downloading a thing.
  • OpenSCAD – OpenSCAD is software for creating solid 3D CAD models. It is free software and available for Linux/UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X.

Video Editing

  • DaVinci Resolve – DaVinci Resolve 16 is the world’s only solution that combines professional 8K editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in one software tool! 
  • Handbrake – HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
  • SFM Source filmmaker – Free video making platform. Popular with Steam

Audio Editing

  • REAPER – REAPER’s full, flexible feature set and renowned stability have found a home wherever digital audio is used: commercial and home studios, broadcast, location recording, education, science and research, sound design, game development, and more.
  • Let’s Make Music – Produce music with your computer by creating melodies and beats, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples and much more.
  • Audacity – Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Developed by a group of volunteers as open source.
  • Musescore – MuseScore is a GNU GPL licensed open-source program.

Simulating

  • Algodoo – Algodoo gives you the opportunity to play with physics. Use your own hands and simple drawing tools to design, construct and explore the world of physics.
  • Bricklink – Watch as your bricks clutch, hinge, and clip to each other through our snap-to functionality. Compatible connections are detected, allowing you to assemble parts quickly.

Streaming Encoders

  • OBS – (Open Broadcasting Software) Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming.
  • StreamElementsOBS – All in one streaming solution, chat and activity feed and Media Request included
  • Streamlabs OBS – Streamlabs OBS is a free reliable streaming app with the fastest setup process on the market. We have developed an all-in-one application making streaming easy for everyone.

Audiobook

  • Chapter and Verse – Chapter and Verse is a free software tool to create chapterized audiobooks for the iPod, iTunes and Quicktime.
  • Calibre – calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager. Users say it’s outstanding and a must-have. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software.

Entertainment / Games

  • Space Engine – SpaceEngine is a realistic virtual Universe you can explore on your computer. You can travel from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, landing on any planet, moon, or asteroid with the ability to explore its alien landscape.
  • Plex – Your favorite movies, TV, music, web shows, podcasts, and more, all streamed to your favorite screens.
  • Steam – Steam is a video game digital distribution service platform developed by Valve Corporation.
  • Kodi – Kodi spawned from the love of media. It is an entertainment hub that brings all your digital media together into a beautiful and user friendly package. 

Networking/VPN’s

  • OpenVPN – OpenVPN provides flexible VPN solutions to secure your data communications, whether it’s for Internet privacy, remote access for employees, securing IoT, or for networking Cloud data centers.
  • Nmap – Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing.
  • pfSense – Netgate’s® virtual appliances with pfSense® software extend your applications and connectivity to authorized users everywhere, through Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services.
  • FreeNAS – FreeNAS is an operating system that can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share data over a network.
  • Musicpd – Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music.
  • TeamViewer – Remotely access, manage, and support computers, mobile devices, network machines, and more — from anywhere, anytime.
  • Wireshark – Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. 

Virtual Machines

  • Proxmox – Proxmox VE is a complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. 
  • VirtualBox – VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. 

Office Suite

  • LibreOffice – LibreOffice is a powerful office suite – its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity. LibreOffice includes several applications that make it the most powerful Free and Open Source office suite on the market.
  • Google Docs – A complete cloud-based office suite for spreadsheets, word documents, presentations, and forms.

Operating Systems/Support

  • Linux – Links that lead directly to the download page of 25 popular Linux distributions.
  • Apache – The mission of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is to provide software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many like-minded software project communities consisting of individuals who choose to participate in ASF activities.
  • Ninite – Custom installer and updater for dozens of applications.
  • Everything – “Everything” is search engine that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows. Unlike Windows search “Everything” initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name “Everything”).
  • f.lux – f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights.
  • Recuva – Accidentally deleted an important file? Lost files after a computer crash? No problem – Recuva recovers files from your Windows computer, recycle bin, digital camera card, or MP3 player!
  • Arduino – Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. 

Code Editor

  • Visual Studio Editor – Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere.
  • Notepad++ – Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.
  • Sublime Text – Text Editor for code, markup, and prose.
  • Vim – Vim is a highly configurable text editor for efficiently creating and changing any kind of text. It is included as “vi” with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X.

