Lively Wallpaper vs. Gloomia: Comparing the Free, Windows-Only Alternative in 2026
If you've searched for a free alternative to Wallpaper Engine, you've almost certainly run into Lively Wallpaper. It's free, it's open source, it lives on the Microsoft Store and on GitHub, and it has a loyal following of people who like that it doesn't ask for a Steam account or a dollar. It's a genuinely good piece of software. It also does a fairly different job than Gloomia does, and the two get compared often enough that it's worth laying out honestly where they overlap and where they don't, rather than pretending one simply beats the other.
We already covered how Gloomia stacks up against Wallpaper Engine and its Steam Workshop. Lively Wallpaper is a different kind of comparison, because it isn't a paid catalog app at all. It's closer to a general-purpose media player for your desktop background.
What Lively Wallpaper actually does well
Lively Wallpaper's core idea is flexibility. Point it at a video file, a GIF, an animated web page, a shader, or in some cases a game, and it will run that as your desktop background. It also ships a built-in machine learning model that estimates depth from an ordinary flat photo and turns it into a real-time parallax effect that shifts as you move your mouse, which is a clever trick for turning a single still image into something that feels three-dimensional. It can double any wallpaper as a Windows screensaver with one toggle, it's scriptable from the command line, and being open source, it's had years of community contributions layered on top of the original project.
None of that requires an account, a purchase, or a subscription. If what you want is maximum control over exactly which file plays on your desktop, and you're comfortable finding or building that file yourself, Lively Wallpaper gives you a wide-open toolset for free.
Where Lively Wallpaper stops: Windows only
The most concrete limitation is platform. Lively Wallpaper is built on WinUI 3 and only runs on Windows; there's no official macOS or Linux release. If your desktop and your laptop run different operating systems, or you switch between a Windows gaming rig and a Mac for work, Lively Wallpaper simply isn't there for half of that setup. Gloomia runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and a Pro license activates on up to three devices regardless of which of those operating systems each one runs. The macOS and Linux breakdown covers what is and isn't different across platforms if you're weighing a cross-platform setup specifically.
Real data versus arbitrary media: two different ideas of a "live" wallpaper
Lively Wallpaper's definition of "live" is about motion: a video loops, a GIF loops, a shader animates continuously. Gloomia's astronomy wallpapers push that definition further by tying the scene to real, current data rather than a looping animation. Orrery places the planets in their true positions right now, calculated from actual orbital mechanics rather than a pre-rendered loop. Asteroid Watch plots real near-Earth objects using NASA/JPL CNEOS close-approach data, over Earth as seen from space. Constellations draws the actual night sky visible from your location, with real stars and named constellations in their correct places.
That's a structurally different thing from playing a video file on loop, however good the video is. Lively Wallpaper can absolutely run a beautiful space video someone else made. It can't generate a scene that reflects where the planets or the near-Earth asteroids actually are on the day you're looking at your desktop, because that requires the wallpaper engine itself to calculate and update the scene, not just play a file. The astronomy wallpapers breakdown goes into how each of these data-driven scenes actually works.
Audio-reactivity isn't something Lively does out of the box
The other structural difference is audio. Several of Gloomia's wallpapers, Aurora Flow, Spectrum Bars, Radial Pulse, and Waveform Ribbon, listen to whatever audio is playing on your system and change shape, color, and intensity in response to it in real time. That's not a video with music baked in; the visual response depends on whatever you're actually playing at that moment, whether it's a playlist, a game, or a call.
Lively Wallpaper doesn't have a built-in equivalent to this. You could, in principle, find or build a shader that reacts to system audio and load it as a custom wallpaper, since Lively does support shaders and web content. But that's a project you'd be assembling yourself rather than a feature you switch on, which is a fair trade for a free, fully open tool but a real gap against a purpose-built audio-reactive scene.
