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24 of the best free alternatives to the most popular paid software

https://www.xda-developers.com/x-best-free-alternatives-to-the-most-popular-paid-software/

You don't have to pay for professional software to complete simple tasks. Here are our favorite free software programs for getting work done.

24 of the best free alternatives to the most popular paid software

Note that these are not all FOSS.

Photo Editing:
- GIMP
- Krita
- Paint.NET
Video Editing:
- DaVinci Resolve
- CapCut
- Shotcut
Audio Editing:
- Audacity
- Cakewalk
- GarageBand
3D Graphics:
- Blender
- Spline
- Rumba
Office Software:
- LibreOffice
- Microsoft 365 Free Apps
- WPS Office
Antivirus Software:
- Windows Security
- Avast Free Antivirus
- Malwarebytes
Productivity Tools:
- Bitwarden
- VSCodium
- PDF-XChange Editor
- 7-Zip
- OBS Studio
- LanguageTool

94 comments

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zarenki

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It is open source, but had some controversy. Most prominently the addition of telemetry a few years ago, which was never included in the builds managed by Debian or most other distro maintainers. They also added a Contributor License Agreement which lets the Audacity project change its own license (even to a non-foss one, though they promise they won't) without needing to have the change approved by any individual developers.

Churbleyimyam

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Ah, monkey business...

Kess8a

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Just to know, how do you disable telemetry, if it isn't off by default?

zarenki

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I'm not completely sure but I think they removed it at some point after the public backlash (which was 3 years ago now). For the Windows version at least, there apparently used to be an option during the installation wizard for setting whether telemetry is enabled or not. Most Linux distros never had the telemetry at all. I don't know about Mac.