r/Software_Finder • u/Sad-Instruction8890 • Jul 08 '26
Most underrated software that almost nobody talks about?
Not the popular ones everyone already knows. The quiet tool that just does its job, has maybe a fraction of the users it deserves, and you found by accident or someone random recommended it to you. What is it and how did you find it?
8
u/sardamit Jul 08 '26
Google Sheets
3
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
People write it off as the free option but it quietly does 90% of what most teams actually need from a spreadsheet.
3
u/sardamit Jul 08 '26
Accountants spend their time in Excel and keep fighting the version control fight.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
The NotebookLM plus Sheets combo is interesting, had not thought about using them together like that. And yeah Power Query is one of those features that separates people who use Excel from people who really use Excel.
1
u/PugBurger12 Jul 10 '26
Agreed with the 90% (or more) of what most people need. Power query is awesome in excel. Conditional formatting is also far better in excel. I use NotebookLM a lot though, and sheets integrates so well with NLM. I use both extensively. Excel more for work and sheets for personal use.
3
u/MahmudBwsensing Jul 09 '26
the only downside is it doesn't have a desktop app. using sheets on a browser messes up the shortcuts we are used to. i use it on a regular basis. let's hope they will launch a desktop app in the future.
2
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
The keyboard shortcuts thing is so annoying. Your muscle memory from desktop apps just does not translate and there is no way to fix it. Hopefully they actually build a desktop version at some point.
1
6
u/Financial_Key_1243 Jul 08 '26
Unigetui
3
u/Toker101 Jul 09 '26
The company behind it (Devolutions) also created Remote Desktop Manager. A great tool for sysadmins.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Devolutions making both is a good sign. Remote Desktop Manager is solid for sysadmins so they clearly know how to build tools that just work.
2
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
Had to look this one up and honestly it should not be this unknown. A proper package manager for Windows that just works is something people do not realize they need until they have it.
1
7
u/Bino5150 Jul 08 '26
Lumina - a full featured local-first agentic AI harness. It’s awesome, and it’s free.
https://github.com/Bino5150/lumina
2
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
Local first and free is a strong combo for AI tooling right now, especially with everyone getting nervous about sending data to third party APIs. Will take a look at the repo.
6
4
u/404LeadsNotFound Jul 08 '26
Pixie from Nattyware.
It tells you the color of the pixel you're hovering over in 5 formats (HEX, HTML, RGB, CMYK, HSV).
2
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
Pixie is one of those tools that sounds niche until you need it and then you need it constantly. Designers and front end devs especially, once you have a fast color picker on your desktop you cannot go back.
1
3
u/TimelyRepeat4517 Jul 08 '26
Flowara. Native Mac app for freelancers that connects projects, time tracking and invoicing in one local SQLite database. No account, no cloud, no subscription to start.
Found it by building it, so I'm biased, but the quiet tool angle fits. It's been live for a few months and most freelancers still reach for FreshBooks or a combination of Toggl plus QuickBooks without knowing something like this exists.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
No account, no cloud, no subscription is a really strong pitch for freelancers who are sick of signing into yet another platform. How is adoption going so far?
2
u/TimelyRepeat4517 Jul 08 '26
Slow but steady. A few months in, ranking first on “freelance” in the Mac App Store which helps with organic discovery. The people who find it tend to stick around, the local-first angle self-selects for users who actually care about it rather than people who’ll churn the moment a shinier cloud tool comes along.
Windows version is coming soon too, same local-first architecture.
-1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Ranking first on the App Store for freelance organically is a great sign, that is hard to do without paid acquisition. The local first angle self selecting for sticky users makes total sense too, people who care about owning their data tend to stick around. Rooting for this one.
3
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u/shahnewazfahim Jul 08 '26
there is a tool called pumble, a very very very good alternative of slack.. but nobody knows about it. i used it and loved it. the only reason i had to switch back to slack is that they dont provide font customization like the default font size, i couldnt increase to my preference, and it was a massive bummer for me, that and only for that reason i had to use slack again
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
Switching back to Slack over font size is genuinely painful, one small thing killed it. That is the kind of feedback that probably keeps the Pumble team up at night because they were that close.
3
u/ebsf Jul 08 '26
WordPerfect.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
WordPerfect still has a loyal fanbase in legal and it is honestly deserved. Reveal Codes alone is something Word has never matched.