Coding Language

  • R – R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.
  • Python – Python can be easy to pick up whether you’re a first time programmer or you’re experienced with other languages. The following pages are a useful first step to get on your way writing programs with Python!

Game Engines

  • Unity – Start bringing your vision to life today. Unity’s real-time 3D development platform empowers you with all you need to create, operate, and monetize.
  • Unreal Engine – A complete Suite of creation tools designed to meet ambitious artistic visions while being flexible enough to ensure success for teams of all sizes.
  • Godot Engine – Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Your game is yours, down to the last line of engine code.

Miscellaneous

  • Google Maps – Satellite mapping service
  • DuoLingo – Learning with Duolingo is fun and addictive. Earn points for correct answers, race against the clock, and level up. 
  • 7zip – 7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio.
  • Robinhood – Make unlimited commission-free trades in stocks, funds, and options with Robinhood Financial. The same goes for buying and selling cryptocurrencies with Robinhood Crypto. Zero commission fees.
  • Shazam – Shazam is a mobile app that recognises music and TV around you.
  • Todoist – Regain clarity and calmness by getting all those tasks out of your head and onto your to-do list (no matter where you are or what device you use).
  • TeraCopy – In case of a copy error TeraCopy will try to recover. If unable to recover in the worst case scenario it will simply skip the problematic file, not terminating the entire transfer. It can also wait for network or device reconnection.
  • CourseDuck (Python) – CourseDuck is your one-stop shop for researching and comparing online courses. We make finding the right course fast and easy. Virtually anyone on the planet can use our top-rated resources to acquire the job-ready skills they need in order to land rewarding, high-paying careers.
  • Explore.org – To champion the selfless acts of others, create a portal into the soul of humanity and inspire lifelong learning. Explore.org is the world’s leading philanthropic live nature cam network and documentary film channel.
  • ninite.com – Install multiple free software programs at once, letting the bots do the rest!

Video/Audio Players

  • VLC – VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
  • foobar2000 – foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform.
  • Musicbee – MusicBee makes it easy to manage, find, and play music files on your computer. MusicBee also supports podcasts, web radio stations and SoundCloud integration

Research/Academics

  • Zotero – Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
  • Desmos – At Desmos, we’re on a mission to help every student learn math and love learning math. We accomplish this goal by building dependable products and meaningful partnerships.
  • fxsolver – fx​Solver is a solver for engineering and scientific equations.
  • Cymath – Our math solver is powered by a combination of artificial intelligence and heuristics, so that it solves math problems step-by-step like a teacher would. 
  • Mathway – Mathway provides students with the tools they need to understand and solve their math problems. With millions of users and billions of problems solved, Mathway is the #1 problem solving resource available for students, parents, and teachers.
  • Harvard University Free Courses – Yes, THAT Harvard. Take real courses online from Harvard University. Does not give College Credit, but learn the skills!

Voice Programs/ Social

  • Discord – All-in-one voice and text chat for gamers that’s free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone. Stop paying for TeamSpeak servers and hassling with Skype. Simplify your life.
  • Skype – Free online calls, messaging, affordable international calling to mobiles or landlines
  • Teamspeak – Use crystal clear sound to communicate with your team mates cross-platform with military-grade security, lag-free performance & unparalleled reliability and uptime.
  • Giveaway of the Day – Free software you’d have to purchase otherwise, resets daily at 3am EST.

Malware

  • Malwarebytes – Blocks malware, hackers, viruses, ransomware, and malicious websites that traditional antivirus isn’t smart enough to stop.
  • Windows Defender – Windows Defender Security Center delivers a robust suite of security features that keep you safe for the supported lifetime of your Windows 10 device.
  • Bitdefender – Today, Bitdefender is also the provider of choice, used in over 38% of the world’s security solutions. Recognized by industry, respected by vendors and evangelized by our customers, Bitdefender is the cybersecurity company you can trust and rely on.
  • AVG – Our free antivirus software just got even better. It now includes real-time security updates, scans for both malware and performance issues, and even catches malicious downloads before they reach your PC. It’s also got an all-new, refreshingly simple design that shows you exactly how you’re protected.
  • ClamwinClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 10 / 8 / 7 / Vista / XP / Me / 2000 / 98 and Windows Server 2012, 2008 and 2003.
If you think we are missing out on the best free software or services, please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and Facebook!