In case you have never seen, Stardock Fences is an excellent desktop organization application for Windows. Fences help you in managing your cluttered desktop by letting you organize and store your icons and folders in “Fences”. As much as it helps in finding right application and files on desktop easily, Fences’ biggest benefit is that it makes your desktop feel minimal and clean without you having to do all the dirty work. The caveat of Stardock Fences? It’s price. Here are 5 Best Free Stardock Fences Alternatives that you should defiantly try.
Nimi Places
The first on our Stardock Fences Alternative list is a lightweight and free desktop organizer Nimi Places. It lets you organize your icons and files into customizable containers. Once you have made a container, you can change its name, add colored labels and create different rules to automatically do some tasks at predefined times.
NImi Places lets you easily label files and shortcuts
Apart from these features, you can change icon side, see thumbnails and even change container themes if you want to. If all you want is a minimal, no-frills alternative to Stardock fences, Nimi Places is defiantly worth checking out.
Virtual Desktops
It’s not exactly a Stardock Fences Alternative, but for many people, Virtua Desktops are very helpful in managing a cluttered desktop. Windows 10 is the first Windows version to have built-in support for Virtual Desktops and with just a few clicks, you can start organizing all your open Windows into different desktops. For example, I keep all my social websites and tools open in a virtual desktop while I work on OneNote and Google Scholar in another one.
Virtual desktop are built in onto Windows 10
To create a Virtual Desktop on Windows 10, just click on Task View icon on the taskbar and then click on New Desktop button.
If you are on an older version of Windows, you can try Dexpot, it is a bit complex, but this free app is much more powerful.
Fences
Well, no list of Free Stardock Fences Alternatives should be complete without mentioning Fences. Yes, the latest version of Fences costs $10 after a 30-day trial. But, you can still download the first version of Fences for free. Sure, the new versions some more features and a bit better user interfaces. But if you don’t need these features, the free version of Fences should be perfectly serviceable for you.
Fences 1.0.1
As an added bonus, this version of Fences should be less resource hungry.
RocketDock
RocketDock is not exactly a desktop icon manager, instead, RocketDock is a powerful icon dock that mimics most features from macOS’ dock. You can add shortcuts to files, folder, and programs just by dragging them into the dock. RocketDock also has many useful extensions that can increase its functionality, for example, you can easily add a real-time analog clock to the dock. Heck, if you want, you can directly minimize your window to the dock, freeing you from using Windows taskbar most of the time.
RocketDock is free and there is a good community of users who have made skins and icon pack compatible with the dock. If you want a Stardock Fences alternative to just organize your desktop in a better way, RocketDock is definitely worth a download.
ViPad
Just like Nimi and Fences, ViPad is also a container based organization system. The difference is that Vipad only uses a single container. To further let you organize icons and files, you can create tabs inside the container.
You can store files, web links, music and even video files inside these tabs if you want to. These tabs can be searched easily too, and you just need to drag and drop to make any changes. Aside from these features, ViPad has deep customization options, you can change the icon size as you need, and you can also download many custom icon pack from its official website.
ViPad is completely free and open source.
Sideslide
Available only for Windows, Sideslide is one of the popular Free Stardock Fences alternatives. Unlike Fences and Virtual Desktops, Sideslide’s working is completely focused on creating and organizing “Workplaces”. Once you have made one, you can easily add shortcuts, documents and even RSS news feeds within.
Sideslide is very customizable
You can make as many workplaces as you like. Whenever you need all data in a workplace is easily available with a click. Sideslice is a very powerful and flexible application. You can add tags to links, add multiple RSS feeds and custom themes to these workplaces easily. Additionally, you can run it as a portable application meaning you don’t need to install it, just open the .exe file whenever you need and will launch.
What are your Best Free Stardock Fences Alternatives?
Which of the Free Stardock Fences Alternatives do you use? Do you know about some other good app that I forgot to mention? Share with me in the comments below…
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