10 Free Alternatives To Costly Softwares

Although the premium versions of the softwares are usually the best ones for the particular task, they are licensed and have to be brought if you want to use it. They consume more disk space too.

To help you budget consciously make use of technology, we bring you the list of 10 free, alternative softwares as reported by Karan Bajaj and Hitesh Raj Bhagat for Economic Times.

1. Ubuntu
Category: Operating system

Ubuntu is an open source operating system that is easy to use. It is one of the most popular among the hundreds of Linux based OS. It has low hardware requirements and can run from a USB drive or DVD. There are built-in softwares like document editing software, a chat client, email client and multimedia player. Most popular apps like Skype, Audacity, Google Chrome are available for Ubuntu.

When compared to the paid OS, the least expensive among MS Windows 7 is its home edition costing  6,000. This edition does not include multi-touch support, Windows Media Centre, Windows XP mode and multiple language support.

2. Google Docs   
Category: Document editing software

Google Docs is an application that supports text documents, presentations and spreadsheets. It is rich in its features and has innovative useful features that allow monitoring the document in real time. It facilitates real time sharing of the particular document which is missing in MS Word. Google Docs makes all your documents to get automatically saved in your Google Drive cloud storage space. It lets you open documents saved in your Gmail inbox or create a new one online.  

The Home and Student edition of MS Office (2013) with a single PC license costs  5,499. You get Word, PowerPoint, Excel and One Note in the package along with 7GB of Sky-Drive storage to store documents.

3. Microsoft Office Web Apps
Category: Document editing software

Users familiar with MS Office, will be comfortable with Microsoft’s free online office suite designed for SkyDrive users. It offers 7GB of free cloud storage for your documents. The app lets you create or upload Word, Excel, PowerPoint as well as OneNote files to SkyDrive and edit them. It allows the documents to be shared and you can authorize people to edit the same too. Access control is taken a step ahead with MS developing a feature that allows you to set the password for certain users to get their hands on the doc.

4. Photoshop Express
Category: Photo editing software

Adobe Photoshop Express is suitable for those who are looking for basic image adjustment and manipulations. You get basic editing options like crop, resize and rotate. Adjustments available are white balance, soft focus, and highlight option. Various picture enhancing effects add to the desirability the software. Once done, images can be saved to your computer or shared on Flickr, Facebook or Picasa.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 is the best image editing software available today. However it burns a hole in your pocket with a price tag of  51,597. It allows you to edit advanced features like type styles, vector layers, tilt shift effects, HDR editing and search layers.

5. Pixlr
Category: Photo editing software

Pixlr facilitates creating a new image, uploading pictures from your computer. You can open any image from a URL using this software. You get all the usual tools as well as support for layers much like Adobe Photoshop. Filter effects, levels, curves and exposure controls are an added advantage. Once the editing is done, we can even save the image to our hard disk or upload it to the web using Flickr or Picasa.

6. YouTube Editor
Category: Video editing software

A powerful online editor by YouTube lets you trim videos and merge multiple videos. It aids to add transitions, stabilize video as well. YouTube Editor facilitates adding a soundtrack of your choice too. It also automatically suggests corrections and effects if your videos are not up to the mark.

In contrast, Adobe’s Premiere Elements 12 costing  6,390 is a capable solution if you like to edit a lot of home movies. It has features like built-in video tutorials, automatic video correction tools that are designed for the first time users or home users.

7. Filelab
Category: Video editing software

Filelab is offers all the basic editing controls to trim, cut and merge videos. However, it works better with Google Chrome and you need to download a free plug-in first. After doing so, you get support for multiple video formats and HD resolution. Filelab provides 50 transition effects along with an option to overlay one video on top of the other. What’s more, it lets you define transparency, insert audio tracks to the video and then watch a live preview in your browser window itself.

8. Speech to text
Category: Innovative software

Instead of using expensive dictation software, you can just visit www.talktyper.com. However the catch is, you need to browse through Google Chrome as it doesn't work too well on other browsers. All you have to do is, to check whether your microphone is working and click on the green microphone button. You can start the dictation soon after and it is converted into text. It works pretty well if you speak clearly and text is obtained almost instantaneously.

9. PDF Tools
Category: Innovative software

If you want to remove restrictions on PDFs, a bunch of tools can be found at ‘www.pdfunlock.com’. The tools are designed such that they are easy to use. The website,‘www.pdfmerge.com’ as the name indicates helps to join multiple files into one. In contrary, there is another site named ‘www.splitpdf.com’ to detach joined PDFs. In order to add password protection to your PDF file, you can make use of ‘www.pdfprotect.net’. There is a website called ‘www.pdfaid.com’ that lets you choose from a variety of tools for watermarking, image extraction, rotation, compression and conversion. The only constraint is that it will leave the website’s logo on the document.

10. 3D House Planner
Category: Innovative software

Homestyler is a free and easy-to-use house planner available on www.homestyler.com. Homestyler lets you easily create a layout and add furniture. Landscaping and experimenting with paints and textures can also be done. It is fun to see how different lighting brings a new aura your room. You can easily see your imagination in 3D and show it to friends too. It is ideally used when you are building a new house. It comes in handy even if you are just re-arranging the furniture or re-painting.