Free tools and software worth knowing about in 2026

[Dave]

The best free tools are often the ones that do something specific brilliantly rather than trying to be everything. What are the free tools you would recommend that people might not know about?

Not the obvious ones. Not VLC and LibreOffice which everyone knows. The specific things that solve a real problem for free that people are often paying for unnecessarily.

[codeberg]

Stirling PDF. Free, open source, self-hostable PDF tool that does everything you might pay a subscription for: merge, split, compress, convert, edit. Run it locally, never touch your files with a cloud service.

[Hollow]

Bitwarden for password management. Free tier is genuinely excellent and the open source nature means the code is auditable. No reason to pay for closed-source password management.

[CollapseState]

OBS Studio for screen recording and streaming. The free version is identical to the paid alternatives and used professionally. If you are paying for Camtasia or similar for screen recording, stop.

[Taker]

Flameshot for screenshots. More capable than the built-in tools on any operating system, free, and the annotation features are excellent.

[Jackson79]

Thunderbird for email. Many people do not know it still exists and is actively developed. If you want a local email client that does not cost money and is not surveilling you, this is it.

[TeddyWhelan]

draw.io for diagrams. Now called diagrams.net. Free, runs in browser, no account required, excellent for flowcharts and architecture diagrams. Saves the Visio subscription for most use cases.

[Sienna74]

Audacity for audio editing. Slightly controversial in recent years due to ownership changes but still free, still capable, and still the right answer for basic audio work.

[StayReadyKev91]

Nextcloud if you want to run your own cloud storage. Technical to set up but free, private, and you own everything. If you have a home server or a cheap VPS this is worth the setup time.

[Clever Georgia]

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