ImageGlass vs Universal Viewer

ImageGlass is a desktop image viewer for browsing and viewing image files on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports more than 90 formats, including WEBP, GIF, SVG, PNG, JXL, HEIC, and RAW. Viewing tools include slideshows, thumbnails, color picking, hardware-accelerated rendering, and EXIF information through ExifGlass. Built-in edits cover rotation, flipping, cropping, lossless compression, and resizing. Pro adds an HDR Tone Mapper, free and margin panning, File Watcher, custom mouse clicks, and settings and feature locks. The app can associate external editing apps, use custom hotkeys with them, and accept extensions built with its SDK. ImageGlass says it does not scan image libraries for analytics or send images, filenames, or folder paths elsewhere. Classic is free. Pro Individual is $14.90, paid once purchase; Pro Team is $69, paid once purchase. Pro Business is $9,917 a year. The 14-day Business trial requires no account, online activation, or device lock for local license verification.

Universal Viewer is a Windows desktop application for opening a wide range of file formats in one viewer. It handles images, multimedia, Word and Excel files, PDF, RTF, internet formats, text, and formats supported by Total Commander Lister plugins. Image support includes over 40 graphics formats and RAW images from 400+ cameras; its multimedia player supports over 170 formats without external codecs. In the Pro version, Word and Excel files including DOCX and XLSX open without MS Office, and a PDF plugin works without Adobe or Foxit Reader. Pro also adds complex RTF and RAW image support, an image panel with a Convert to feature, and highlighted text search. Text mode handles files of unlimited size, including those over 4 GB, with encodings such as Unicode and UTF-8. Windows Explorer context-menu integration provides a way to open files in the viewer. The free edition’s multimedia support depends on the Windows Media Player engine. Listed system requirements include Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. The Pro version has a 15-day trial; paid access starts at $26.