Pausing on battery and fullscreen: similar instincts, different guarantees
Both apps understand that a continuously rendered wallpaper shouldn't fight your GPU while you're gaming. Lively Wallpaper can pause when another application or game goes fullscreen, and Gloomia does the same automatically for every wallpaper with no setting to find. Where Gloomia goes a step further is battery power specifically: every Gloomia wallpaper pauses automatically the instant your device switches off mains power, a behavior built into the app itself rather than something you configure per wallpaper. If you're weighing this mainly because you're worried about a laptop's battery or GPU load, the battery and GPU impact breakdown covers the numbers in more detail, including which of Gloomia's own wallpapers are lightest and heaviest to run.
Price: free and open source versus a small one-time fee
There's no getting around the obvious point: Lively Wallpaper is free, full stop, with no tier to unlock. Gloomia has a free tier too, three wallpapers free forever with no account required, Starfield, Planet System, and Hue Drift, but the rest of the catalog sits behind Gloomia Pro, which costs $2.99 a year or $9.99 as a one-time lifetime purchase (an early-adopter price, normally $14.99), delivered as a license key by email that activates on up to three devices, with a 30-day refund window if it turns out not to be for you. If your budget is genuinely zero, Lively Wallpaper's price is impossible to beat by definition. The free versus Pro breakdown lays out exactly what the free tier covers and what unlocking Pro actually changes, if the free tier alone might already cover what you need.
Picking between them
These aren't really competing for the same person in every case. If you're on Windows, you enjoy assembling your own wallpaper from a video or a shader you found or built, and you don't need audio-reactivity or real astronomical data, Lively Wallpaper is a capable, free, open source tool with nothing to lose by trying. If you want a catalog of finished, purpose-built scenes that respond to real data or real audio without you having to source or configure anything, and you want that to work identically whether you're on Windows, macOS, or Linux, that's the gap Gloomia is built to fill. Both are honest, well-made pieces of software aimed at a similar itch: a desktop that isn't just sitting still.
Frequently asked questions
Is Lively Wallpaper actually free?
Yes. Lively Wallpaper is free and open source, distributed through the Microsoft Store and GitHub, with no paid tier or in-app purchase. Everything the app can do is available from the moment you install it.
Does Lively Wallpaper work on macOS or Linux?
No. Lively Wallpaper is built on WinUI 3 and only runs on Windows. There is no official macOS or Linux build. Gloomia runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, so the same wallpaper and the same license follow you across operating systems.
What can Lively Wallpaper do that Gloomia can't?
Lively Wallpaper turns almost any file into a wallpaper: a video, a GIF, a web page, a shader, even a game, and it can generate a real-time parallax 3D effect from a flat 2D image using a built-in depth-estimation model. Gloomia doesn't accept arbitrary media files or generate parallax from photos; it ships a fixed catalog of built-in scenes plus a photo wallpaper mode and a 3D model viewer for your own .glb or .fbx files.
What can Gloomia do that Lively Wallpaper can't?
Gloomia's astronomy wallpapers use real data: Orrery places the planets in their true current positions, Asteroid Watch plots real NASA/JPL CNEOS close-approach data, and Constellations draws the actual night sky for your location. Gloomia also has audio-reactive wallpapers that respond to whatever is playing on your system, and it runs on macOS and Linux as well as Windows. Lively Wallpaper doesn't offer real-data astronomy scenes or built-in audio reactivity, and it doesn't run outside Windows.
Which one costs less, Lively Wallpaper or Gloomia?
Lively Wallpaper costs nothing at all. Gloomia has a free tier with three wallpapers free forever (Starfield, Planet System, Hue Drift), and unlocking the full catalog costs $2.99 a year or $9.99 as a one-time lifetime purchase (an early-adopter price, normally $14.99). If price alone is the deciding factor and you're on Windows, Lively Wallpaper is the cheaper option by definition.
Do both apps pause when I'm gaming or on battery?
Both pause automatically when a display goes fullscreen with another app or a game, so neither one fights your GPU during a match. Gloomia additionally pauses every wallpaper automatically the moment your device switches to battery power, which is a guarantee built into the app rather than a setting you have to find and enable yourself.