Monitor Flows vs Stickies

Monitor Flows provides customizable desktop widgets that stay visible while users switch between apps. Its library has more than 50 widgets across nine categories, with examples including weather forecasts, terminal emulators, color pickers, and 3D globes. A drag-and-drop editor arranges and resizes widgets, while settings adjust opacity, blur, accent colors, themes, and backgrounds. Video can keep playing, radio can keep streaming, and web pages can stay loaded as users switch pages. The listed integrations include Spotify, Google Assistant, Philips Hue, Discord, YouTube, GitHub, Twitch, Steam, Slack, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, WLED, and OpenWeather. The app supports Windows 10 and 11, including Home and Pro editions; macOS and Linux support are being explored for the 2026 roadmap. Free includes 15 core widgets, three pages, and five themes, with no time limit or credit card. Pro costs $3 a month; Max costs $49 a year. The FAQ says credentials and configurations are stored locally and that the product collects no telemetry, usage analytics, or personal information.

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.