DevToys Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

DevToys is a free, open-source desktop app that bundles 30+ offline developer utilities — converters, encoders, formatters, generators and testers — into one clean window. It replaces a browser full of sketchy “paste your JSON here” sites. Best for: developers who want fast, private, offline tooling. Price: From $0/mo (free plan: yes). Rating: 8.3/10

What is DevToys?

DevToys bills itself as “a Swiss Army knife for developers,” and for once the tagline is accurate. It is a lightweight desktop application that collects the dozens of tiny utilities you reach for every day — formatting a blob of minified JSON, decoding a JWT, base64-encoding a string, generating a hash, testing a regex — and puts them all in a single, native, offline app. Instead of Googling “JSON formatter” and pasting your production data into some ad-riddled website of unknown ownership, you press a key, pick a tool, and get your answer locally. Nothing leaves your machine.

The project started life as a Windows-only app built with WinUI and Fluent Design, and its first stable release (v1.0) landed in July 2023. It is genuinely community-built and open source under the permissive MIT license, living on GitHub at github.com/DevToys-app/DevToys, where it has racked up well over 31,000 stars — an enormous number for a developer-utility app and a strong signal that real developers use and trust it. The original Windows version was later joined by a separate macOS port (DevToysMac, led by developer ObuchiYuki), and the two efforts converged.

The big leap came with DevToys 2.0, which rewrote the app on a cross-platform foundation (Blazor-based UI) so that a single codebase now ships to Windows, macOS and Linux — the Linux release arrived in mid-2024. Version 2.0 also introduced an extension system, so the roughly 30 built-in tools can be topped up with dozens of community-built extensions distributed as NuGet packages, plus a command-line interface so the same utilities can be scripted into CI pipelines. It is not a startup, there is no funding round, and there is no company trying to upsell you — it is a maintained open-source project with an active contributor base, which is exactly why it is worth writing about.

What Are DevToys’s Key Features?

A deep catalogue of offline converters, encoders and formatters

The core value is breadth. Out of the box you get around 30 tools grouped into sensible categories: Converters (JSON ↔ YAML, number-base conversion, date/timestamp conversion), Encoders/Decoders (Base64 for text and images, HTML, URL, GZip, JWT decoding, certificate decoding), Formatters (JSON, SQL, XML), Generators (hash and checksum like MD5/SHA, UUID/GUID, Lorem Ipsum, passwords), Testers (RegEx, JSONPath, XML/XSD) and Text utilities (case conversion, text diff/comparer, Markdown preview, text analyzer). It is the exact spread of micro-tasks that otherwise scatters you across ten different tabs.

Everything runs 100% offline and private

This is the feature that actually matters. DevToys works entirely offline — none of the data you paste in ever touches the internet. If you have ever hesitated before dropping a real access token or a customer record into a random web “JWT decoder,” that instinct is correct, and DevToys removes the risk entirely. For anyone handling secrets, PII, or anything under a compliance regime, doing these conversions locally instead of on a third-party website is a real, defensible security improvement rather than a nice-to-have.

Smart clipboard detection

DevToys can inspect what is on your clipboard and automatically suggest the right tool for it. Copy a base64 string, open DevToys, and it will nudge you toward the decoder; copy minified JSON and it points you at the formatter. It is a small touch, but it shaves the “which tool do I need” step off dozens of daily interactions and makes the app feel closer to a system utility than a menu you have to navigate.

Extensions and a growing tool library

Version 2.0’s extension system means you are not locked to the built-in 30. Community authors publish extensions (there are dozens available, with counts commonly cited around 44) as NuGet packages that you install into the app, and because the whole thing is open source you can build and ship your own tool if the one you need does not exist. That extensibility is what keeps the catalogue growing without bloating the base install for people who do not need niche utilities.

Command-line interface for automation

DevToys 2.0 exposes its utilities through a CLI, so the same encoding, formatting and conversion logic you use interactively can be invoked from a terminal or wired into a Continuous Integration pipeline. That turns a GUI convenience app into something you can also lean on in scripts — a genuinely useful step up from web-based competitors that live only in a browser tab.

How Much Does DevToys Cost?

DevToys costs nothing. It is 100% free and open source under the MIT license — there is no paid tier, no “Pro” upsell, no seat pricing, no telemetry paywall, and no account to create. You download it once and use every tool forever. On Windows you can install it from the Microsoft Store or via package managers like WinGet and Chocolatey; on macOS it is available as a download (and community Homebrew formulae exist); on Linux it ships as a downloadable package. Community extensions are also free.

