Best Free Online Applications and Services

Online applications (also known as web applications or webware) are getting more popular, particularly when broadband Internet access has become more common and readily available to more users. With online applications and services, you do not need to download and install them into your computer for using them—you just need to open up a browser and access them online.

Not only that you can save harddisk space as they do not need to be installed, but also you can work with files that are saved online from any computer anywhere, without the need to carry a storage device even a USB stick around with you.

Besides, you don't have to worry about different operating systems as these applications and services are cross-platform, running in your browser as a client. Neither do you need to keep updating your software versions, as you will get any new software updates and bug fixes automatically whenever you access them.

Like to use them? Here we have compiled a list for best free online applications and services—click on related links or product logos and you can start using them right away. The list contains items grouped by categories, each of the items has a brief description with a link, where applicable, to a review by our editors.

Best Free Office Suite

• Google Docs offers a suite of Web-based productivity applications including documents, presentation, spreadsheet and form in a simple folder within a file organizational system. It allows for users to easily create, share and edit files in real time online, or upload an existing file into the system.

• Office Web Apps "offers free online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft OneNote. Even better they are giving users 25 GB of free online storage to store their documents on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service." (Review) See also Windows Live SkyDrive.

Best Free PDF Tools

• 7-PDF Web Portal converts a wide range of documents into PDFs. You can set a page range and image compression for the conversion. Just choose a file to upload, click Convert to PDF button and a PDF file is downloaded automatically for you. (Review)

• PDFescape, a PDF editor with form filler and designer. You can add text, links and sticky notes, whiteout contents, draw shapes, add form fields or fill up forms. Maximum file size 2 MB or 50 pages per file for free accounts. (Review)

• PDFHammer a PDF editor to visually rearrange, reorder and delete pages, merge PDFs, set PDF metadata or protect PDF files with a password. Easy to use—just upload, edit and save the files back to your computer.

• ILovePDF, a nice tool to merge or split pdf files easily. You can merge up to 10 PDF files in one, extract or split pages in a PDF, subject to a maximum file size of 8 MB.

• Nitro PDF offers free online conversion from PDF to Word/Excel via PDF-to-Word Converter and PDF-to-Excel Converter. Both are helpful and easy to use—choose the file you need, click the Convert button and check your inbox for the converted files. See also Free File Converter.

• Web2PDF lets you convert any webpage into a PDF document and save it to your computer with various options such as setting paper size. Simply paste the URL and click the button, or you can drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar so you don’t have to revisit the website. (Review) See also PrintWhatYouLike.

Best Free Document Viewer and Sharing

• Scribd, a great tool to upload and view documents of various formats in full screen, mark them private and accessible by a specific URL, share them with millions of readers, or embed the viewer into a website or blog.

• SlideShare, search and download Powerpoint presentations from the web, or upload and share your slides, word or pdf documents publicly or privately. You can also view slides in full screen, or read transcripts and outlines.

Best Free Document Collaboration

• Crocodoc, a convenient tool to collaborate on PDFs, Word and Powerpoint documents. You can highlight, add or strike out text, and add a note to a document shared by an URL. Adding password protection is limited to paid-for accounts.

Best Free Calendar

• Google Calendar lets you quickly schedule events and keep track of appointments. You can share your schedule with your co-workers, family and friends, sync to your mobile phone's built-in calendar, get notified by email or have a text message sent right to your mobile phone.

Best Free Multiple Timezone World Clock

• TimeAndDate.com "is the most versatile I have found from the many sites available. It allows you to see the time and date of virtually any city in every country and set for a custom clock with all the time zones you care about." (Review)

• Time Zone Genius displays up-to-date time zone information for cities in the world. You can check current times for cities you choose, or find out offset from GMT, daylight savings time adjustments, sunrise and sunset times of a city.

Best Free Timesheet / Timer / Alarm Clock

• Time Online "offers Time Sheet recording, reporting and invoicing with no restrictions on the number of projects or users. Invoicing is built in so there's no need to have Excel installed." (Review)

• SlimTimer makes time tracking easier on your tasks or sharing them with your co-workers. You can print reports with selected report type, date range and other options, or save reports to your computer in csv format.

• Online-Stopwatch, a simple yet powerful timer for stopping watch and counting down, featuring full screen, split lap timer, egg timer, and even Custom Countdown to make your own countdown timer.

• Kuku Klok, a well designed alarm clock to wake you up with the sound of Classic Clock, Cockerel or other choices. Once loaded, it will work even if the Internet connection goes down.

• Klokoo waits you up at the alarm time you set for today or tomorrow. Easy to set up—just select a time, click set or stop the alarm clock with a selectable sound.

