IT professionals keep technology running smoothly at companies around the world so everyone else can do their job. But often, these hard-working, computer-savvy professionals are tasked with fixing everything and anything electronic, with little or no budget for software.
Thankfully, some helpful IT tools are available for free. But not all no-cost IT software is created equal. With freeware tools, sometimes you get what you pay for and busy IT workers don’t have time to individually test every application to separate the good apps from the not so good.
Great free tools for IT professionals
Often, the best way to find out about free IT tools and utilities is from others who have hands-on experience. And over the years, IT pros in Spiceworks have recommended many high-quality, free software tools to each other. We combed through many “best of” posts and reviews in Spiceworks to create this list of IT tools that are either completely free for commercial use or provide a free version that can serve a legitimate business purpose with an option to upgrade if more functionality is needed.
Free Backup Software
- Veeam Endpoint Backup Free — free for unlimited Windows-based desktops and laptops, this software can help anyone back up PCs to external hard drives or networked storage.
- Veeam Backup Free Edition — highly-rated virtualization backup software for creating ad-hoc backups of VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines
- Bacula — a network-based open source solution that can help sysadmins back up, recover, and verify data. Bacula claims they are the most popular open source backup program.
- Cobain Backup — freeware that can help you schedule incremental backups of files and directories
- Unitrends Enterprise Backup Free — free server backup virtual appliance that can help you protect your small business or home environment for up to 1TB of data
Free Antivirus for Businesses
- Comodo Free Internet Security — A free security suite that includes antivirus, software firewall, and host intrusion prevention protection for home or business use.
- Avast! Business Basic Antivirus — Free for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), a cross-platform security solution that includes antivirus protection, threat scanning, and integrated browser protection.
- Microsoft Security Essentials — antivirus from Microsoft that small businesses can install on up to 10 devices for free
Free Text Editor
- Notepad++ — a highly-rated free text editor for Windows that supports syntax highlighting for many file formats that’s available under the GNU General Public License (GPL), meaning it’s free to use by anyone, including businesses.
Free Boot CD and Utilities
If your operating system won’t boot due to hard disk problems or a corrupted master boot record (MBR), boot discs or bootable USB sticks can help you recover files or figure out what’s wrong.
- Ultimate Boot CD — a “completely free” boot disc that includes many diagnostic, disk, boot management, and benchmarking tools. Many IT pros consider it an essential tool in the IT pro arsenal.
- Knoppix — a fully functional Linux distribution / live CD that’s bootable from a USB drive, making it useful if you need to rescue data
- Hiren’s Boot CD — another bootable CD that includes many tools for data recovery, disk imaging, and general computer troubleshooting
Free Disk Utilities
Whether you need to image a disk, permanently delete files, or blow away an entire hard drive, these free tools have you covered.
- DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke) — DBAN is one of the best wipe tools for hard drive disposal. If you need certification of erasure for compliance reporting, however, you should upgrade to the paid version
- File Shredder — a free utility that can help you permanently delete Windows files and folders without leaving any trace, so they can’t be recovered later.
- Disk Wipe — a free Windows application for permanent data destruction that is “free for personal or commercual use, without any restrictions.
- CloneZilla — a bootable disk imaging and cloning utility similar to other paid tools. Best of all, Clonezilla is free and open source.
- IMGBurn — a lightweight application that can help you burn CDs, DVDs, HD DVDs, or Blu-rays for free.
- FOG Computer Cloner — a Linux-based, free and open-source computer imaging solution for Windows that works via TFTP and PXE. No boot disks required, you can deploy images to multiple systems over the network.
Free File Utilities
- 7zip — file compression software that’s free and open source and can be used on any computer in a commercial organization
- FreeFileSync — a GUI-based, rule-based file syncing tool that can help you perform complex sync operations. The tool is open-source and works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X folders.
- WinDirStat — free software that provides disk usage statistics and cleanup tools for Microsoft Windows so you can see which files and directories are hogging disk space and do something about it
Free File Transfer Utilities
- Filezilla — a popular, open source FTP client and FTP server that’s free, open source, and distributed under the GNU General Public License
- Martin Prikryl WinSCP — an open source SFTP client and FTP client for Windows known for it’s distinct lack of bloatware that can facilitate secure file transfers between computers
Free Virtualization Software
- Oracle VM VirtualBox — a very useful open-source (GNU license for the base package) hypervisor that runs on top of your existing OS. VirtualBox runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris hosts and supports a huge range of guest OSes including major Windows releases, Linux, OS/2, OpenBSD, DOS, OSX, and more. While free, additional features in the optional extension pack need to be licensed for commercial use.
- Disk2VHD — a freeware tool that helps you do physical to virtual conversions (P2V) by generating a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file for use with.
- vCenter Converter — freeware that allows you to create VMware virtual machines by converting from Windows or Linux physical machines, or other VM formats.
