Invisiwind and the free ways to hide a window, compared honestly

Free tools for this exist, they are maintained, and they work. Any comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading, so here is the honest version — what each one is, the single architectural difference that separates them, and when the free option is simply the better choice.

We make one of the paid options, so weigh this accordingly. Everything below is checkable.

The tools

Invisiwind is the serious one. 466 stars, 72 forks, last commit August 2026, distributed through winget. It hides windows from full-screen sharing on Windows 10 v2004 and above, and its README is unusually straight about how and at what cost.

WindowSharingHider and winhider are smaller GitHub projects doing broadly the same job with less around them. There is also a Microsoft Store app called Hide During Screen Sharing.

Browser extensions — the WhatsApp blur family — solve a different problem in a different way and are covered separately.

The difference that actually matters

Every tool here is aiming at the same Windows feature: a flag called WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE that tells screen capture to skip a window. The catch is that a program can normally only set that flag on its own windows. You cannot simply reach over and set it on somebody else’s.

There are two ways around that, and the choice is the whole comparison.

Invisiwind injects a DLL into the target process and calls the API from inside it. Its README says so plainly:

The tool performs dll injection to SetWindowDisplayAffinity to WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE.

That produces the cleanest possible result — the real window is genuinely excluded, with no overlay to position or keep in sync. It also has a consequence the README states immediately afterwards:

This software may be detected as a virus/trojan by your antivirus due to the fact that it performs dll injection. This is a false positive and can be safely ignored.

That is an honest warning and almost certainly an accurate one. Injection is precisely the behaviour heuristic scanners exist to flag. The question it leaves you is whether you want a tool injecting a library into your banking app or your browser. That is a judgement, not a defect.

Hushglass does not inject anything. From its own source header:

A “decoy” overlay — an opaque cover with a “Private content protected” badge — is placed exactly over it. This overlay IS captured, so viewers see the cover. A “clone” overlay showing a live mirror of the real window is placed on top, marked with WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE so capture APIs skip it. Only you see it. Both overlays are click-through.

Every window involved belongs to us, so no other process is touched. The cost is that there are overlays to keep positioned — across monitors, across DPI changes, when windows move — which is real engineering work that can go wrong in ways injection cannot.

Side by side

Where the free tools win

Not a grudging list. These are real:

• Price. Zero, permanently, for the full feature.
• Auditability. You can read exactly what Invisiwind does. You cannot do that with us, and “trust us” is a weaker claim than “here is the code” — particularly for a privacy tool.
• The result is cleaner in principle. A genuinely excluded window cannot be mis-positioned, because there is nothing to position.
• No badge. If you would rather viewers saw nothing at all than a labelled cover, injection gives you that. Our badge is deliberate, and some people will not want it.

Where we think we win

• Nothing is injected into your other applications. For a lot of people that is the whole argument, especially when the window being protected is a banking app.
• The antivirus story is settled rather than explained. Both our binaries were submitted to Microsoft as incorrectly detected and both came back cleared, detection removed. We still expect a browser warning, because that is reputation, not detection — but you are not being asked to ignore a scanner.
• It is usable by someone who does not own AutoHotkey. A window list, a Protect button, a built-in shortcut.
• Later windows from the same app are picked up on Pro — chat pop-outs, extra dialogs — which Invisiwind’s README says it does not do.
• The cover says what it is. Viewers see that something is deliberately private, rather than a gap. That makes it a poor tool for deceiving anyone, which we consider a feature.

Choose the free one if

You are comfortable in a terminal, you accept DLL injection into your applications, you want to read the source, you only need one or two windows hidden and you do not need anything to happen automatically. Invisiwind is a good piece of work and that is a perfectly sensible answer.

Choose ours if

You want an installer and a button, you would rather nothing was injected into your other apps, you want an app’s pop-ups covered without selecting each one, or you want the antivirus question already answered rather than explained away.

Either way, verify it on a second device before you rely on it: join a meeting from your phone, share your entire screen, and look at the phone rather than at your own preview. That advice applies to whichever tool you pick, including ours.

Hushglass — Windows 10 version 2004 or later, free for one protected window.