UnifiedRGB: All your RGB. One app. Zero bloat.

What it does

59 effects, any device, any zone

Rainbows, meteors, plasma, aurora, candle, rain, Matrix. Audio-reactive bars and pulses that move the instant sound does. Keys that ripple when you press them. Screen ambient, Wallpaper Engine capture, and Razer Chroma game sync with no Razer software installed.

Run one effect everywhere, or a different one on each fan ring.

Colors you actually chose

A real wheel, with brightness, hex, and RGB entry. The Palette Library keeps presets and your own sets, and imports straight from a coolors.co link or a pasted list of hex codes.

Color calibration trims each device until the same white looks the same on all of them, whatever LEDs and plastic its vendor used.

The Palette Library showing preset palettes, save-current, and coolors.co import

A dashboard on your pump LCD

Drag CPU and GPU temps, clocks, date, fan RPM, network throughput, weather, and what's playing with its album art onto a Thermalright 240×320 screen. Put your own image or GIF behind them. Build several screens and sequence them.

A profile switch changes the lights and the pump screen together. If the panel's firmware locks up and the screen goes dark, the app restarts the panel itself.

The pump LCD designer: time, date and both temperatures over an animated background, with the widgets you can add

Fan curves that respect your other tools

Curves follow the CPU, the GPU, or whichever runs hotter. Live gauges, per-fan profiles, drag-to-edit points, and a failsafe at 96 °C CPU or 90 °C GPU that hands the fans back to the BIOS.

Fans left on Auto are never touched, so your BIOS profiles keep working.

With a Thermal Grizzly WireView Pro II on the GPU's power connector, you also see board power and the current on every pin.

The Cooling pane with CPU and GPU gauges, GPU power per connector pin, a fan list, and a drag-to-edit curve editor

One effect across your whole desk

Arrange your devices the way they sit in front of you, then run an effect on the desk instead of on each device. A wave rolls off the keyboard and up the case fans as one image, in the order they are really in.

It is also where you say where a device's LEDs physically are: a strip taped along a GPU is a line, a fan is a ring.

Lights that react, and know when to go dark

App rules, schedules, and rules on temperature, load, fan speed or a wireless battery. Lock the PC or put it to sleep and the lights go off until you're back. Counter-Strike 2 drives them from the game's own state, not by watching your screen: your health, every hit, kills, flashbangs, and a bomb that pulses faster as the fuse runs down.

When the lighting changes and you didn't change it, the activity log says which rule did.

Settings, Automation: the activity log, lights off when away, app rules and sensor rules

Shows

Step through your profiles on a timer: lights, pump screen and wallpaper together.

Works with your other tools

Home Assistant, Stream Deck and anything else written for OpenRGB can drive your lights.

Hands your hardware back

On exit, each device stays on a color, turns off, or goes back to its own profile.

Looks after itself

Devices that drop off after sleep or a replug come back on their own.

Light on resources

About 14% of one core in the tray, with seven devices and the pump screen animating.

Profiles and hotkeys

Ctrl+Alt+1…9 switches profiles, even in games. Ctrl+Alt+↑/↓ sets brightness.

Your setup in one file

Back up profiles, screens, shows and rules, and restore them on another PC.

Wallpaper Engine and Chroma

Chroma games and Wallpaper Engine light your devices. No Razer software needed.

Updates without a launcher

One click, checked against the release's SHA-256. Or turn the check off.

How it compares

These are the other cross-vendor tools, built to drive your whole machine rather than one company's products. Single-brand software (iCUE, Synapse, L-Connect, RGB Fusion, Armoury Crate) isn't compared here, because it only lights its own hardware. That's the pile this replaces.

Every claim is about what the software does, not how good it is. Where a rival wins, that's on this page too.

	UnifiedRGB	OpenRGB	SignalRGB	Artemis	Aurora
Price	Free, all features	Free	Free tier, paid Pro	Free	Free
License	GPLv2, open source	GPLv2, open source	Closed source	PolyForm Noncommercial source available	MIT, open source
Lighting across brands	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Breadth of devices	~12 native families, plus the OpenRGB bridge	1,200+ devices	Very large library	Per-brand plugins	Major peripheral brands
How it reaches hardware	Directly (HID, WinUSB, SMBus, I²C)	Directly	Its own drivers	RGB.NET plugins	SDK wrappers Colore, RGB.NET
Uses OpenRGB for the rest	One checkbox downloads and runs it for you; devices we drive natively are excluded	It is OpenRGB	No, conflicts with it	Yes, once you install OpenRGB and start its server	Yes, once you install OpenRGB and start its server
Fan curves	Yes, free	No, lighting only	Pro feature	No	No
Temps and monitoring	Yes, free	No	Pro feature	No	No
LCD screen dashboards	Yes, free	No	Custom faces are Pro	No	No
Game lighting sync	Chroma games, no Razer software	Third-party plugins	Many integrations	Deep profile engine	Its whole specialty
Other apps can drive your lights	Yes, built in speaks the OpenRGB protocol, so tools written for it work unchanged	Yes, it defines the protocol	It connects to OpenRGB, rather than being driven	It connects to OpenRGB, rather than being driven	It connects to OpenRGB, rather than being driven
Reacts to what is happening in a game	Yes, from the game's own state CS2, via Valve's Game State Integration	No, lighting only	Yes, by reading your screen	Yes, through its plugins	Yes, its specialty
Account to use it	Never	Never	Sign-in for Pro	Never	Never
Ads or upsells	None	None	Ad-free is a Pro feature	None	None
Platforms	Windows 10/11 (x64)	Windows, Linux, macOS	Windows	Windows	Windows

Where the others win

If one of these matters more to you, use that tool. You can run UnifiedRGB alongside most of them.

OpenRGB supports far more hardware and runs on Linux and macOS. If your gear isn't on our list, OpenRGB probably has it. Several of our drivers began as ports of its GPLv2 code, which is why this project is GPLv2.
SignalRGB has a bigger device library, a huge catalogue of effects, and more per-game integrations. We have a desk canvas now, but theirs is the more polished one and has had far longer to prove itself.
Artemis has the deepest customisation engine of the group. Layers, conditions, and data bindings put it closer to visual scripting than an effect picker.
Aurora owns per-game lighting. It reads real in-game state across a long list of titles; we read it for Counter-Strike 2 and nothing else yet.
Vendor apps remain the only route to firmware updates, macros, and actuation points. We can now leave a device on a color or hand it back to its own saved profile when we close, but they are still the ones that write those profiles in the first place. They also have support staff.
UnifiedRGB is young. Public since September 2026. Short device list, unsigned binary, small community. If you need something proven across thousands of builds today, this isn't it yet.

What about JackNet RGB Sync?

It's retired. rgbsync.com says so outright, and its team went on to build SignalRGB.

It also shows the difference in approach. JackNet drove the vendor apps through their SDKs, so iCUE, Aura, and Synapse all had to stay installed underneath it. UnifiedRGB talks to the hardware itself. That's more work per device, which is why our list is shorter, and it's why nothing else is left running on your machine.

Supported hardware

Native drivers, talking straight to the hardware. Anything not listed can still run through the optional OpenRGB bridge, and hardware we drive natively is never handed to it.

Device	How it's driven
Corsair Strafe MK.2	HID
SteelSeries Apex Pro TKL Gen 3 and Apex Pro TKL (2023)	HID
Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2 boards (IT5711, IT8297) and their ARGB headers	HID
Logitech G403 HERO	HID++ 2.0
Razer Basilisk V3 Pro and V3 Pro 35K (lighting, battery)	HID, no Synapse
Razer Kraken V3 X headset	HID, no Synapse
SayoDevice E1	HID
MSI GeForce RTX cards (Gaming Trio and similar)	I²C via NvAPI
ENE DRAM (G.Skill and others)	SMBus via PawnIO
Lian Li SL-INF wireless fans pair once in L-Connect 3, then close it	WinUSB and RF
Lian Li SL-Infinity wired hub	HID
Thermalright pump LCD (Frozen Warframe, 240×320)	HID
AMD Ryzen CPU temperature	PawnIO
NVIDIA GPU temperature and fan control	NvAPI
Motherboard fan headers	Super I/O via PawnIO
Thermal Grizzly WireView Pro II (GPU power, per-pin current)	USB serial

Missing your hardware? Open a device request. Protocol notes and USB captures are the fastest route to a driver.

Read this before you install

It needs administrator

Direct hardware access means kernel-level access. CPU temperature, DRAM lighting, and motherboard fans need PawnIO, a signed, module-constrained kernel driver, which the app offers to install with one click. Know that before you say yes.

DRAM lighting talks raw SMBus

It follows OpenRGB's proven ENE detection and writes only to controllers that have identified themselves as ENE. As with every tool in this category, writing to the wrong SMBus device can permanently damage hardware.

The download is unsigned

A signing certificate costs money this project doesn't take, so SmartScreen warns on first run. Click More info, then Run anyway. Every release publishes a SHA-256, and you can build it yourself.

Questions people actually ask

Is it really free? What's the catch?

Free, with no paid tier to upsell you to. The whole thing is on GitHub under GPLv2, including the reverse-engineered device protocols. The catch is the honest one: it supports far less hardware than the big tools, and one person maintains it.

Does it phone home?

Once at startup, to check GitHub Releases for a new version, and you can switch that off. Everything else follows something you did: downloading an update, installing PawnIO, turning on the OpenRGB bridge, or adding a weather widget to the pump screen, which asks wttr.in every 15 minutes and so shares your IP address with it. No telemetry, no analytics, no account. The "Report a problem" button writes a file to your Desktop and opens a pre-filled GitHub issue, and nothing is uploaded unless you post it. This website has no trackers and loads nothing from third parties either.

Why is the download so large?

It bundles the whole .NET runtime, so there's nothing to install and no framework to keep in sync. One file that runs. Turn on Start with Windows and it copies itself to Program Files, so the copy that runs as administrator at logon is one other programs can't replace.

Can I run it next to iCUE, L-Connect, or OpenRGB?

Usually, but two programs writing the same device will fight over it and the lighting flickers between them. Let UnifiedRGB own what it drives natively and close the vendor app. Lian Li wireless fans are the exception to "usually": pair them once in L-Connect 3, then close it, because both want the receiver. UnifiedRGB's own OpenRGB bridge never touches hardware it already drives.

My device isn't supported. Now what?

First check Settings, Devices: if the hardware is plugged in but another program holds it, or it needs the sensor driver, UnifiedRGB now says so there, with the fix. Otherwise try the OpenRGB bridge. It covers over a thousand devices and turns on with one checkbox, which downloads OpenRGB from its official releases. If that misses too, open a device request. Captures and protocol notes make a driver far more likely.

Does it work on Linux?

No. It's a Windows app, and the kernel-access parts are Windows-specific. On Linux, OpenRGB is the right answer.

All your RGB.One app. Zero bloat.