An iMazing alternative for Windows, after iMazing stopped selling a licence you keep
If you are looking for an iMazing alternative, the reason is probably the one iMazing published itself:
In June 2025, we discontinued the device license and now only offer subscriptions
That is still the position: there is no lifetime option on the store any more.
What does iMazing cost in 2026?
Personal is 49.99 USD a year for five devices, Personal Family is 89.99 USD a year for twenty, and Business starts at 275 USD a year, all checked on 4 August 2026. None of the three is a one time purchase.
Set against the programs it shares a shortlist with, iMazing is decided by a different column each time: iMazing against Decipher TextMessage is a phone manager you rent or an exporter you buy, iMazing against TouchCopy is five devices rented against two computers owned, and iMazing against AnyTrans turns on the encrypted backup.
That is a reasonable price for software you open every week. It is a strange price for the thing most people came to iMazing to do, which is get one conversation off an iPhone, once, because of a dispute or a hearing or a relationship ending.
What actually changed in June 2025?
The licence stopped being something you keep and became something you rent. Before that, a device licence was a purchase: you paid once, the program kept working, and if you needed it again in three years it was still there. Now the program works while the subscription is current.
For a phone manager in daily use, that is the normal shape of software pricing and nobody should be scandalised by it. For a one time job it inverts the deal. You are paying yearly for the option to repeat a task you have no intention of repeating, or you are cancelling and losing access to the tool that produced a document you may need to explain later.
What does iMazing still do better?
A great deal, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this page worthless.
iMazing is a full phone manager. It backs up and restores devices, manages apps and their data, moves photo libraries, extracts voicemail, handles ringtones, transfers a phone to a new one, and supervises devices in a fleet. It runs on macOS as well as Windows, including Apple Silicon.
If you want one program that does everything an iPhone might need from a computer, buy iMazing. This page is not going to talk you out of a tool that is better than this one at nine jobs out of ten.
The question is whether you want those nine jobs.
What is this program, next to it?
One job, done in more detail, sold once.
ChatExport reads an Apple backup, finds the message database, and turns one conversation into a document. It does not manage your phone, move your photos or restore anything. What it spends that narrowness on is the document itself:
- Court View, a formal layout meant to be filed rather than admired, chosen at export: no chat bubbles, message numbering down the margin so a specific line can be cited by number, full timestamps to the second, raw phone numbers printed beside contact names. An attachment index exists too, as a separate switch rather than part of the layout.
- A SHA256 checksum of the finished file, shown on the success screen and written beside the export, so the document can be re-checked later by anyone. What that does and does not prove is set out in how to verify a PDF with SHA256 in 30 seconds.
- Encrypted backups read directly, with the password asked for at the backup and never written to disk.
- Recently deleted messages, on iOS 16 and later, within Apple’s roughly thirty day window, as a switch that is off by default rather than a surprise.
- Five formats: PDF in two styles, plus TXT, HTML, CSV and RSMF for an eDiscovery platform.
And one payment. The download today is a free trial; the one time licence is on sale now, and there will never be a subscription. After June 2025 that sentence is a commitment rather than a boast, so it is written here where it can be held against us.
What does “free” mean in this category?
This is the part worth reading slowly, because two of the four ways people search for an iMazing alternative include the word free, and the honest answer is that nothing here is free in the way that word usually means.
Every program in this category, including this one, gives you a limited version that stops before you have a usable document:
| Program | What you get without paying | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| iMazing | 25 messages, and 25 WhatsApp messages | 4 Aug 2026 |
| TouchCopy | the first five or six messages of each conversation | 4 Aug 2026 |
| AnyTrans | 30 items per data type, in the first three days | 4 Aug 2026 |
| Decipher TextMessage | “a few messages from each contact”, no number given | 4 Aug 2026 |
| ChatExport | 50 messages, watermarked, with the whole thread previewable | 4 Aug 2026 |
So if free is the requirement, the real free options are not these programs at all. They are screenshots, or printing from Messages on a Mac you may not own. Both work, and both cost you in a currency the price tag does not show: the free methods and what they cost in time does that arithmetic properly, and the answer for a four hundred message conversation is roughly three hours of your evening and a document with dates on some of the images and not others.
The reason to pay anyone here is not that free does not exist. It is that free produces a worse record, and for the situations that send people looking for this software, the record is the entire point.
When should you stay with iMazing?
Three cases, and they are not rare.
You are on a Mac. This program is Windows only. That is a real gap, not a temporary one that will be quietly fixed next month, and the FAQ on this site has said so since the first day.
You need the phone managed, not just read. Restoring a backup, moving to a new device, extracting app data: none of that is here and none of it is planned.
You already pay for it. If the subscription is current and covers other work, adding a second tool to save nothing is not a saving.
What is left, and it is the largest group by far, is the person with a Windows PC, an iPhone, one conversation that matters and no interest in owning a phone manager. That person was well served by a perpetual licence until June 2025 and has been looking for a replacement since.
Frequently asked questions
Does iMazing still sell a lifetime licence?
No. Checked on 4 August 2026, the store offers Personal at 49.99 USD a year, Personal Family at 89.99 a year and Business from 275 a year, with no perpetual option. The vendor’s licensing policy page states that the device licence was discontinued in June 2025.
Do both programs read the same data?
Broadly yes, and that is worth saying plainly. iMazing pulls messaging data from an iTunes or iMazing backup, and this program reads an Apple backup too, so neither is doing something the other cannot. The differences are in what the finished document carries and in how you pay, not in whether the messages are genuine.
Can it open a backup iMazing made?
Only if that backup sits in the folder Apple’s own software uses. This program scans the two standard Apple backup locations on Windows and nowhere else, so a backup another tool keeps in a folder of its own will not be found. If the document matters, the reliable route is a backup made with Apple’s software, and where Windows stores iPhone backups shows exactly where that lands and why nothing inside it is named after the messages.
What about WhatsApp?
Both handle it, by different roads. iMazing reads WhatsApp out of the phone backup. This program reads WhatsApp’s own export file, which is slower to set up and has one advantage that matters to a lot of people: it works from an Android handset, because the file is written by WhatsApp rather than by the phone.
The comparison across the whole category, including the two programs that reconstruct conversations from screen recordings rather than reading the database, is in the best iPhone message export software of 2026.
Before spending anything with anyone, open a finished document. The sample exports are this program’s real output over an invented custody dispute, so you can see the Court View layout, the timestamps and the checksum page without installing a thing.