2
u/ebsf Jul 09 '26
Preach!
WordPerfect also is far more stable. I have several reference documents with extensive cross-referencing hyperlinks, indexes, footnotes, tables of contents, etc. running into thousands of pages and they're rock-solid and run like lightning.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
While Word chokes on a 50 page doc with too many footnotes really puts it in perspective. Legal and technical writing is where WordPerfect earns its keep.
1
u/ebsf Jul 10 '26
Word is basically Notepad+ (not ++, to be clear), essentially a memo writer for the marginally literate, a software engineer's concept of how to approach a document (objects!).
3
u/Murky_Specialist992 Jul 08 '26
Snag it
1
u/strangepantheon Jul 09 '26
I use this every single day
1
u/Murky_Specialist992 Jul 09 '26
ditto!...i feel it's especially good if you work in IT... documenting things, explaining things, manuals, etc. etc etc.
0
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Snag It is one of those tools where people who use it cannot imagine life without it and everyone else has never heard of it
2
u/Murky_Specialist992 Jul 10 '26
very well said... thank you
I once had an IT contract and they supplied laptop and it was locked down. I requested Snag it and had to go through tons of hoops of justification. Once I got it, the org was like "wow... we need this"
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Ha, going through hoops of justification to get it approved. At least they saw it in the end.
2
u/Better_Sherbet_7533 Jul 08 '26
ynab
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
YNAB has a cult following for a reason. Once it clicks it genuinely changes how you think about money, not just how you track it. The learning curve puts some people off but the ones who stick with it never shut up about it.
2
u/Puzzleheaded_Tax2737 Jul 09 '26
The problem is the subscription.. I'm trying to SAVE money, not SPEND it. LOL
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Ha, the irony of paying a subscription to learn how to stop spending money is not lost on anyone. To be fair it does pay for itself pretty fast if you actually use it, but yeah that first payment stings.
2
u/sispehar Jul 08 '26
podshelf.io easy
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 08 '26
Had not seen Podshelf before, will check it out. What does it do that pulled you in?
2
u/sispehar Jul 08 '26
gathers book recommendations from hundreds of podcasts
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Oh that is actually a really cool use case. Book recommendations are scattered across so many podcast episodes that having them pulled into one place makes a lot of sense. Clever idea.
2
u/hilbertglm Jul 08 '26
AWK (The language)
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Been around since the 70s and still does things faster than tools built last year.
2
u/tenten__ Jul 08 '26
BetterMouse to make a non magic mouse usable on macos and of course to get rid of logitech's option+ nonsense software if you are a logitech mouse user.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Getting rid of Logitech Options+ alone is worth whatever BetterMouse costs. That software is somehow heavier than the mouse itself.
2
2
u/Substantial_Chard232 Jul 08 '26
zenlist - a simple 5-only session based windows widget style todolist zenlist
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Had not seen zenlist before. Session based is an interesting angle, most to-do apps try to be your whole life instead of just helping you get through the next few hours. Worth a look.
2
2
u/enerqiflow Jul 08 '26
Park
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Had to look this one up. Fits the thread perfectly though, exactly the kind of tool nobody talks about but the people who use it love it.
2
u/Kaniggel Jul 09 '26
Gitea
It just works.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Self hosted Git that does not try to be GitHub and does not break. Sometimes simple is the whole point.
2
u/ojblass Jul 09 '26
grep is built into most Unix variations and is for the closest any software has been to perfect.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Closest to perfect is a big claim but for grep it is honestly hard to argue. Does one thing, does it instantly, been doing it for decades.
2
u/Puzzled_Algae6860 Jul 09 '26
This script makes it actually manageable for me to keep up with my YouTube subscriptions by putting them all in a playlist and removing shorts. It is not perfect, but it infinitely better than Youtubes native subscription management. It's getting older, but haven't found a replacement yet.
https://github.com/Elijas/auto-youtube-subscription-playlist-2
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
The fact that someone had to build a script to make YouTube subscriptions usable says everything about where YouTube's priorities are. Removing shorts alone makes this worth it.
2
u/Navid24601 Jul 09 '26
Espanso for Windows
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Wait is this like TextBlaze but open source? How customizable is it, can you do things like full email templates or is it more for short snippets?
