Get a List of Software Installed on Your PC with a Single Line of PowerShell

Suppose someone asks you for a list of applications you have installed on your computer. To get this information, what’s the first thing you would think to use? Third-party program? Not us, we have PowerShell.

How to Get a List of Installed Software on Your PC

Getting a list of installed software is as simple as using this straightforward WMI query.

Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product | Select-Object -Property Name

You will probably want to export that to a file though, which is also easy enough — we’ll send the output using the > symbol and adding the path to a new text file that we want to create. Make sure that path(C:\List\) is exist in your  C drive or you can select any path you want.

Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_product | Select-Object -Property Name > C:\List\List_of_Applications.txt

What makes using Power Shell really neat is that if you do this on two different machines, you can easily compare the software installed on them.

C:\Users\Ravi> Compare-Object -ReferenceObject (Get-Content C:\a\Ravi_PC.txt) -DifferenceObject (Get-Content C:\a\Promod_PC.txt)

Any entries with a side indicator pointing to the right (=>) mean that the software is installed on my laptop but  not on my Lab PC, and any entries with a side indicator pointing to the left (<=) mean that the software is installed on my Lab PC but not on my laptop.