5 Free Apps That Beat Expensive Alternatives In Every Way That Matters

By now, it feels like a common observation that tech keeps getting more expensive without necessarily becoming more useful. While AI drives up hardware costs, many apps we once used for free now require subscriptions to access their most useful features. When we begrudgingly pay those increasingly exorbitant fees, we often receive a product that barely works.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Some of the most frustrating and costly apps are the most well-known, but that’s only because they have a corporate marketing budget. There are often excellent alternatives available completely for free, many of which are even better than the expensive apps they’re meant to replace. The only reason you don’t know about them is that they rely mostly on word-of-mouth for marketing. So, we rounded up five of the best free apps that will make you forget all about their expensive competitors faster than you can say, “Cancel my subscription.”

When we say free, we mean you don’t spend a dime (unless you want to donate to the developer, which is always a welcome way to show your appreciation for their work). This list excludes any apps with hidden fees or “pro” subscriptions that lock important functionality behind a paywall. When you install these programs, they’re yours to configure as you wish, because that’s how software is supposed to work. So, here are five free apps that beat expensive alternatives in every way that matters to you.

If you’re someone who spends a lot of time writing, working in spreadsheets, or making slideshows, there’s a good chance you use Microsoft Office apps such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Microsoft Office apps are an industry standard, with decades of support and nearly endless features that keep even the most demanding users satisfied. But they have become increasingly frustrating to use over the years. The company pushes its monthly Microsoft 365 subscription heavily as the main way to access the suite, and if you go digging for a one-time purchase, you’ll find yourself shelling out $180 at the time of this writing. 

Moreover, Office apps are increasingly bloated with what many users call “AI slop” through Copilot integrations. They will even default to saving your files in OneDrive, which not only makes it difficult to find documents later but also risks exposing sensitive information you may not have wanted uploaded to the cloud.

If you’re tired of Microsoft’s antics but need Office’s professional-grade features, look no further than LibreOffice. It’s a free, open-source way to get work done on your Mac or PC, making it a fantastic alternative to Redmond’s productivity suite, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Compared to Office, LibreOffice surpasses the big tech option in every way that matters. Because it’s open-source, anyone who sees room for improvement and knows how to code can contribute to the project. There is even a robust library of user-created extensions that can add functionality, such as an MLA formatting tool for academic papers.

Private media servers are the perfect solution for anyone who wants to stream the media they already own on multiple devices. Plex, which lets you legally stream your media, is the most recognizable brand in the space. Its sleek aesthetics and ease of use make it quick to get your media server up and running during a lunch break. But some of its most desirable features are locked behind a paywall, and the company raised prices significantly last year. If you want to stream your media on the go, download files to other devices, stream with multiple devices at once, or let other users access your server, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription or cough up $250 for a lifetime membership.

Jellyfin is a popular alternative to Plex that works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox, and even LG webOS. It is both free and open source, with a large number of user-contributed clients available for download. This makes it far more flexible than Plex. There are versions of Jellyfin just for music, others for reading books and comics, and, of course, versions that let you watch your movies and TV shows, to name just a few. The only real downside compared to Plex is that it can be a bit tricky to figure out which configuration makes sense for your needs, and then to get all the kinks ironed out during setup. If you don’t think you can handle a bit of light network configuration, you may be better off with Plex. But in terms of relative feature sets, Plex is a shallow pool next to the deep well of Jellyfin.

Over the past decade, live streamers have become a new kind of Internet celebrity. Whether playing games, commenting on politics, or a potentially irresponsible mix thereof, these people broadcast themselves on Twitch, YouTube, and similar platforms, sometimes garnering enormous audiences. For the largest streamers, it’s a multi-million dollar business. But regardless of income level, most streamers default to using a free program to run their streams.

OBS, short for Open Broadcaster Software, is a free and open-source software application for video recording and live streaming. It is the rare such software which not only provides more functionality compared to paid alternatives like StreamYards, but is more popular than those products. In fact, the popular paid streaming suite Logitech Streamlabs is actually built on top of OBS, and its paid tier simply charges for the additional features. In fact, since streaming is so lucrative for gaming and entertainment companies, OBS is also in the enviable position of being sponsored by Logitech and other large industry players, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and YouTube. In a world where many open-source developers work for free while shaking a digital tin can, OBS can continue development without similar financial pressure.

Like other open-source options on this list, OBS also has a dedicated community and a robust plugin library to fit the marginal needs of various creators. For instance, musicians who stream their production sessions can install the atkAudio Plugin, which interfaces directly with MIDI and audio hardware, while those making tutorial or news content can use Zoominator, a plugin that zooms in on the area of the screen around your mouse during broadcasts.

If you’ve ever found yourself in the frustrating situation of having a video file that your computer or smartphone can’t play, you’ve likely found yourself searching for a reliable way to convert it to a compatible format. What you probably discovered next is that most of your options to do so are not very good. There’s Adobe Media Encoder, which offers an advantage for video editors who use Adobe Premiere, since it integrates with that workflow, but it feels like it was designed by someone who had never used a computer before and is bundled with a large software subscription. Wondershare UniConverter is a popular, standalone, paid option, but it has recently been flooded with AI features that many users will find dubiously useful and that video purists may find outright offensive.

The open-source, free alternative is HandBrake, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Known for its granular control over transcoding and excellent compression ratios, HandBrake may not use GPU-bound processes to the same extent as some paid competitors, but it hardly affects the final output. A corrupted, one-hour-long MP4 video in 1080p at 30fps transcoded in just under nine minutes on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D system with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super GPU in light testing for this article.

HandBrake’s biggest benefit is that it works for you regardless of your familiarity with the ins and outs of digital video. You can simply drag and drop, then click a single button to start your encoding queue, trusting the software to select the appropriate settings. Alternatively, you can dial in the specific settings you want. Or, you can choose from HandBrake’s long list of presets.

If you’ve got a large collection of digital media  — movies, TV shows, or music  — you know how difficult it can be to find software that plays nice with files of all types. The media player apps that come pre-installed on your Windows PC or Mac might be pretty to look at, but they fall short when faced with a file they don’t recognize. For those who are serious about their media consumption, one app rises above the rest: VLC Media Player by the non-profit VideoLAN Organization.

VLC is a completely free and open-source player with the most robust codec support on the market, meaning that, unless a file is corrupted beyond recovery, VLC can probably spin it up. The next time you get a video encoded in AV1, HEVC, or even MKV, it’s a job for VLC. But local video isn’t where the fun ends. VLC supports DVD, Blu-ray, and CD playback; receives and broadcasts network streams (a feature that makes it valuable for home server owners); streams Internet television; and displays live webcam feeds. It also uses hardware decoding and works great with NVIDIA graphics cards.

The VLC app itself is not very glamorous, to say the least, but that’s because the emphasis is on features and support. A built-in EQ and compressor let users tune the audio mix on any sound system, while audio desynchronization controls can compensate for latency or desynced audio tracks. Deinterlacing helps keep older videos looking their best, and those with NVIDIA RTX GPUs can take advantage of RTX Super Resolution to enhance low-quality videos with AI. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. VLC is available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android (including Google TV), and iOS.

Each of the apps recommended in this article was selected based on extensive knowledge of the software market for its category, in concert with hands-on testing and a preponderance of positive user sentiment. Testing of all recommended apps and the paid apps against which they were compared was performed on a high-end Windows PC and, where possible, on a mid-range Linux laptop. Given its broad platform reach, JellyFin was also tested on an Android smartphone, a Roku TV, and a Google Chromecast with Google TV.