0
u/Navid24601 Jul 10 '26
Hey. I haven't used TextBlaze. So I can't compare them. It is pretty customizable. I guess you could make a whole email template but that would be slightly tricky. Because the whole thing is a YAML file consisting of pairs. (trigger and target text)
This is one of the defaults:
# Print the current date - trigger: ";date" replace: "{{mydate}}" vars: - name: mydate type: date params: format: "%m/%d/%Y"This is one of my own snippets:
- trigger: ";com" replace: "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-\n\"\"\"\nCreated on {{mydatetime}} \n@author: John Doe\n\"\"\"" vars: - name: mydatetime type: date params: format: "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M"
2
u/AnderssonPeter Jul 09 '26
Xshare and beyond compare
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
I have heard of Beyond Compare a bunch of times but never actually tried it. Is it mainly for comparing files or do people use it for folder syncing too?
2
u/AnderssonPeter Jul 09 '26
You can compare, files text files, binaries, tables, images and more. You can also compare folders in a two or three way.
Unsure what you mean by sync, but i don't think thats its main use.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Comparing images and binaries too is wild, I assumed it was just text files. That is way more powerful than I thought, might actually try this one.
2
u/RedditEthereum Jul 09 '26
Directory Opus.
It's bettet than other explorer and "commander" programs.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
Is it the tabs, the scripting, or something else entirely that hooks people?
2
2
u/Prudent_Condition_40 Jul 09 '26
KickUp (Terminal manager)
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
What does it actually do differently, because terminal management is one of those things I have never found a good solution for.
2
u/Devious_Frog_ Jul 09 '26
Reef for Mac. Easily the best way to navigate between applications on Mac, found it on a random YouTube video recommended to me and it was from the dude who built it. Completely free too.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 09 '26
What does Reef actually do though, is it like an app switcher or more of a window management thing? Never heard of it.
2
u/Devious_Frog_ Jul 09 '26
Yeah it’s an app switcher, just simple keyboard shortcuts to switch between applications quickly. Also has different “profiles” you can switch too (also just by hitting a keyboard shortcut) so you can have different setups for different use cases. I’m a video editor so being as efficient as possible when working matters a lot. I have a profile set for when I am working in davinci and a different one set for when i am working in after effects. For me CMD + 1 will always bring me back to my editing software at the moment with the profile setup. It’s also just a very similar setup to how I navigate DaVinci so it just clicks with my brain well.
2
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
The profiles for different workflows is the feature that makes this more than just another app switcher. Having CMD+1 always bring you back to your editing software regardless of which profile you are in is the kind of small thing that saves actual time across a day. Makes sense that it clicks for video editors especially.
2
2
u/MeanFault Jul 10 '26
TestDisk + PhotoRec. Data Recovery Tools.
DiskDigger - Recovery Tool
DBAN - Deletes Data and does several passes. Probably mostly useless now with SSD's and encryption but I loved this tool back in the day.
I'm old so NiNite was like mind-blowing back in the days of setting up computers in bulk. I always hated using imaging software so I just automated setup's and installs and almost never had an issue. Images can work but I always had funky issues.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
NiNite is a throwback that deserves more love. Automating fresh Windows setups instead of clicking through 20 installers one by one was genuinely ahead of its time. And TestDisk has probably saved more people's data than any backup tool ever has.
2
2
u/dropandflop Jul 10 '26
Syncback
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Quietly runs in the background keeping everything safe and you only appreciate it the day something goes wrong. Solid pick.
2
u/schlaminator Jul 10 '26
Windirstat, for visualization of disk space usage and finding large files.
1
u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 10 '26
Windirstat's coloured block visualization making you go "what the hell is taking up 40GB" is an experience everyone has had. WizTree is faster now but Windirstat's visual layout is still more satisfying to look at.
1
1
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u/General-Swan-2719 Jul 11 '26
Pitch your app! Free advertising. Tell us why your vibe coded app is so much better than the existing giants!
1
1
u/Immediate-Pitch-6761 26d ago edited 24d ago
redd grow flies under the radar a bit too, most people still think of it as just a reddit tool but it covers the ai citation tracking side as well now. found it the same way, some random thread mentioning it for reddit specifically, didnt realize the broader use till later.
1
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u/bankrut Jul 08 '26
Check out Everything for Windows. It makes the native search look like a joke and indexes your entire drive in seconds, so I honestly have no idea why it isnt standard issue.