Working at a computer can take a lot more work than many give it credit for, and it's not uncommon for jobs to require certain paid tools to optimize productivity. Even in my line of work writing for XDA, there's frequent pressure to pay up for certain things that can improve productivity, such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, or Microsoft Office.

But there are multiple ways to increase productivity, and thankfully, they don't all have to cost money. I use a lot of free tools on my PC to elevate my productivity, sometimes beyond what a paid suite alone might do for you. If you want to do the same, here are some recommendations.

PowerToys

There are so many goodies here

Microsoft's own PowerToys suite is a treasure trove of useful features that can improve your productivity in various ways. I could spend an entire article talking about it (and have done so in the past), but let me recap some highlights. First off, there's FancyZones, which is frankly the best part of this whole toolkit, particularly if you have a large screen. FancyZones lets you design window layouts and easily snap windows into their respective areas, making it much easier to juggle multiple apps and tags at the same time. This pairs well with another tool called Workspaces, which can save sets of apps and their respective positions so you can launch them all at the same time, and all in the right place.

Another tool that can potentially save you a lot of time is New+, which essentially creates a templates folder where you can store files with a template you use frequently. This can be just about anything: a Word document, a spreadsheet, and so on. It then allows you to use the File Explorer context menu to create a copy of that template in any location on your PC, so you can just edit the necessary parts and have a document ready to go much more quickly.

There are other tools I find useful, like PowerToys Run or Command Palette, the Mouse Utilities, and more. You might find your own favorites in here.

File management tools

OneCommander

Managing files on Windows probably works about as well as you've ever needed, but there are certainly ways you can make it a lot better. There are a lot of alternative file managers out there, but many of them are paid and even more of them have designs that feel a little out of date on Windows 11. OneCommander is a great exception to both of these rules.

To be fair, OneCommander does have a paid version with some extra features, but most of what you might consider essential is available for free, and OneCommander is an excellent file manager, as I've highlighted before. It comes with tab support and a dual-pane view that makes it much easier to juggle files across different folders. The way the ages of files is displayed also makes it even easier to spot the files you need, and the whole UI just feels smooth and modern. It even has a built-in feature that's kind of like the New+ PowerToys tool I mentioned above, and you'll find a lot more if you dive into it. But the base functionality is already fantastic, so it comes highly recommended.

Everything

Don't worry, I'm not telling you to install every app that's ever existed — Everything is a file search tool, and it's amazing for finding any file quickly. Unlike the Windows indexer which is slow, resource-heavy, and often ineffective, Everything indexes all the files in your system in seconds, and when it's time to search for them, you get results instantly.

Everything can return results for just about every file on your system, inside any folder, and they all appear instantly as you type, making it easy to find anything you need at a moment's notice. It supports wildcards and conditional searches to make things even faster, so it can be a huge productivity boon.

TeraCopy

This is a smaller one, but if you're thinking of working more quickly and your work involves copying and moving a lot of files, this might be for you. It's not exactly a secret that Windows isn't the best at handling file operations and it can be a bit slow compared to other operating systems (especially Linux), but TeraCopy can help with that.

It's not only generally faster at copying files, but it has a ton of useful features, such as file verification after copying, the ability to queue file tasks to be performed in succession, and skipping over tasks that result in errors, rather than stalling the task entirely. That way, if you're copying large amounts of files and leave the task unattended, you can come back and address the errors, but at least everything else will be copied. The built-in file manager on Windows would stop the transfer entirely until you address the problem, which would be a huge waste of time in some situations. It may seem small at first, but when it comes to being productive, it can also be a huge help.

Vivaldi

The web browser

I've been a big proponent of the Vivaldi web browser for a few years now, and despite taking a bit of a detour for a while, I always came back, and to be fair, it's better than ever. Productivity-wise, Vivaldi is pretty much unrivaled, with a set of tab management tools that make it a breeze to juggle large numbers of tabs, including workspaces, tab stacks, and tiling. It even syncs my tabs across devices in real time, so it's great for cross-device work, too. I often do research on my main computer but I then need to go back to those pages on my test computer, and Vivaldi makes that a lot easier by syncing my tabs.

All of that is just the essentials, but Vivaldi has a lot of useful extras, too. The sidebar makes it easy to access a wide range of tools, but on top of that, you can pin any website to it, and that means you can then open that website at any time in a small window that just hovers the rest of the browser and is dismissed automatically when you click away from it, perfect for pages where you usually take quick actions like uploading or downloading files, or as a way to occasionally check social media without having it take full control of your screen.

Of course, it's unlikely you'd ever be paying for a web browser these days anyway, but Vivaldi is so good, it still deserves a shoutout.

Affinity

Photo editing made easy and free

For a few years now, I had been using Photoshop and Lightroom for my photo edits, but recently, Canva launched its new Affinity app (thanks to its purchase of Serif), making it free to use with only some AI tools locked behind a paywall. Affinity is a very good image editing app supporting both vector and pixel-based editing, and even including the ability to develop RAW photos.

While it's not as optimized for RAW photo development in bulk as Lightroom is, Affinity is still fantastic for my needs. It lacks some of the automatic options I'm used to from Lightroom, but to balance it out, I can create and save presets, so the settings I apply to one photo can instantly be applied to another whenever I need them. If anything, this can sometimes be even better, especially because I take so many photos in similar lighting conditions.

I'll be more specific: one of the features I use a lot in Lightroom is the automatic noise reduction, and indeed, that works very well and saves me the trouble of figuring out specifics. But because this relies on AI and requires GPU power, a lot of the laptops I use for work can take a long time to process it, so manual edits are easier anyway. And since I can just save presets of my noise reduction settings, applying them becomes a breezy task that happens much more quickly. Similarly, the auto settings in Lightroom can save me some time occasionally, but even after applying them, I often tweak the settings to my liking, so the automatic settings are always an approximation anyway. By saving my own presets (and as many as I want), I can apply my most used settings quickly, and if changes are required, then it's still no harder than Lightroom.

I will admit there are some areas where Affinity falls short of Photoshop, especially as it concerns AI-based features in the free version, but it's still an incredible tool with which most people will be more than happy.

OnlyOffice

It's all I need

Finally, let's talk about office suites, because that's a tool even more essential than Photoshop for most people. And while Microsoft kind of reigns supreme there, you don't actually need to give the company money to edit your documents or spreadsheets. I've spent a lot of time hunting for the perfect alternative, and I've settled on OnlyOffice. In its standard, local-only version, OnlyOffice is completely free and it's available on pretty much all platforms.

It includes a document, spreadsheet, and slideshow maker, with all the tools you'd expect, plus templates. You even get 2GB of cloud storage for documents if you want to collaborate with others in real time. Most of the work I do in an office suite is poring over data in a spreadsheet, and OnlyOffice lets me do that just as well as I would with Microsoft Office. I have no regrets about making the switch, and if you're looking to save money, I highly recommend it.

You don't need to spend money to be productive

You'll hear a lot of people talk about how "real professionals" need to pay for this or that software. But for a lot of people, myself included, free alternatives have often proven to be more than enough to offer all the productivity I could ask for, and then some. The tools above have allowed me to be more productive than ever, and I highly recommend checking all of them out.