Microsoft Management Tools
- Windows SysInternals — a collection of advanced system utilities for designed to help IT professionals manage, troubleshoot, and diagnose their Windows systems. (Reviews for Autoruns, Process Monitor, BgInfo, Active Directory Explorer)
- PowerShell — Microsoft’s highly-rated and powerful, .NET-based command line scripting and automation framework allows you to automate numerous processes and simplify systems management, saving sysadmins lots of valuable time.
Free Network Monitoring and Management Tools
- Connectivity Dashboard — monitor and view speed to their applications. Figure out if there’s an issue with the ISP, application, or something else onsite with this network troubleshooting tool.
- PDQ Deploy — this time-saving tool helps you deploy patches and common applications to multiple systems across your network. According to IT pros, the free version provides plenty of features if you don’t want to upgrade to the pro version
- The Dude — free, cross-platform network monitor application that can scan and map your network and alert you if there are any problems
- Wireshark — an open-source, multi-platform packet analyzer tool you can use to scan network traffic.
- Spiceworks Network Monitor — free, Windows-based monitoring software that provides real-time status and alerts for your critical devices including servers, switches, SNMP devices, services, and more.
- Nagios — free, cross-platform, open source software for network, systems, and infrastructure monitoring with built-in alerting.
- Cacti — an open-source, multi-tenant network monitor and graphing tool for Unix or Windows. It uses industry standards like SNMP to poll and graph info on CPU, bandwidth utilization, memory and more.
- Zabbix — an open-source, Linux-based, real-time network monitoring system for various network services, servers, and hardware. It can monitor up to 100,000 devices and provide up to 1,000,000 metrics.
- PRTG — an all-in-one monitoring solution for Windows, which continuously collects status information from IT infrastructure and informs you about malfunctions and allows you to pro-actively reduce downtime. The free version is limited to monitoring 100 sensors / switch ports.
Free Software Firewall + IDS / IPS
Numerous free, software-based firewalls can help protect your business from external threats and some can even analyze incoming traffic for intrusions.
- pfSense — a free, open-source, FreeBSD-based software firewall distribution that can also be deployed as a router, wireless access point, DHCP server, DNS server, or VPN endpoint and with integrations, can also serve as an IDS or IPS solution.
- Untangle — a software-based next generation firewall platform with an intuitive GUI interface that’s popular among IT professionals. The free version includes firewall, IPS, and some web filtering functionality, although you can pay to unlock additional features
- Snort — free and open source network intrusion detection and prevention software used by many IT departments to secure their network
- IPCop — A Linux-based, open source firewall that’s geared towards small office and is a favorite among some IT pros
- Smoothwall Express — A Linux-based open source firewall solution that’s been around since 2000, and has an easy-to-use web interva
Free Network Scanners
- Advanced IP Scanner — Windows freeware that can locate all computers on your network quickly and allows for some remote control of devices via RDP and Radmin
- Angry IP Scanner — a cross-platform, open source network scanner that can help you quickly find devices on your network. Available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X
- Spiceworks Inventory — comprehensive network management freeware for Windows that provides a one-stop shop for cataloging devices, customized reporting and alerting, and software tracking
- NMAP — a cross-platform, open source network security scanner that can help you create a map of your network. Nmap can scan for exposed ports and services, which can help you identify vulnerabilities and make your network more secure.
Free Help Desk Software
- Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk — help desk software with nothing to install. Build, a multi-user help desk with no limits so you can tackle tickets and problems quickly, and get back on with your day.
Free Remote Desktop / Remote Control Software
- Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) — included in most Server, Pro, and Enterprise versions of Windows for decades, RDP allows IT pros to remotely control computers from afar, although it doesn’t include some of the screen mirroring functionality that third-party remote desktop assistance software does.
- VNC variants — freeware that allows you to mirror someone else’s screen on yours remotely and control the mouse and keyboard too. Very useful for IT professionals who need to manage and debug many PCs.• Tight VNC — available for Windows and Unix
• UltraVNC — available for Windows
Free Office Productivity Software
- OpenOffice — An open source, multi-platform office suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations, and more.
Free Web-based Network Tools from Spiceworks
- Subnet Calculator — does the difficult math of subnetting for you, so you can more easily divide an IP network into smaller subnets, displaying subnet masks, IP ranges, and CIDR notations graphically.
- Port Scanner and Tester — Quickly find out which ports at an IP address or hostname are exposed to the internet
- IP Lookup — Learn more about an unknown IP address or hostname like the ISP’s domain, organization, owner, and location.
- Blacklist Check and IP Reputation — Check if an IP address or domain is on an email or website blacklist, so you an protect your network and users from threats.
Web-based Speed Tests
- Fast.com — a super fast way to check download speed in terms of megabits per second (Mbps)
- Speedtest.net — test ping, download, and upload speed using this free online site
Free Photo and Video Editors
- GIMP — The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a powerful open source, cross platform (Windows, Linux, OS X) image editor similar to Photoshop that is free to use for businesses.
- Camstudio — screen recording software for Windows that’s “completely 100% free for your personal and commercial projects.”
- Windows Movie Maker — Free video editing software for Windows from Microsoft that allows you to splice videos, add text, transitions, voice-overs, and more.