Best Free Notepad / Notebook / Notes Organizer

• SimpleText.ws, a notepad for you to write, save and sync snippets of text easily and quickly in a clean and simple interface. This service uses Google Accounts for signing in.

• Zoho Notebook does an amazing amount of things—you can save text, image, audio and video objects, aggregate them in one place, keep track of changes and share a whole book, page or just an object on a page by granting read/write permissions.

• Evernote "is an outstanding product that provides you with an excellent solution to manage notes and snippets of information. You can create notes or cut-and-paste them with text and images." Desktop software is for syncing notes across computers if needed. (Review)

Best Free Reminder / To-Do List

• Remember The Milk lets you organize tasks into various lists, set due dates, postpone or repeat tasks, add notes, print lists and so on. It integrates with Gmail and other services with add-ons.

• Toodledo allows you to add and organize your tasks by folders, contexts, due dates and priorities, share your tasks with coworkers, friends or family. You can add multiple and repeated tasks, notes and tags, import and export your data or customize the service to suit your needs.

• TeuxDeux gives you a week overview of what needs to do in a clean user interface. It's easy to use—type in a box to add a task, move it to another day by drag and drop, or click to check off a done one or remove it.

Best Free Sticky Note (see also Private Note)

• Postica, a sticky note which is clean in design and easy to use, with a quick layout, filter, printer-friendly view, and allows you to attach a file to your sticky note too.

Best Free Meeting Scheduler

• Doodle, a brilliant way to organize a meeting that suits everyone to get together to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or new job with a group of close friends and family, or to get together with a few colleagues. (Review)

• Needtomeet, use a simple calendar and schedule a meeting time that works for everyone in three simple steps, no more emailing back and forth or wasting time to call everyone couple of times in a day.

Best Free Project Management

• ClockingIT, manage your projects with timelines and assigning tasks, view the overall progress with an interactive gantt chart and scheduling, run flexible reports or get notifications via email and more.

Best Free Room Planner / Floor Layout Plan (see also Diagramming Tool)

• PlanningWiz3, a useful tool to partition rooms and arrange furniture in them easily, with good example plans and allowing you to save, print or export a layout plan to an image file.

• Autodesk Homestyler allows you to create your home in 2D and see it in 3D. Along with the generic items, you can include branded pieces from manufacturers, save your masterpiece or export it in jpg, dwg or rvt format.

Best Free Personal Finance

• Mint "an attractive personal finance on-line service helps budgeting and keeping track of your finances. Users need to create a Mint account before adding bank, credit card, home loan and investment accounts." (Review)

• Yahoo Finance offers up-to-date information and basic tools for personal finance management. It also allows for setting up your portfolios and getting quotes for your stocks with interactive, basic and technical analysis charts for the period you choose.

Best Free E-commerce Business

• PayPal offers a secure and convenient way to pay when you shop online, send money to friends and family, or receive online payments from your clients. It's free to open an account but fees are chargeable on certain conditions for sending or receiving money.

Best Free Outliner

• Thinklinkr, a great tool to organize ideas and information in outlines, and allow for multiple users to edit them in real time, with useful features including auto save, drag and drop, import and export, and a lot more.

Best Free Mind Mapping

• Mind42 (Mind For Two), a neat and useful collaborative mind mapping tool for brainstorming and managing ideas in a tree-like diagram with node attributes, easy for publishing and distribution.

Best Free Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Translator

• Wikipedia allows users to type a word or phrase to search for useful information from millions of articles written collaboratively online by volunteers around the world. It's a good and handy encyclopedic reference and a frequently updated news resource for you.

• LDOCE, an online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, provides a quick search for a word or phrase, with widgets available for adding to your browser search bar, blog or personal website.

• Wordnik, "you don't get just a definition when you look up a word. You get example sentences, related words, charts, images from Flickr, pronunciations, etymologies, tags, Twitter segments and more." (Review)

• Thesaurus.com, a popular site to search for word definitions, synonyms and antonyms with filtering by parts of speech or word classes and suggestions for nearby words.

• Google Translate, enter text, a webpage address, or upload a document for translation from one language into another with auto detection of the source language. The translated result from an uploaded document is presented without preserving the layout or embeded images though.

• Bing Translator, translate texts or entire web pages from one language into another, with auto detecting the source language and other features such as synchronized highlights and bilingual viewing layouts for a webpage translation.

Best Free Answer Engine

• Wolfram Alpha answers your queries submitted in a text box by doing computations from its own knowledge base. See what you get from, for example, New York and London, Microsoft and Apple.

