5 Essential Windows Apps Everyone Should Be Using In 2025 – BGR

Windows has access to a vast selection of free, paid, open-source, and proprietary applications. While you can find many of these in the bundled Microsoft Store, others are scattered across the different corners of the web. This makes app discovery slightly harder for even the savviest of users. As a result, many of us often end up using the same set of popular apps, such as Chrome, VLC, and WinRAR. However, there are so many more exciting and helpful apps that you can install on your Windows PC to take its performance to the next level or replace native functions, like a file explorer on steroids.

So, let’s take a look at five gems from the massive Windows app universe that should be installed on every PC. Our recommendations are suitable for most Windows users and enhance the operating system’s experience by either adding new functionality or by offering a better way of doing things than what’s available in Windows.

The built-in search on Windows isn’t the best and can take ages to find files. It’s also slow to index and extremely resource-heavy. An excellent replacement for this is Everything, which is a free-to-download app from Voidtools. It’s significantly faster than Windows search while being resource-efficient and easy to use. If you remember the file name, it’ll barely take a second to find your file.

Unlike Windows search, it only indexes the file and folder names, which makes the indexing process much faster, and the company claims it can index a million files in about a minute. Although it doesn’t index file content, you can specifically ask the app to find files featuring specific content, but that will take a lot of time as it has to index and search everything. Besides your computer’s contents, you can ask Everything to index your mapped network drives to search through them. Moreover, the app supports Boolean operators and wildcards for advanced searches.

Another useful addition to your Windows PC is Flow Launcher. It’s a more versatile alternative to Mac’s Spotlight Search for Windows that can help supercharge your Windows workflow by reducing your reliance on the Start Menu and File Explorer. It’s basically a quick launcher and search tool at its core, which you can trigger with a simple keyboard shortcut, such as Alt + Space, but it can do much more. It allows you to open apps, search for files, settings, bookmarks, and the web, run shell and select system commands, perform basic mathematical calculations, and more.

Interestingly, if you already use Everything for Windows search, Flow Launcher can leverage Everything’s index while giving you file and folder search results. You can also customize its look and expand its functionality using hundreds of community-made plugins. Some of the popular plugins include Steam search, Obsidian Notes, and GitHub notifications. Most importantly, Flow Launcher is free and open-source.

If you’re someone who frequently has to deal with archives, a good archive manager is an essential utility. While Windows 11 includes basic archiving and unarchiving capabilities, you can greatly expand them with NanaZip. It’s an open-source app that’s forked from 7-Zip, which is another popular archive management tool. It essentially wraps 7-Zip in an interface that’s designed for a modern Windows experience. It’s also free to download and use, and available via the Microsoft Store. Nanazip supports more archive formats in both creation and extraction than the built-in Windows solution.

For example, you can use it to create ZIP, 7z, TAR, GZ, XZ, BZIP2, and other archive formats, and it can extract RAR, ISO, WIM, and many others. It also has better encryption protocols, a dark mode, and context menu integration. Moreover, it’s faster than Windows at creating and extracting larger archives. In other highlights, it can split archives, select different compression levels, and more.

Microsoft PowerToys is a set of tools and utilities designed for power users who are looking to get more out of their Windows experience. However, it can be an excellent addition to any Windows install, as it gives you immediate access to several utilities for which you would otherwise need separate apps. Some of its most useful tools include Command Palette — a quick launcher similar to Flow Launcher or Mac’s Spotlight, PowerRename, which lets you rename files in bulk, and FancyZones, which lets you create and customize window layouts for snapping windows.

There is also Peek for a quick preview of a file and Always on Top to keep a window pinned on top of other windows. Moreover, you get utilities like Advanced Paste, Image Resizer, Text Extractor, Color Picker, Screen Ruler, and Light Switch, which are pretty self-explanatory. There are many more such utilities and advanced options to help you increase your productivity and improve your workflow. PowerToys can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store for free.

Many of us use web apps on a daily basis, and it can quickly become a chore to manage them across browser tabs and dedicated containers on Windows. Fortunately, there is an app called Ferdium, which solves this problem by giving you a one-stop shop for all your web apps. It’s a free-to-download open-source tool, built as a fork of a similar app called Franz, which is focused on chat apps. 

Ferdium provides you with a single window, and you can seamlessly switch between different web apps in the same window, removing the need to deal with multiple tabs and open apps. It also supports using multiple instances of the same web apps for different accounts, workspaces for easy app management, and custom services if yours is not in their database. Additionally, there is a built-in To-do list panel and a password lock for security. In other highlights, Ferdium gives you the choice of creating an account to sync your services across devices or using it locally on a single machine.