11 Best Open Source Alternatives For Expensive Applications 

Why do we still favor pricey programs like Microsoft Windows, Adobe, Autodesk, and others when there are many open-source replacements? Yes, many free alternatives to your expensive software are available to you, ranging from operating systems to other tools.

The fact that they have well-known brands is one of the key reasons why most of us prefer expensive software to perform our daily tasks. And the majority of us still aren’t familiar with the open-source software, where you may acquire tools for free that are just as functional or even more so than those that cost money.

This article will cover a few of the top free and open source alternatives to pricey applications. Install them to see how they compare to your current, expensive program. Most of the open-source programs (except from the first, which is an operating system) in this list have cross-platform support, allowing you to install and use them on other operating systems like Windows, Mac, and Linux.

What is open source software? 

Software created, tested, or enhanced by open collaboration is referred to as “open source software (OSS)” and is released with the understanding that it must be shared with others to ensure future open cooperation or you can just download free software available in full.

Why should you select open source software?

There are numerous benefits, or justifications, for using open-source technologies instead of pricy software.

• You have total freedom with open-source software because there are no dubious terms or constraints.
• Anyone can use, distribute, alter, and study open-source software code since it is easily accessible to anyone who wants it.
• The best operating systems and solutions available today to track their users.
• Open-source tools can occasionally provide features or performance advantages over their commercial versions.
• Economical – absolutely free, with no additional fees.

Audacity

Category: Audio Editor

The best free alternatives to Apple LogicPro are FL Studio Producer Edition ($199) and Apple LogicPro ($199.99).

An open-source, free digital audio editor and recording program is called Audacity. The ability to post-process various sorts of audio, including podcasts, adding effects like normalizing, cutting, and fading in and out, as well as recording audio from many sources.

Features:

• Audacity can use a mixer or microphone to capture live audio and digitize records from other sources.
• Mix, edit, and import audio files. Your recordings can be exported as various file types, including many files at once.
• Supports 16, 24, and 32-bit systems. Using the dithering and high-quality resampling to convert sample rates and file formats.
• Support for the effect plug-ins LADSPA, LV2, Nyquist, VST, and Audio Unit. You may simply alter Nyquist effects with a text editor, or you can even create your own plug-in.
• With Cut, Copy, Paste, and Delete, editing is simple. Additionally, you can undo and redo things indefinitely in a session to go back to whatever many stages you like.
• Effects from LADSPA, LV2, VST and Audio Unit (macOS) can be previewed in real time. The plug-in manager handles the installation of plug-ins and the addition/removal of effects and generators from the menus.
• The keyboard can be used to fully alter tracks and selections. extensive selection of keyboard shortcuts.
• Frequencies can be seen and chosen using the spectrogram display mode. For a thorough frequency examination, plot a spectrum window.

Amarok

Category: Tools for audio and music

Best open-source alternative to: iTunes

Amarok is one of many open-source programs for playing music that combines music finding tools with an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly audio player. The integration of many Web audio services, dynamic playlists, bookmarking, scripting, context view, and other features.

Features:

• You can download the cover art to more attractively arrange your collection and use it to categorize your songs in a useful way.
• It has a tab for information so you can identify the musician or band you’re listening to and even check their Wikipedia page.
• Playlist management is incredibly effective with Amarok, and you can add songs from other platforms like Jamendo and Last.FM to build up your library.

Gimp

Category: Drawings and Graphics

 Best open-source alternative to: Photoshop ($19.99 per user per month)

Like Photoshop, Gimp makes it simple to modify pictures and other types of images. It has appropriate capabilities for experts, such as layers, gradients, photo enhancement, color manipulation, digital retouching, and many more.

