Widget Launcher vs 8GadgetPack vs Themia on Windows 11

The most-searched name in this category, and the one people most often assume is dead. It is not.

First, a housekeeping note that trips up half the search results still online: the project was renamed GadgetPack in December 2024 and moved from 8gadgetpack.net to gadgetpack.net. The old domain still redirects, so nothing is broken, but a lot of "8GadgetPack is abandoned" posts are simply looking at the wrong URL.

It is not abandoned. Version 42.0 shipped on 11 May 2026, after 41.0 and 40.0 in March and 39.0 the previous September. Those releases are not cosmetic either — recent changelog entries cover DPI scaling above 175%, gadgets failing to hide behind fullscreen applications, and gadgets losing their position after a reboot. That is someone actually testing on current Windows 11 builds.

What it does is restore the gadget platform Microsoft shipped with Windows 7 and then retired, plus a sidebar to dock them in, plus more than 50 gadgets in one 22 MB installer. Clock, weather, CPU and GPU meters, network monitor, calendar, sticky notes, calculator, a clipboard manager, a currency converter, a web radio player. It is free — the FAQ answers "is it free?" with "Yes, completely."

Two things worth knowing before you install. Since version 38, gadgets that require a 32-bit host process no longer run, so a small number of genuinely old Windows 7 gadgets you might find archived online will refuse to load. And on Windows 11 24H2 and later, you have to grant Location permission in Windows Settings before weather gadgets can read your connected Wi-Fi information.

Deep dive: Themia vs 8GadgetPack, or the setup walkthrough in How to get Windows 7 gadgets on Windows 11.

The gadget experience, but delivered the way Microsoft would prefer you get software.

Widget Launcher is published by Chan Software Solutions on the Microsoft Store — not by Microsoft, despite how often the name and the placement suggest otherwise. The current build is 6.0.4.0, from April 2026, so it is actively maintained too.

Its catalog stays close to the classic gadget scope: world clocks, weather, calendar, calculator, RSS, a CPU monitor, notes, an image slideshow. You place each widget individually and can adjust skin, colour, transparency and font per widget — more control over appearance than GadgetPack gives you, less than Rainmeter would.

The commercial model is where you should read carefully. The base app is free and ad-supported, and reviewers consistently describe brief interstitials when you launch a widget rather than ads sitting on your desktop. Removing ads and adding extra widget packs are purchases: a separate "Pro Widgets for Widget Launcher" Store listing extends the catalog into system monitoring and translation, and requires the base app to run. Pricing varies by region and changes, so I am not quoting a figure — open the Store listing and look.

The strongest argument for Widget Launcher has nothing to do with widgets. If you are on a work laptop where IT blocks arbitrary installers but allows the Store, this is very possibly your only real option in this whole category, and it is a decent one.

Deep dive: Themia vs Widget Launcher.

Built for Windows 10 and 11 from scratch, with widgets aimed at services that exist now.

Themia is a native Tauri app. It is not reviving anything and it is not a Store wrapper — it draws widgets straight onto the desktop, and the whole set is designed together, so a stack of six of them reads as one interface rather than six.

There are 22 built-in widgets: Email, Calendar, To-Do, Contacts, Notes, CPU, RAM, GPU, Disk, Network, Battery, Bluetooth, Weather, Weather Forecast, Stocks, GitHub, RSS, Folder, Clock, Now Playing, Gallery and Calculator. The Folder widget is the one people end up using most — it pins any directory to the desktop and lets you browse, drag, drop, rename and open without touching Explorer. The Clock does big legible time and date, with multiple clocks for different time zones if you work across them.

Layouts are per-screen and switchable, so a work arrangement and a personal arrangement can be two different desktops on the same monitor. Updates install themselves.

Now the honest part. Themia is the youngest of the three and it shows in some places. There is no third-party skin ecosystem — what ships is what you get, and if your idea of fun is hunting down someone else's skin, that is a real loss. Temperature and fan rows on the CPU widget depend on you already running LibreHardwareMonitor or OpenHardwareMonitor, because Themia ships no kernel driver of its own; without one, many boards report nothing over ACPI and fan speed is unavailable outright. The Bluetooth widget shows battery level only where the device itself reports it, and plenty of peripherals never do. And it is a direct download, not a Store app, which is a non-starter on some locked-down machines.

On price: free tier, and Pro is $19 once. Not per year. That is the whole pitch — if you are going to keep widgets on your desktop for the next five years, paying once and never seeing an ad or a renewal notice is worth something. If you would not have paid anything, the free tier is there and GadgetPack is free too, and neither of us is going to be upset with you.