The only “cost” is the honest one: it is a local app you have to install and update yourself, and there is no vendor SLA or support desk — you get GitHub issues and a community. Compared with the paid alternatives, the value proposition is stark. DevUtils, the closest polished macOS competitor, is a one-time purchase of around $19–$29 per license (Mac-only). CyberChef is also free but is a web app rather than a native offline install. Against a paid, single-platform tool, DevToys gives you more platforms and a wider tool catalogue for exactly zero dollars, which is hard to argue with unless you specifically want DevUtils’ macOS-native polish and dedicated support.

Who Is DevToys Best For?

DevToys is aimed squarely at working developers — backend, frontend, DevOps, and QA engineers — who repeatedly do small data-wrangling tasks and are tired of trusting random websites with their payloads. It is equally at home for a solo indie hacker debugging an API response and for an engineer at a larger company who is not allowed to paste tokens into external sites. Because it is free and cross-platform, it is also an easy, no-approval-needed tool to standardize across a whole team.

Use DevToys if you frequently format/validate JSON, decode JWTs, convert timestamps, generate hashes or test regexes; if you care about keeping sensitive data off third-party websites; if you work across Windows, macOS and Linux and want the same toolset everywhere; or if you want to automate these conversions in CI via the CLI.

Skip DevToys if you live entirely in the browser and refuse to install desktop apps (use CyberChef instead); if you are on macOS and want the most polished, hotkey-driven, actively-supported experience with a vendor behind it (DevUtils may be worth its one-time fee); or if you need heavyweight cryptographic “recipe” chaining and forensic operations, where CyberChef’s operation-chaining model is more powerful than DevToys’ one-tool-at-a-time layout.

Best DevToys Alternatives

DevToys sits in a small but competitive niche of developer utility toolboxes. The three you will actually compare it against are DevUtils, CyberChef and It-Tools.

DevUtils

DevUtils is the polished, macOS-only paid competitor. It focuses hard on speed — global hotkeys, instant clipboard smart-detection, and a very native Mac feel — and comes with a dedicated developer and paid support. The trade-offs: it is Mac-only, and it costs roughly $19–$29 as a one-time license versus DevToys’ free-and-cross-platform model. If you are exclusively on a Mac and value polish over price, DevUtils is the strongest rival.

CyberChef

CyberChef, the free open-source “Cyber Swiss Army Knife” from GCHQ, runs entirely in the browser and excels at chaining operations into multi-step “recipes” — stacking Base64, XOR, AES and hex dumps in sequence. It is more powerful for security/forensics workflows than DevToys, but it is a web app (no native install, weaker discoverability of individual tools) and its interface is denser. Choose CyberChef for complex encoding pipelines; choose DevToys for fast, everyday, native offline tasks.

It-Tools

It-Tools is a free, open-source, self-hostable web collection of developer utilities — similar breadth to DevToys but delivered as a website you can also host yourself. It is great if you want a shareable team instance behind your firewall and dislike installing desktop software, but you lose DevToys’ true offline-desktop convenience, clipboard detection and CLI. It is the best pick when you specifically want a self-hosted web toolbox rather than an app.

Final Verdict: Is DevToys Worth It?

DevToys is one of the easiest recommendations we can make, precisely because there is nothing to lose: it is free, open source, cross-platform, and it removes a genuine security footgun — pasting sensitive data into anonymous web tools. The catalogue of 30+ offline utilities covers the overwhelming majority of the micro-tasks developers do daily, the smart clipboard detection makes it fast, and the 2.0 extension system plus CLI mean it keeps getting more capable without bloating. Over 31,000 GitHub stars is not a fluke; this is a tool developers actually keep in their dock.

It is not flawless. It is a one-tool-at-a-time app, so power users who want CyberChef-style operation chaining will find it limiting for complex pipelines. Some tools have had platform-specific rough edges — the diff/comparer feature has been flaky on macOS for stretches — and because it is a community project, support is GitHub issues rather than a help desk. If you want vendor-backed polish and instant support on Mac, the paid DevUtils is a legitimate alternative.

For everyone else, DevToys is a near-mandatory install. Download it, pin it, and stop pasting your tokens into random websites. At a price of zero and a rating of 8.3/10, the only real question is why it is not already on your machine.