Best Free Calculator

• Instacalc gives you instant answers as you type and allows you to embed a live calc in your website. It also has other modules to calculate home loan, hourly pay, unit conversions and more.

Best Free Grammar and Spell-Checker

• PaperRater checks your document for grammar and spelling errors. On top of that, it helps you to improve the document's readability, word choice and style by an in-depth analysis.

Best Free Unit and Currency Converter

• Digital Dutch Unit Converter "comes with a cleaner web page, instant response and ease of use, with commonly used units available and divided into 16 categories." (Review)

• OANDA Currency Converter, "one of the popular web tools for currency conversion with daily and historical rates for over 164 currencies, available in multi languages." (Review)

Best Free Optical Character Recognition

• Free-OCR, upload an image up to 2 MB in pdf, jpg, gif, tiff or bmp format for optical character recognition and get the real text result right on your screen. No registration or email address is required. (Review)

Best Free Text Formatting

• Goformat, a simple utility for you to convert any text to either lower, upper, proper or sentence case with just one click without refreshing your screen, and remove unwanted characters or replace them with what you enter. See also Text Fixer.

Best Free Image Editor

• Pixlr Editor "an excellent set of tools that rival many image editors, including drawing, retouching, cropping, resizing, warping, adding text, basic and advanced lighting and color adjustments, numerous filters and layers with blending." (Review)

• Sumo Paint, a powerful tool for creating and editing images with more painting tools than other paint-oriented online image editing programs, supports for layers, blending modes, special filter effects, opacity levels, handy adjustment tools, etc.

• FotoFlexer creates dazzling photo effects in a simple interface with optional fullscreen editing. Supported features include one-click auto fix, red eye removal, resizing and cropping, rotating and flipping, 20 over filtering effects, decorations, animations, layers and more.

• AnyMaking Photo Editor helps you edit an image easily in a few seconds with a set of tools for you to choose: crop or resize image, flip or rotate, add frame, filters, drop shadow, reflection and round corners.

Best Free Image Converter and Resizer

• fixPicture converts all popular picture file formats and camera raw formats to jpg, png, gif, tiff, bmp or pdf formats, and resizes them by a percentage or a specific pixel value with optional rotation and some effects.

Best Free Image Cropping and Customizing

• CutMyPic, 3 simple steps that allow you to quickly upload a picture, cut and customize it, and mail it to a friend or save it to your computer. Image customizing includes rounding corners and adding a shadow with thickness of your choice.

Best Free Digital Image Stitcher

• Dermandar offers an easy way to stitch a series of your scenic photographs into one picture—just browse for pictures from your folder, then save a panoramic image back to your disk, or upload and share it in the gallery.

Best Free Screen Capture Utility

• Kwout, grab a web page and crop an area, post it anywhere or right-click the cropped image to save into your computer. You can resize, add a border or shadow to the image, work easily with a bookmarklet on any browsers with no need to install anything.

• Thumbalizr, capture a top screen or full scrolling webpage in seconds—just enter an URL, click thumb it, and download the image in width of your choice. Free sign up for even better quality.

Best Free Diagramming Tool (see also Room Planner / Floor Layout Plan)

• Cacoo, a user-friendly drawing tool allows you to create a variety of diagrams, save or export your file in PNG format. A useful stencil is available for easily creating basic shapes, office layout, equipment, network, flowchart and more.

Best Free Photo Management and Sharing (see also Image Search)

• Flickr a popular web service for users to upload their photos, edit and organize their collections and share them with groups and privacy controls. Uploading video is an added feature.

• Dropico, an exciting service that allows you to manage and organize your photo collection across social networks, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and more, or edit a photo with Pixlr or other editors, all in one place. (Review)

Best Free Photo Collage

• Photovisi, a useful tool to create photo collages, quick and easy—just select a template, add photos, then click save and download.

Best Free GIF Animator

• Picasion creates an animated GIF image file comprises up to 10 frames with optional size and speed adjustments. In just a few minutes, you can then post it to the website or save it to your computer. (Review)

Best Free Image Generator

• FunPhotoBox generates funny pictures from your photos with useful tools, either photo effects, animations, cards, magazine covers or face in hole, choose one then upload your photo, see the result and save it.

• Says-It.com, create your own funny photos and graphics in seals, badges, posters, tickets and other various signs—simply choose a design, type in some text, change colors or outlines, insert your own image, then click Go to get one.

• Cool Text, an easy way to generate cool and impressive text logos or buttons without a lot of design work—choose a style, fill up the form with text and adjust the settings, then click the Render button.

