Best Discounted & Free Student Software Options
Being a student can be hard, even overwhelming at times. Most college students have to juggle a social life, part-time jobs, and internships while also trying to keep up with their education. Add the pandemic and increased digitalization to the mix and you have a huge tangle to sort in your hands. However, the role of education is still highly important to achieve professional success. According to the recent study conducted by Resume Now, education was considered the most crucial factor to having a successful career, ahead of work experience—34% vs. 28%, respectively.
While students have to learn difficult subjects and master software that will help them land a job, they might feel a little lost. Especially since most software, they have to learn is professional and quite expensive. Thankfully, all is not lost. Many of the major players have options to help out students whether giving away their software for free or providing special rates for students.
In this article, we’ll have a look at the most popular and vital software options that students can get for free or with a sweet deal.
Best Free Software for Students 2023
1. Jotform Student Survey Program
If you’re a student the chances are quite high that you’ve already prepared a survey or will prepare one in the future. We all know how difficult it can get to create and publish a survey. Especially, if you are not aware of online tools that can create online surveys in a matter of minutes and share them with people even faster.
Jotform is an excellent tool to create surveys and it’s already free to anyone who wants to try it out. But, what’s better is that JotForm also has a special plan for students that gives them the survey plan for completely free.
The Jotform Student Survey plan removes submission limits from surveys and offers robust survey features, and hundreds of free templates. All you have to do is to apply to the program and if you can prove that you’re a student, you can create your own survey in a matter of minutes. You can apply to the program from here.
2.ADOBE - Creative Cloud for Education
Adobe is one of those giants that actually introduced discounted rates to premium tools for students. Famous for its design and production tools, including but not limited to, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Illustrator, The Adobe Creative Cloud is a wonderful tool for any student that wants to get their hands on tools that will eventually help them learn a profession.
The Creative Cloud is discounted to $19.99/mo for students. That’s around %60 cheaper than getting the toolset for its retail pricing. For an incredibly cheap price, you can get every tool offered by Adobe (there should be around 20) if you can prove you’re a student.
3. Autodesk Futureskilling
Autodesk is also one of those giants that have assumed the role of assisting the future professionals of many different industries. Not only that, they also support educators and lifelong learners and they call the process futureskilling. Autodesk offers all of its products for free to people who can prove they are a student or educator.
Autodesk comes with a rich portfolio of tools vital to many industries including AutoCAD and MAYA. Honestly, their portfolio is so wide that the options wouldn’t fit into a single article.
4. Evernote for Students
Evernote is an excellent note-taking app. Their main goal is to make note-taking digital and paperless. As we do almost everything, including studying on our computers and tablets, it only makes sense to have a tool that can utilize the advantages of computers while doing something as simple as note-taking.
Evernote has a free plan that’s quite useful in itself, however, students can get one-year access to its premium plan. We couldn’t find any information about if it’s possible to renew the student plan if you can prove you’re still a student. So, it’s up to you to go for the upgrade right away or try the free plan before upgrading.
5. Atlassian Classroom Licensing
Atlassian offers a lot of different tools, especially to future software engineers and computer science students. Atlassian boasts an impressive portfolio including all Jira services and even Trello.
Atlassian offers a %75 discount on most of its products, however, these aren’t available to individual students. Instead, these discounts are offered to institutions to be handed out to students. So, you should probably check in with your institution to see if you have the option.
Honorable Mention: Audacity
Audacity is a free, open-source audio recording and editing software. It doesn’t have a special offer for students as it’s already free-to-use. It’s been developed by a group of volunteers.
Audacity is a wonderful tool for recording music, podcasts, or any type of audio. You can also edit your recordings. So, you can finally actually record that podcast that you thought would be a great idea while hanging out with your friends.
To Conclude…
All in all, many companies are providing huge discounts or even giving away their full products for free to help future professionals. These were the most popular free student software options we gathered for you. If you think we missed a software that you believe deserves a spot on this article, let us know in the comments below.
Featured image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash