Compare
Homedex vs Everything (voidtools)
Updated
Short answer
Use Everything if you know a file's name: it's free and finds names across every drive almost instantly. Use Homedex when you don't: it searches the text inside screenshots and scanned PDFs, groups downloads by the website they came from, understands plain-English queries, finds duplicates by content and shows big previews. Many people use both.
| Homedex | Everything | |
|---|---|---|
| Instant file-name search | Yes | Yes, the fastest there is |
| Searches every drive | Folders you choose | All NTFS drives |
| Plain-English queries | Yes | No, uses its own search syntax |
| Text inside images and scanned PDFs | Yes, on-device OCR | No |
| Downloads grouped by source website | Yes | No |
| Duplicate finder | By content fingerprint, with keep/trash | By name or size (dupe: functions) |
| Visual previews | Big previews, quick look, built-in player | Thumbnail view, preview pane |
| Price | One-time payment | Free |
| Platforms | Windows | Windows |
Where Everything wins
Raw speed on names. Everything reads the NTFS file table directly, so it lists matching names from millions of files as you type, for free. If your searches are “invoice_2026.pdf”, it's hard to beat.
Where Homedex wins
- Finding a screenshot by the words in it.
- Finding a download by remembering it came from Gmail or WhatsApp.
- Finding and safely trashing duplicate copies, with a suggested keeper.
- Seeing photos, videos and documents as big previews instead of rows.
Questions
- Is Homedex a replacement for Everything?
- Not for pure file-name search, where Everything is excellent and free. Homedex covers what name search can't: content, sources, duplicates and visual browsing.
- Can Everything search text inside images?
- No. Everything searches file names and, optionally, file contents of text files. It does not run OCR on images.
Every file you own, easy to find.
Homedex is a visual file browser for Windows. Big previews, plain-English search, text inside screenshots, duplicate cleanup — all on your device.
Related
- Homedex vs File ExplorerFile Explorer manages files. Homedex helps you see and find them: big previews, plain-English search, text in images, duplicates and cleanup. Here's how they compare.
- Search the text inside your screenshots, photos and PDFsHomedex reads the text in every screenshot, photo and scanned PDF on your computer, so you can find them by what they say. Offline, on Windows.
- Find any download by the website it came fromHomedex groups your downloads by their source, like Gmail, WhatsApp or Google Drive, so you can find a file by remembering where you got it.