What are sharewares ? How are they different from freewares ?

There is a wide variety of software available on-line which come free of cost. However, many of them are often confused by users. For example, freewares and sharewares are few of them. Let us get into the details of how are these software different from each other. A freeware is a copyrighted software which is available to users for free. They can even be further distributed without obtaining any fee, however copyright laws do apply to them. Sharewares, on the other hand, are also available for free but are used for promotional purposes by many organizations.

Sharewares are some sort of trial software which lack few advanced features of an otherwise full-featured complicated payed software. Once the trial version of a shareware expires, users are required to purchase full featured version of the same by paying money. Prime motive of shareware providers is to promote future sales by providing users with a free software which gives them an insight into the working of that software. Though often used interchangeably, the two software are truly different from each other. While, both of them can be downloaded and used for free, users will have to pay a specific amount to enjoy full benefits of shareware software. Therefore, users need to pay a price for continual usage of shareware applications.

As developers of freeware are not earning any incentive for their development, these software are often stagnant. Whereas, sharewares are continuously being developed and evolved to suit user requirements. Moreover, sharewares do have certain restrictions in terms of being further shared among friends. Users can only share an unregistered version of a shareware software. But, once they have registered that software, they cannot further share it without any restrictions.        

Users must be cautious about downloading and using freeware and shareware applications. As no initial cost is associated with them, they could be misused by hackers to distribute a malicious payload. That is why, many freewares are often associated with computer viruses and malwares and for which the computer required an effective Antivirus Software against them.