Desktop Widgets vs Stickies

Desktop Widgets is a marketplace of desktop mini-apps for trading, research, monitoring, and automation. Its site describes widgets being installed in one click and running natively across Windows, macOS, and Linux, while also promoting a Windows runtime and saying macOS and Linux are coming soon. Traders, operators, researchers, and developers are named as intended users who can combine mini-apps into an always-on workstation. Developers can make TypeScript widgets with @desktopwidgets/sdk, using Claude, GPT, or another model; the listed build and publishing tools include an MCP server, REST API, and CLI. Uploads are pending review, and automatic publication through signing is planned for Phase 3. The runtime is described as sandboxed by default, with gate-enforced capabilities. The Free Trial costs 0.00 USD for 7 days and includes all 31 widgets and themes and customization, with three device activations and no credit card required. Professional is $34.99, paid once purchase; Enterprise is $149.99, paid once purchase. Both paid plans include one year of updates, then optional paid maintenance renewals for further updates.

Stickies is a free Windows utility for placing text and image notes on the desktop. Notes stay where positioned until closed, including after reboots, and can be resized and styled with custom fonts, colours, buttons and layouts. You can hide a note until a chosen date and time, schedule it to wake daily, weekly or monthly, and add alarms. Notes may be attached to an application, website, document or folder so they appear only when that item is on screen. Stickies transfers notes between machines over TCP/IP, an SMTP mail server or a MAPI client, and exposes an API through Windows messages. It stores data in one SQLite database file without writing to the registry. Unicode and right-to-left text are supported, with translation files for menus and dialogs. The current download supports Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11. Group Policy can control settings.