Summary

• Get quick access to any folder and boost productivity with Fences 5's Folder Portals
• Streamline desktop organization and make icons tidier with Fences 5's Peek feature
• Increase productivity by keeping desktop icons tidy and accessing files in a snap with Fences 5

Stardock is no stranger to making great tools for customizing Windows, and the company has done so for many years. A few months ago, I reviewed Start11 v2, and found it to be a nearly essential tool for making the most of the Windows 11 Start menu, turning it into what it should be. Fences, on the other hand, aims to power up the Windows desktop, which is a tool I don't use that much in the first place.

With that in mind, Fences 5 is still a fantastic tool, and a great way to boost your productivity and organization. It organizes the icons on your desktop, but what makes it so great is everything else it allows you to do, giving you access to files and folders in a snap, and boosting your productivity as a result.

About this review: This review was written using a free trial for Fences 5, which includes all the features of the full version but with a time limit of 30 days.

Price and availability

Fences 5 launched on December 6, 2023, and you can buy it from Stardock's website. A new license costs $9.99, but there's also a free trial available that lets you use all the features of the app for a period of 30 days before having to pay up. This is a perpetual license, so you'll never have to pay for the app again, but you won't get new major releases in the feature.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to Stardock's Object Desktop suite, which includes all of the company's apps, including future major releases. This costs $49.95 for the initial subscription.

What I like

Organizing my desktop

The big initial selling point of Fences is the ability to organize the icons on your desktop. I'll be perfectly honest, I don't use the desktop on my PC all that much. I usually delete all the icons on it and set the desktop to hide all icons anyway, so to me personally, this feature isn't the most compelling part of Fences right out of the gate. But that's not to say it's useless, not at all.

The core feature of Fences is that it creates areas on your desktop (called fences), where your desktop icons reside based on certain conditions. You may have a fence for apps, one for documents, and so on. Fences will create a few by default (though you can skip this), and you can also go into the settings to create custom rules for it, so apps always go into one fence, Word documents in another, and whatever else you prefer.

I've seen far too many desktops that look like a mess, including my own a few years ago, which is why I've been interested in Fences for a long time. I've changed my habits since then, but if you have a lot of stuff on your desktop, this is still a game changer.

One thing I really like about creating a fence is that you can drag it anywhere and also roll it up. This means that a fence will only show its title until you hover the mouse cursor over it, helping me keep my desktop even cleaner.

Folder Portals

While the typical fences are what gives this app its name, its true selling point for me is called Folder Portals. This feature lets you create a fence that's essentially a portal to any folder on your PC. Want quick access to your images? You can create a folder portal that puts your images folder right on your desktop, without actually moving the files to it. You can navigate these folders, open files, and move drag and drop them into apps (more on that in a second).

Having a portal to my screenshots folder is a godsend

A lot of my work involves creating tutorials for Windows, which means taking a lot of screenshots, so having a portal to my screenshots folder is a godsend. And that's not the only kind of image I have to upload (my Pictures folder is huge), so I also have a folder portal for all my XDA images, and it's also a blessing. I can drag and drop files between folder portals, too.

This is what makes Fences so great nowadays, and without it, I'd have a much harder time recommending this app.

It's a true productivity boost

Both of the features above really come together with the last major feature of Fences, called Peek. Similar to how Windows 11 lets you peek at your desktop, Fences allows you to quickly access your fences and Folder Portals, but there's a twist. Bringing up your Fences (which you can do with a keyboard shortcut or by using the taskbar corner, if you enable this capability) doesn't take you to the desktop. Instead, your Fences are displayed over any apps you have open at that time.

You have instant access to your apps, files, and folders without removing yourself from your current context

What that means is you have instant access to your apps, files, and folders without removing yourself from your current context. If I'm working on an article and need to upload an image, I can bring up my Folder Portal and drag the image from its folder and into the image uploader. If I need to edit that image, I can open Photoshop using Fences, and then drag the image into Photoshop, all without having to close or minimize my current windows. This truly helps a lot with my productivity, and that means it's achieving its goals.

Useful customization

Finally, I'd like to touch on customization. While Fences isn't as intricate as a tool like Start11, you can still make Fences look and feel how you want it to. You can change the color and transparency of your Fences, move them around, roll them up, or choose whether you want a fence's name to be visible, all of which are useful things to have. You can even change the font on a fence's title, as well as the color of that text.

A new feature in Fences 5 is called Chameleon, which I also love. If you've seen the way widgets work on the latest macOS version, this is similar. Essentially, it turns your fences heavily transparent and colorless, making them blend in with your desktop background. I really like being able to see my background uninterrupted, so this is perfect for me. Plus, you can even set Fences to become fully invisible when the desktop is inactive after a set length of time.

Otherwise, the customization mostly boils down to simple things like renaming individual fences, or changing the keyboard shortcuts for features like Peek. It's not a lot, but it doesn't;t need to be.

What I don't like

Selecting multiple items while using Peek could be easier

My biggest gripe with Fences is probably the fact that I can't select or act on multiple files at the same time by holding down Ctrl and clicking each item, specifically while using the Peek feature. It seems like a small complaint considering you can click and select an area with the mouse to select multiple files, but it's very frustrating.

Drawing an area inside a fence means you need to find the right free space to do it, so you don't accidentally drag a file instead, which wastes my time. Plus, I don't always want to select sequential files, or the files I want are split across multiple lines, and this method means selecting more files than I want. Hopefully, this is something that can be addressed soon.

There's some overlap with Start11

Another problem I have with Fences is that, for my usage, it's just not as useful of a tool as Start11. The thing is Start11 also lets me organize everything on my laptop easily into groups, including multiple tabs and pages so I can get to my files as quickly as I want to. And since Start11 replaces the Start menu, I can just press the Windows key to get to it even more quickly, since Fences uses more complicated keyboard shortcuts.

In terms of boosting my productivity, I feel like Start11 and Fences 5 do a lot of the same things, but Start11 is even more customizable in terms of how it looks and feels. If you already have Start11, I don't think it's worth it to get Fences as well unless you rely heavily on the desktop. For me, the Start menu was already what I used most often, so Start11 makes a lot more sense for me.

It's also interesting that, despite this, Fences costs more than Start11. You can grab that tool for just $7, which makes Fences harder to recommend. It definitely still has its use case, though I think it should, at most, cost as much as Start11.

Should you buy Fences 5?

Fences 5 isn't a tool that's made for me, but there's a lot to love here. Organizing your desktop icons into groups makes things look much more tidy, and Folder Portals are a true game-changer feature, especially paired with the Peek capability. These two features are what makes Fences a true productivity tool, and if you can see how these capabilities will speed up your work, then I think Fences is almost certainly worth it.

However, I can't help feeling like it's harder to recommend Fences compared to Start11. That tool gives you even easier access to your apps and folders in a centralized location, and it has a whole lot of other customization options with a lower price to boot. I would recommend trying Start11 first, but Fences 5 still has its unique selling points.

You should buy Fences 5 if:

• You have a lot of icons on your desktop and want to keep them organized
• You want quick access to specific folders on your PC without having to open File Explorer

You should NOT buy Fences 5 if:

• Start11 already gives you fast access to the files and folders you want
• You don't plan on using the Peek feature while multitasking