• Barcoding allows you to create an optical machine-readable barcode image by giving barcode data, encoding type and output file format. This is an example of Gizmo's Freeware encoded in Code 128.

Best Free Poster / Tiled Printing

• Block Posters, create a large-size poster from a small-size image for printing in three simple steps: upload an image, slice it and download the pdf file. You can then print and assemble the pages into a big poster. (Review)

Best Free Image Search (see also Photo Management and Sharing)

• TinEye, submit an image to discover the source of the image, where it is being used and check out its modified or higher resolution versions if they exist on the web.

• GazoPa, a useful search engine to look for images similar in color, shape or other optional parameters, to the one you submitted. Search results are viewable in two layouts.

• RGBStock.com, a good place to search for high quality and royalty-free photos and choose the ones you like to download. Type a keyword to search for the photos or check out what are the most downloaded photos.

Best Free Multimedia Suite

• Aviary, a web alternative to Adobe Creative Suite, has a suite of various editors and tools to allow designers to create images and audio. This suite includes Phoenix Image Editor, Toucan Color Palettes, Peacock Visual Laboratory, Raven Vector Editor, Myna Audio Editor, Falcon Image Markup and more.

Best Free Video Sharing

• YouTube "offers 16:9 aspect ratio, high quality video playback, support for nearly every video format, a large audience for your videos, the ability to embed videos on a blog or website, video reply feature, customizable personal video page and the ability to limit video access." (Review) See also KeepVid for download and Bender Converter for convert and download.

Best Free Music Sharing

• Grooveshark operates in a similar way like YouTube but allows you to upload, search and share music, instead of videos, with others. Features such as library, playlists, favorites and fans are available to users after signing in.

Best Free Music Search Engine

• BeeMP3 helps you locate an mp3 audio file over the Internet. With more than 800,000 mp3 files now in the database, the crawler searches and adds more files for you daily, subject to its terms of service.

Best Free Radio Broadcasting

• Streema offers an easy way to search radio stations by station name and country, add them to your Favorites, listen to the stations right away on the web platform or share them with your friends.

Best Free Online TV Viewer

• TOMA - Internet TV, a browser-based version of JLC's internet TV viewer, lets you watch TV programs from a large database of over 3,000 TV channels maintained and updated by the community every day in the world. (Review)

Best Free Music Player and Organizer

• AudioBox.fm lets you upload and organize your media files from anywhere at anytime in a desktop-like music player and organizer. You can play tracks, create playlists or edit simple tags of your music files with free storage up to 1GB, but not all these features are guaranteed to be available in future under the free plan.

Best Free Screen Session Recorder

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Best Free MP3 Cutter

• CutMP3.net works lightning fast with no need to upload the Mp3 file and no file size limit either—a cut above the rest! (Review)

Best Free Lyric Finder and Resource

• LyricWiki, a community based and huge resource for finding lyrics in multi languages—enter keywords such as a song title, artist or album into the search box to find lyrics, press edit this page button to copy lyrics for editing, or help add lyrics in a new page.

Best Free Music Recognition

• AudioTag.info helps you to identify an unknown piece of music easily—upload an audio fragment and get the tag info such as the track title, artist name and album title of the song based on its audio fingerprint.

• Midomi, "a new revolutionary way to find that lost tune you don't know the title of—sing, hum, or whistle into your microphone and let Midomi find your music for you." (Review)

Best Free Text to MP3 Converter

• Yakitome "requires you to set up an account and the site is free to use. If the only thing that counts is the voice quality regardless of time delays, Yakitome wins hands-down." (Review)

• vozMe, "simple to use and requires no registration, just type or paste some text into the box, choose a male or female voice, then click the Create mp3 button. The conversion takes just seconds." (Review)

Best Free Chords and Scales Finder

• Chord House, a sharp music tool and useful resource for finding chords, scales and guidance if you play guitar, piano or use a sequencer. Sounds can be heard or played "live" and downloaded for future use.

Best Free Slideshow Creator

• 123-slideshow allows you to create a flash slideshow in just a few steps—select a slideshow layout and effect, upload 4 to 8 images to the server and save the resulting swf file to your computer easily.

Best Free Comic Builder

• Bitstrips, create your own cartoon characters and comic strips using the items included in the drag-and-drop builders, with quite a bit of flexibility in what you can make, i.e. scenes, facial expressions, body langauge, cartoon panels, etc. (Review)

Best Free Online Storage and Backup

• Dropbox allows you to back up files and access them online, or share folders with several people to work together easily. Its desktop program is only needed for syncing files across computers. (Review)

• Windows Live SkyDrive offers an amazing 25 GB of online storage as part of the Microsoft Windows Live suite of services. It requires a Microsoft Live ID to sign in and begin using. (Review)

• Drop.io "gives you up to 100 MB per drop with no limit on the number of drops and a host of features and unique ways to add and share your drop." (Review)

Best Free File Archiver / Zip Utility

• ezyZip, add files to create a zip file, or unzip a file to a target folder in your computer, quick and easy. Uploading or downloading your files is not necessary as both zipping and unzipping run locally as a Java applet in your browser.

