I, for one, love open-source apps, and there’s no shortage of them on Windows. But the truth is, not all of them get the same level of love. You might already know about LocalSend, Ditto, ShareX, PowerToys, and Bitwarden, but there’re plenty more that fly under the radar. And some of these are just as good, if not better.

Scolect

Monitor productivity with ease

Your PC may be a productivity machine, but Windows doesn’t actually offer a way to measure how productive you’ve been. There’s no screen time feature that tells you which apps you’ve used the most and how you’ve spent your time.

Scolect is a free tool that fixes that gap. It runs in the background and tracks which apps you’ve been using and for how long. You can categorize apps as productive and non-productive, then check usage at the end of the day or week. It also creates reports that give you an idea of your daily screen time and overall productivity at a glance. And you can even go as far as setting up app timers and alerts for daily screen time.

Most importantly, all of this data is stored locally, and there’s no subscription to worry about. This is something WIndows should’ve shipped, but it didn’t, so here we are.

Franz

Bring all your chats in one place

Communication is the key, but when you’re jumping between half a dozen apps just to talk, it can get frustrating fast. WhatsApp for family, Slack for work, Gmail for everything else — the list goes on. And of course, those apps also have to remain open in the background so you don’t miss alerts.

Franz solves this problem by pulling WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Discord, Gmail, Outlook and 70+ other services into one app. Everything lives in one window, so there’s a need to alt-tab between six different apps. The app is fast, beautiful to look at, and dead easy to use.

The only catch is that it’s not entirely free. The free tier lets you run 3 messaging services, and if you need more, there’s a $6 monthly subscription that can help.

YASB

YASB (Yet Another Status Bar) is a free, open-source app that adds macOS-like status bar at the top permanently. By default, it shows the name of the active app, time, notification count, volume level, and options for Shutdown, Restart, Sleep, Hibernate, and Logout.

The real fun, though, begins when you add widgets. You can set the status bar to show things like CPU, memory, network stats, weather, media player, and a lot more. You can even customize it with themes so it matches your wallpaper and overall setup.

It also has native integration with tiling managers like GlazeWM and Kobmorebi, which makes it the obvious pick if you’re already running one of those. So yes, if you’re tired of the limitations of Windows taskbar, YASB is worth a try.

FluentCleaner

Clean up junk in seconds

Like it or not, cleaning apps for Windows are somewhat necessary, unless you enjoy jumping through multiple menus to get the job done. FluentCleaner is the best tool I’ve found for that. It can clean up junk files, cache, browser clutter, old registry entries, and more.

FluentCleaner scans your PC for all this stuff and gives you the option to analyze what it found before deleting it. Unlike CCleaner, it does this without showing any ads, pushing its other apps, or asking for a subscription.

It’s built with WinUI 3, so it looks and feels like a native Windows 11 app. It’s also portable, which means there’s no need to keep it installed.

Windows 11’s right-click menu is one of those things that annoys almost everyone. It’s unnecessarily long, and even then, half the options you need are buried behind “Show more options.”

Windows 11 Context Menu Manager is a simple tool that only does one thing. It lets you remove any unwanted entries from the right-click menu with simple toggles. There’s no need to edit the registry files or do anything else. You just open the app and turn off the toggles for entries you don’t want — OneDrive, Adobe Acrobat, Copilot, Photos, or anything else you don’t want to see. It’s the easiest way to clean up the right-click menu.

TrafficMonitor

Your taskbar should show your internet speed

Microsoft recently added an internet speed test option to the Windows taskbar, but if you’ve tried using it, you know how awful it is. Clicking it opens a speed test in Bing, and there’s no way to change that. I couldn’t care less, though, because I use TrafficMonitor. It’s a simple app that adds real-time upload and download speeds to the taskbar. You can even configure it to show other things like CPU and RAM usage, CPU temperature, and total traffic.

You can customize the widget by changing the font style, changing themes, and converting it into a floating window that appears on top of your apps. It even stores historic traffic data if that’s something that interests you.