Features:

• GIMP provides the tools required for high-quality picture modification. Your imagination is the only restriction regarding artistic collages, restoration, and retouching.
• GIMP allows artists the freedom and control to rework photos into totally original works of art.
• Icons, graphic design elements, and artwork for user interface elements and mockups are all created using GIMP. 
• A top-notch framework for programmed image editing, GIMP supports multiple languages, including C, C++, Perl, Python, Scheme, and more.
• GIMP has excellent color management tools to guarantee accurate color reproduction on printed and digital media. The best workflows for using it include other free programs like Scribus, Inkscape, and SwatchBooker.
• Through the incorporation of numerous programming languages, such as Scheme, Python, Perl, and others, GIMP offers extensibility.

OpenOffice

Category: Office Productivity

Best open-source alternative to: Microsoft Office ($71.88 per user per year and up)

Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (graphics), Math (mathematical equations), and Base are all included in Apache OpenOffice (database). It has a user-friendly interface and can open, edit, and export files in Microsoft formats. 

Features:

• Neither a license fee nor any unsettling fine print are included with Apache OpenOffice.
• Apache OpenOffice takes great pride in its ability to work with various office suites.
• The simplest and most affordable method of offering the fundamental software tools necessary to support an expanding business is through OpenOffice.
• Apache OpenOffice is an excellent tool for handling administrative activities and producing educational materials.

LibreOffice

Category: Office Productivity

Best open-source alternative to: Microsoft Office ($71.88 per user per year and up)

LibreOffice provides similar software to its predecessor while adding some new features and extensions. The website has a helpful chart that contrasts it with Microsoft Office.

Features:

• No matter what they are for—a letter, a master’s thesis, a brochure, financial reports, marketing presentations, technical drawings and diagrams—your documents will seem polished and well-presented.
• Just a handful of the document types that LibreOffice is compatible with include Microsoft® Word (.doc,.docx), Excel (.xls,.xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt,.pptx), and Publisher. Through its effective extension mechanisms, LibreOffice is easily extensible.
• LibreOffice is Free and Open Source Software created by a global community of hundreds of developers and is accessible to everyone for use, sharing, and modification.

PDFCreator

Category: PDF Tools

The most effective open-source substitute for Adobe Acrobat ($381.65) 

With PDFCreator, any program that can print may produce a PDF file. It also has encryption and digital signature capabilities, but some of Acrobat’s form creation features are missing.

Features:

• Convert PDF files to JPG, PNG, and TIFF image formats.
• The PDF converter supports token usage.
• You may expedite the procedure by utilizing digital signatures to sign the document with PDFCreator.
• Save automatically.
• PDFCreator can produce PDF/A files. 
• Can merge them into a single PDF document.
• Your papers can be protected from unwanted access and change.

Connecting Your Devices: How to Find the Network SSID

Finding your network SSID (Service Set Identifier) is an important step in connecting to your Wi-Fi network. The SSID is the name that identifies your network, and it is required to connect devices to the network. In this article, we will guide you through the process of finding your network SSID.

Blender

Category: 3D Graphics Tools

For amateurs and home users, 3D animation software can be prohibitively expensive. However, Blender is free and has been used to produce feature-length animated films.

Features:

• Viewport preview in real-time
• GPU and CPU rendering
• Support for PBR shaders and HDR lighting
• VR rendering assistance
• Automatic and manual tracking
• Highly effective camera reconstruction
• Your tracked video and 3D scene are displayed in real-time.
• Support for tripod solvers and planar tracking
• Change the interface’s design and colors.
•  Retina/high-resolution screen support 
• Make your add-ons and tools 
• OpenGL viewport with drawings 
• Connect to the Render API in Blender.

Cinelerra

Category: Video Editing Tools

Best open-source alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro ($19.99 per user per month), Avid Media Composer

While claiming to be “helpful and quick,” the video editor Cinelerra admits that it lacks some functions compared to contemporary professional applications. At Cinelerra.org, a community-based fork with very similar features and support is available. 

Features:

• An 8k editor that supports LV2 and many cameras, like Calf Studio Gear for audio mastering, is Cinelerra GG Infinity.
• It contains a text editor for making titles and texts for your videos and supports proxies.
• You can use it to remove distracting elements from your film, reorganize scenes, make lovely transitions, enhance the visual or aural quality, and add music.
• Utilize YouTube presets to render your new video production directly.
• Although Cinelerra GG Infinity is intended for pros, it can also be used by amateurs to maximize the potential of their videos.