• WebZipr is powered by phpAce Web Zipper. You'd need to upload files to create a zip file for download to your computer, or upload a zip file from your computer to view and download the files inside it, allowing for a file size up to 2 MB.

Best Free File Format Converter

• Free File Converter supports conversion between a wide range of file formats including document, image, audio, video and compression formats. Upload a file, choose a conversion type and download the converted file to your computer. Check here for a full list of conversion types.

• Media-Convert helps convert your files from one format to another up to a maximum file size of 200 MB. You can rename file and apply other advanced settings in response to the output format. See supported file formats.

• Bender Converter, an easy-to-use online application to convert videos directly from YouTube and other services in 3 steps—choose a format to convert to, give a video page link, then click Convert and download the converted file you need.

Best Free eBook Converter

• Ebook Converter provided by online-ConVert supports a variety of input formats like PDF, ePub, mobi, HTML, LIT, LRF and more—choose the target format you need for your eBook reader and start converting.

Best Free File Encryption Utility

• File Encryptor allows you to encrypt or decrypt a file online upto a maximum file size of 20MB. The encrypted file is saved with the extension of .FE3.

Best Free Virtual Desktop

• Glide "looks to be the best developed to date, with 30GB free online storage and a selection of basic applications such as simple word processor, presentations, image editor, website creator, collaboration, file sharing and more."

Best Free Desktop Wallpaper Tool

• Desktop Wallpaper Tool allows you to quickly create desktop wallpapers auto-adapted to your screen resolution by cropping or scaling images from your collection or from Art Galleries, with supports for modern HTML5 capabilities.

Best Free Screen Session Recorder

• ScreenToaster records your screen session in full desktop or fixed rectangular area with audio input from a microphone or auxiliary device, then upload to ScreenToaster, YouTube, or save it in mov or swf format.

Best Free Icon Converter

• iConvert converts an image into an icon for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in one step, or converts Windows icons to Mac OS X icons, svg icons to Windows icons, png icons to Mac OS X icons and so on.

Best Free Font Tools

• FFonts, a useful resource to search for new or top fonts by category, download and unzip them for installing and adding more fonts to your system.

• Identifont, "one of the best resources on the internet for identifying fonts and typefaces—just answer a handful of questions about the appearance of certain characters, and the site will tell you the name of the font." (Review)

• FontStruct, create your own True-Type fonts with a graphic tool in a grid base and save them, or search by tag for the fonts built by others and download them to your computer easily. (Review)

• FreeFontConverter, a handy tool to convert fonts between ttf, otf, pfa, pfb, ttc, svg, pt3, sfd, otb, t42, cef, cff, gsf, ik, mf, dfont, bin, suit and bdf for their suitable uses in Windows, Mac and Linux.

Best Free Webmail (see also Disposable Email Address)

• GMX Mail, complete with a Mail Collector, "lets you read and send emails from your multiple email accounts in one place. Easy to set up, no more going through various complicated settings for incoming and outgoing servers." (Review)

• GMail features a search-oriented interface and a thread view, supports for Internet standard protocols and allows e-mail clients such as Thunderbird to access its mail server, offers about 7.4 GB free storage and 25 MB attachments but filtering out exe files.

• LetterMeLater comes with a feature missing in other email service in that it allows you to compose an email and have it sent at any future date and time, or have it sent multiple times in a range or interval you select.

Best Free Email Tracking

• SpyPig lets you find out if your email has been read by the recipient. It works with web based email and desktop email clients so long as both you and the recipient use an HTML-formatted email.

Best Free Download Manager

• KeepVid helps you identify available streaming videos in different qualities and download them from a video sharing site, such as YouTube, by entering the URL of a video page, or by clicking the bookmarklet Keep It! when watching a video from the site.

Best Free Instant Messaging

• Meebo, "You can log in to any of your IM networks, including: AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, ICQ, Jabber & Meebo, all from one page. With it's vast extra language support, it adds a lot of flexibility." (Review)

Best Free RSS Reader - Aggregator

• Google Reader "offers very good feed management, and its keyboard shortcuts provide superb feed navigation. It sits right in my browser, that lets me open feed links in new tabs, open full feed articles, bookmark items of interest, search or browse for related information, etc." (Review)

Best Free Web Search

• Google Search, the most-used search engine on the web, with search options for images, videos, news, blogs, updates, books, forums, and other features.

• Open Directory Project (also known as Dmoz, or Directory Mozilla) lets you search the web content by category maintained by a community of volunteer editors. Alternatively, you can use Google Directory which sorts the directory from Dmoz by popularity.

Best Free Poll and Survey

• Micropoll, create a simple poll with a question and multiple-choice answers in live preview, and use it wherever you want to post the poll. Features include enable or disable visitors from viewing reports, IP blocking and more.

Best Free Web Page Editor / Reader

• PrintWhatYouLike, "a free online webpage editor lets you quickly remove images or the background of a webpage, click and add the boxes or frames you want, isolate and resize them, change the font type and size, fit your selection to a page width, redo or undo an edit and save in pdf or html formats." (Review) See also Web2PDF.

• Readability, a simple tool to make reading individual articles on the Web more enjoyable and printing them with no cluttering. Set the style, size and margin you like, then add the Readability bookmarklet. You will get what you've set when you visit a webpage and click the bookmarklet.

Best Free Navigation

• Google Maps, a mapping service application lets you search for a map with related information such as an address and contact numbers, get directions to go from one place to another or even create and share your own maps.

Best Free Bookmark Manager

• Delicious allows you to keep your personal bookmarks online for access from anywhere, or share and discover web bookmarks. You can search bookmarks by tags, transfer bookmarks inside your browser to your Delicious account or download a copy of bookmarks for backup.

• Diigo gives you more powerful bookmark service with additional research tools featuring highlights, sticking notes, comments and more. You can also drag its bookmarklet Diigolet to your bookmark bar for direct access to the service.

• Read It Later, never miss a page you want to read later, just one click to save it to your list, or after your are done reading a page, remove it from the list. A bookmarklet is supported.

Best Free URL Shortener (see also URL Expander)

• Bit.ly, a useful tool to shorten and share your web links (or URLs), with a free account available for tracking them. A click on the bookmarklet Bit.ly Sidebar shows up this page's shortened URL http://bit.ly/9xzvmw being shared, with statistics available here.

Best Free Password Manager

• LastPass "stores more than usernames and passwords, it stores webform information in a similar manner to Roboform's Passcards. It also securely stores your notes." [You can use LastPass Bookmarklets as an alternative to the program or extension when you can't install it somewhere or when you're travelling.] (Review)

Best Free Connection Speed Test

• Speedtest.net provides key measurements on download speed, upload speed and ping to determine the overall quality and performance of your Internet connection. It also identifies your Internet service provider and server location.

Best Free Browsing Tools

• PageZipper, life is too short to spend clicking "Next" and refreshing the next page? Then you will find this a time saver. Try our Recently popular pages and click PageZipper bookmarklet if it helps.

Best Free Website Builder

• Webnode is designed for you to easily build and maintain a website from anywhere online. It's convenient to use with builder tools, drag-and-drop functionality, ready-made gadgets and widgets, and has no intrusive advertisement banner occupying the precious space of your webpage.

• Wix allows you to create great-looking flash-based websites easily. Just register, click on a template and start editing. You can change the text, pictures and about everything else, create as many pages and edit them as often as you wish. (Review)

Best Free Website Template Designer

• Cool Template "is really very clever indeed. You can change the number of columns, the menus, text, colours, position of content blocks, and just about everything else. When you're done, choose whether you want your finished page downloaded as HTML/CSS files or other templates." (Review)

Best Free Web Hosting

• Byet provides you with a free hosting service for your web sites without forced advertisements. It features 5.5 GB disk space, 200 GB monthly traffic and a useful control panel to add domains, upload files via an online file manager, create databases, check websites usage, etc.

Best Free Domain Name Checker

• KnowEm, "type in the name you want to use, and the site instantly tells you whether the domain name is available in various countries, and whether it's already in use on any of around 50 different social networking sites." (Review)

Best Free FTP Client

• Net2ftp, a web based FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client to gain access to the FTP server and manage your websites, view and edit codes, add or rename files and directories, upload or download files as well as other advanced FTP functions.

Best Free Blog Publishing

• WordPress, "my number one choice based on the features, plethora of free themes and plugins, and the ability to use it as an alternative to create or host a web site with static content." (Review)

• Blogger is popular and easy to use. You can post text, photos and videos to your blog, personalize it with many templates, add gadgets, get feedback from your readers and more.

