Themia vs TaskbarX: Widgets and Taskbar Tweaks

If you have been customizing Windows for any length of time, you probably know TaskbarX. Chris Andriessen's free utility became the standard way to center taskbar icons, add transparency, and fine-tune per-icon spacing back when Windows 10 stubbornly insisted the Start button lived in the bottom-left corner. Even after Windows 11 shipped a centered taskbar natively, plenty of people still reach for TaskbarX (or its successor, TaskbarXI) for the finer controls Microsoft left out.

Themia gets compared to TaskbarX fairly often, and we think that is mostly a category mistake. TaskbarX tweaks the bar at the bottom of the screen. Themia works in the big empty space above it. They are solving different problems, and you can reasonably run both.

A Themia desktop on a synthwave wallpaper showing stock price, folder shortcuts, and system widgets — Themia lives on the desktop itself — stocks, files, system stats. The taskbar is untouched.

The short version

TaskbarX customizes the Windows taskbar: centered icons, transparency, animations, per-icon spacing. Narrow scope, done well.
Themia is a native desktop widget app: files, email, calendar, weather, stocks, music, system stats, and more — living on the desktop, not the taskbar.
They do not overlap. If you like centered icons and useful widgets on your wallpaper, run both.

Feature comparison

Feature	Themia	TaskbarX
Price	Free tier · $19 one-time Pro	Free (donationware, also available on Microsoft Store)
Primary target	The desktop / wallpaper area	The Windows taskbar
What you get	Widgets for files, email, calendar, weather, system stats, stocks, music, notes, to-do, RSS, GitHub	Centered icons, transparency, blur, animations, per-icon spacing
Windows 11 relevance	Built for Windows 10 and 11	Still popular; TaskbarXI is the Windows 11 rewrite
Configuration	Visual editor, drag widgets into place	Small configurator app with sliders and animation presets
Footprint	Native Tauri app, under 10 MB install	Very small, low RAM use
Made in	Switzerland	The Netherlands

Where TaskbarX wins

Taskbar customization that Windows still will not do

Windows 11 finally centered the taskbar by default, but it did not add much else. If you want animated icon centering, true transparency without a hard tint, or the ability to space icons apart so your Start button does not sit flush against Explorer, TaskbarX (and TaskbarXI for Windows 11) is still the cleanest way to get there.

Free and tiny

TaskbarX is free, open source, and essentially weightless. It is the kind of utility you install once, forget about, and notice only because your taskbar looks better than everyone else's.

One focused job, done well

There is something to be said for a tool that does a single thing and stops there. TaskbarX is not trying to reinvent Windows — it just polishes the one strip of chrome you look at all day. No accounts, no tiers, no feature bloat.

Themia desktop showing weather, system stats, and calendar widgets on a space-themed wallpaper — The empty space above the taskbar is where Themia does its work — weather, calendar, stats, notes.

Where Themia wins

It fills a different gap

TaskbarX makes the taskbar nicer to look at. It does not put any information in front of you. Themia is the opposite problem: most people's desktop wallpaper is a wasted two million pixels of decoration. Themia turns that space into live widgets you actually read — today's calendar, unread email, current weather, file shortcuts, CPU and GPU load, your music playback, a stock ticker.

A coherent, designed look

Themia's widgets share a visual language — spacing, typography, translucency, motion. TaskbarX gives you the knobs to make the taskbar fit any aesthetic, but you are still designing it yourself. Themia ships with sensible defaults that look finished the moment you add a widget.

Per-screen layouts

If you have multiple monitors, Themia lets you define a different layout per screen and switch the whole thing (work widgets vs. personal widgets, say) with one click. TaskbarX operates at the taskbar level — it is not trying to solve the bigger "context switching" problem.

Modern integrations

Themia talks to Microsoft 365, calendars, music players, weather APIs, GitHub, and RSS feeds through proper OAuth and vendor SDKs. None of that is in TaskbarX's wheelhouse — and it was never meant to be.

A wide Themia setup with multiple widget groups arranged across a desktop — Themia and TaskbarX happily coexist — Themia up top, centered icons down below.

Which should you pick?

Honestly, this is one of the easiest answers we give. These are not competing products.

Install TaskbarX if the Windows taskbar bugs you — if centered icons on Windows 11 are not enough, if you want real transparency, if the spacing feels wrong. It is free, small, and solves exactly that.

Install Themia if your wallpaper is wasted space and you want useful, good-looking widgets on it — files, inbox, calendar, weather, stats, music, stocks — without stitching together a dozen Rainmeter skins.

And if both describe you, run both. A centered, translucent taskbar with a well-laid-out Themia desktop above it is one of the nicer-looking Windows setups you can put together in under ten minutes.