Bluefish

Category: Website-building software

Best open-source alternative to Adobe Dreamweaver ($19.99 per user per month)

Bluefish is a very quick WYSIWYG HTML editor that uses very few system resources. It isn’t as user-friendly as its commercial rivals or the other open-source solutions described here. It supports additional programming languages and is more geared toward programmers than designers.

Features:

• Bluefish strives to be as lightweight as feasible, considering that it is a GUI editor.
• Fast – Bluefish starts up remarkably quickly and loads hundreds of files in a few seconds (even on a netbook). A multi-document interface that quickly opens 500+ documents (tested with more than 100,000 documents at once)
• With project support, you can work productively on several projects simultaneously, and each project’s settings are immediately restored.
• Gvfs’s multi-threaded support for remote files, which includes WebDAV, CIFS, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and more1
• A highly robust search and replace includes capabilities like a sub-pattern replacement, support for Perl Compatible regular expressions, and search and replace in files on disk.
• Open files in a recursive manner depending on content or filename patterns
• Use the snippets sidebar to create custom dialogs, search and replace patterns, or insert patterns and bind them to a shortcut key combination of your choice to expedite the development process.
• Integrate other programs like make, lint, weblint, xmllint, tidy, javac, or your own software or script to perform advanced text processing or error detection.

KeePass

Category: Security Tools

Best open-source alternative to RoboForm, LastPass

You may keep your passwords safely with KeePass, a free open source password manager. You can store all of your passwords in a single database secured by either a key file or a master key. Thus, to unlock the entire database, you just need to remember one master password or choose the key file. The best and safest encryption techniques currently available are used to encrypt the databases (AES and Twofish).

Features:  

• Not just the password fields are secured; the entire database is. Your user names, notes, etc. are therefore also encrypted.
• A single master password unlocks the entire database.
• Key files are an alternative. In most circumstances, key files offer greater security than master passwords. You only need to bring the key file, which you can store on a CD, USB drive, or floppy disk. You shouldn’t lose this disk then, of course.
• Using both password and the key file to unlock the database will boost security even more if the two strategies discussed above are used. The database would be secure even if you lost your key file.
• KeePass is portable because it operates on Windows without needing to be installed and can be carried around on a USB stick.
• Installer packages are also offered for those who prefer shortcuts on their Windows start menu and on their desktop.
• KeePass does not keep any data on your computer. 
• In the databases, you can do searches for certain entries.
• Simply click on one of the column headers in the password list to sort the list of passwords by any column.
• You may fully view KeePass’s source code for free!

ClamWin

Category: Antivirus

Best open-source substitutes for McAfee AntiVirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus

More than 600,000 individuals use ClamWin Free Antivirus regularly. It has open source code and a simple installer. It is available for download and use without any fees. High detection rates for viruses and spyware are included, as well as a scanning scheduler, automatic downloads of frequently updated virus databases, a standalone virus scanner, right-click menu integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer, and an Outlook add-in to automatically remove malicious attachments.

Features:

• High rates of spyware and malware detection;
• Scheduler scanning
• Automatic virus database downloads that are updated frequently.
• Integration of the right-click menu with Microsoft Windows Explorer’s stand-alone virus scanner;
• Microsoft Outlook add-on to automatically eliminate malicious attachments

8 Top Best Office Suite Software

Here is a list of the Top Office Suite Software, with links to their websites and lists of their most popular features. Both commercial (charged) and open-source (free) applications are included on the list.

Conclusion

Install these free alternatives today to see how much better they function than the expensive ones. You can now see how much money moving to a free solution will save you. In the comments, share your thoughts on their features, performance, and other aspects.  Please also inform us of other excellent open-source replacements for the pricey application that we forgot to mention.