• Posterous, just send an email to post@posterous.com and your site is created, claim the site from the link it sends to you, give a name and a password to your site. You can then start adding a new post by an email, or try out more features. (Review)

Best Free Social Networking

• Facebook, a popular website for you to share your personal profile with friends, add them to your list, send them messages, or join a network group organized by workplace.

• Twitter, a real-time information network and a micro blogging service allows you to share and discover what's happening now based on brief text messages sent by users via the Twitter website, SMS or external applications.

Best Free Web Information

• Alexa, a useful resource to find out information about a website, site owner, traffic statistics, search analytics, clickstream, top sites, hot pages and a lot more. This is our site info according to Alexa.

Best Free Favicon

• Favicon.cc, create a new favicon for your own web page, import an image file to edit and save it as a favicon, or search for top rated and latest Favicons. See also Extract a favicon from a web page.

Best Free Compiler and Debugger

• Ideone, a handy compiler and debugging tool in more than 40 programming languages—choose one of them, paste your source code, share it, or run it and see the results.

Best Free Source Code Formatter

• Pretty Printer, a quick tool to format your source code. You can add new lines or remove empty lines, reduce white spaces, add comment lines before a function, etc. It supports PHP, Java, C++, C, Perl, JavaScript and CSS.

• WebmasterGate's HTML / XHTML Beautifier allows you to reformat html or xhtml source code with proper indentation of tags and syntax highlighting. You can specify not to indent certain tags to your liking and save the output in a plain or rich text format.

Best Free HTML Editor

• Online HTML Editor, simple and easy to use, just edit html codes in an expandable box provided and see the live results in another. One-click opening and closing tags are included.

Best Free HTML Tools

• WordOff, a useful web tool to remove unnecessary tags and styles from HTML code as a result of pasting into WYSIWYG editors from Word. For example, <span>, <div> and empty elements are removed.

• Text Fixer offers a raft of tools including Convert Word to HTML, Text to HTML helpful for editing web pages. Remove Line Breaks also comes in handy if you want to copy and paste text from a web site, email or anywhere without unwanted line breaks. (Review)

Best Free Color Picker

• ColorExplorer gives you color codes in RGB, HSV and Hex instantly when you choose a color from the vertical slider or color square. You can also choose colors from Libraries or save your picked colors to your Palettes.

Best Free Anti-malware

• Virustotal, an online independent service to analyse suspicious files and detect viruses, worms, trojans and other malware by multiple antivirus engines. Detailed results from each antivirus engine are listed after it has scanned the file uploaded.

• Anubis, a service for analyzing malware. Submit your Windows executable file and receive an analysis report about what it does, or submit a suspicious URL to find out the activities of the Internet Explorer process when visiting that URL.

Best Free Internet Safety

• WOT (Web of Trust) "provides fastest ratings, uses green / yellow / red ratings and 'people' reliability icons, multiple rating categories to help you evaluate websites, fantastic warning screen to empower users to avoid potentially bad websites before interacting with them." (Review)

• Online Link Scan helps you scan links for harmful threats such as viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. It also shows you the host IP, any threat name and the overall result if the site is secure.

• OpenDNS, "a web based service that in conjunction with your own system's network configuration redirects all your browsing through OpenDNS servers where it is filtered for content." (Review)

Best Free Private Note

• Privnote allows you to write a confidential note and send a link to someone for reading it. The note is destroyed after reading once, no more worrying about your message being forwarded to and read by others.

Best Free Disposable Email Address

• GishPuppy, with a bookmarklet Gish It!, helps register an email address used for forwarding emails to your normal email account to avoid spams. When you decide not to receive any further emails to this address, just cancel it.

• Spamgourmet forwards only a limited number of mails to your protected email address and eats the rest. Just register your username and protected email address, then give out any disposable email addresses in this form someword.username@spamgourmet.com. Adding trusted senders and more settings are available.

Best Free Email Address Converter

• Scrim converts your email address into a short and safe link (for instance http://scr.im/joe) so that you can share it on the web to avoid spam robots and get less spam.

Best Free URL Expander (see also URL Shortener)

• URL X-ray examines a shortened URL you gave and finds out where it leads to before you actually click on it. It helps surfing the net more safely. (See more choices in this Review)

Best Free E-learning Tool

• Kubbu, an e-learning tool designed for teachers to create quizzes, crosswords or games and make them available to students or groups, view and analyse the results, or even share activities with other teachers. It's limited to 30 students and 15 activities for a free account.

Best Free Lectures

• Academic Earth lets you watch up to 1,500 lectures, on everything from computer studies and psychology to medicine, architecture and entrepreneurship from respected educational institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Yale. (Review 1, Review 2)

Best Free English Learning Resources

• Perfectyourenglish, a comprehensive reference guide to English Grammar, Practical English usage, vocabulary, English writing and speaking. You can also test your knowledge of English language with interactive grammar and vocabulary exercises.

• English Practice consists of many archived lessons for learning English—choose a category or type a key word to search for what you want, then browse through previews or read the full lessons.

Best Free Typing Tutor

• TypingWeb, a place to learn, practice and improve your typing speed and accuracy on beginner to advanced and specialty courses. You can track your progress if you opt for registration which is free.

Best Free Flashcard

• Quizlet, browse and use millions of flashcards created by teachers and students, or create your own, in various study modes including Familiarize, Learn, Test, Play Scatter, Play Space Race, Voice Scatter and Voice Race.

Best Free Printable Paper Generator

• Incompetech, do you ever buy lined paper, graph paper, music notation paper, or score sheets for popular games and sports? If so, how about printing your own? Check out this generator that allows for some fine adjustments before you print it. (Review)

Best Free Printable Coloring Pages and Worksheets

• Twisty Noodle has an extensive collection of printables designed to help kids learn about objects and improve handwriting. A bunch of material for use, the illustrations are very well done and cover coloring pages and handwriting worksheets. (Review)

• Kidopo "is very professionally implemented. The coloring application in particular is very well done and emulates closely the pencil and paper experience. There’s also an excellent collection of printables including stickers, connect-the-dots, birthday cards and much more." (Review)

Best Free Sandbox Game

• Powder Game, "a Dan-Ball's entertaining game where you have over 30 different ingredients to create interesting things and play around with chemicals or other objects such as Powder, Water, Fire, Ice, Stone, Magma, Wind, Fan, Oil, etc." (Review)

Best Free Chess

• Little ChessPartner, as hosted at Chess.com, gives you a lively game against your computer in a friendly interface with adjustable settings. (See more choices in this Review)

• ChessWhiz, a Chinese Chess web client offered by PlayXiangqi.com, allows you to log in as Guest or enter your username, then join a table to observe or play Xiangqi with humans. (See more choices in this Review)

250 Best Free Online PC Games In One Place

• Friv, "a full-screen of tiny screen shots for more than 250 free online PC games of various genres with the most popular ones in hand from time to time, just in one place." (Review)

Best Free Match-3 Puzzle

• Cradle of Rome, "a thrilling path to puzzle glory. Build the heart of the Ancient Roman Empire by playing and conquering more than 100 addictive and intuitively designed levels." (More choices in this Review)

Best Free Jigsaw Puzzle and Creator

• Jigsaw Puzzle Gallery at JigZone, "choose a puzzle from a gallery of beautiful pictures of animals, art, flowers, scenes and other categories, change cuts into 6 to 247 pieces in different shapes. (More choices in this Review)

• Jigsaw Planet, "create your own puzzles with difficulty levels, shapes and rotations, play your own or common puzzles or even send puzzles to friends." (More choices in this Review)

Best Free Game of Go

• 361points.com, "you can play against the GnuGo engine online with three different table sizes to choose from and engine strength is adjustable. A big bonus for beginners is the chance to challenge an online computer to play a simplified version of the game called Capture Go." (Review)

Best Free Tetris

• Tetris N-Blox lets you play the game up to 10 levels of difficulty with colorful shapes, optional full-screen mode and sound effects in a simple design. It's easy to play—just click the game logo and start a game.

Best Free Sudoku

• DKM Sudoku Online, "almost as fully-featured as any of Sudoku download. Click Play Now and go to Menu to create a new puzzle in any of 4 levels. You can enter possible cell values manually in pencil mode, or let it scan for you." (Review)

Best Free Reversi

• Reversi Lounge "lets you select a server from the list, click Launch button to open the lobby screen, select an empty chair at one of the tables and play online free against the human players in the lobby." (More choices in this Review)

• Othello Game, "a good choice to challenge the computer opponent with 3 levels of strength, undo moves, highlight valid moves, hints and animation effects." (Review)

Best Free Backgammon

• Motif lets you play backgammon against a decent computer engine via a functional 2D interface. Good documentation too. (Review)

Best Free Games for Charity

• FreeRice, "play educational quiz games to help fight hunger around the world, each answer you get correct contributes 10 grains of rice to WFP, the best of its kind I have seen so far." (Review)

• The Editors' Choice List: Our Selection of the Best PC Freeware
• Best Free Windows 7 / Vista 64 bit Software
• Best Free Portable Applications
• Best Free Software for Linux

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