Start11 v2 review: Making the Windows 11 Start menu actually useful

As much as I love Windows 11, there's no denying that it's fairly restrictive in what it lets you customize by default. That's where tools like Start11 come in, and with the recent release of Start11 v2, I was drawn to try it out and see what it can do in terms of customizing Windows 11, specifically the Start menu.

What I found is that Start11 provides a ton of options to customize the Windows 11 Start menu and taskbar, and it can make a huge difference if you want to maximize what you get out of the operating system. You can do so much more with the Start menu, not only in terms of how it looks but also in how your apps and files are organized and how many of them you can easily reach without too much hassle. Considering it's a relatively inexpensive piece of software, it's an easy recommendation for anybody who feels that the standard Start menu is too limited.

About this review: Stardock provided us with a Start11 v2 license for testing purposes upon release. The company did not ask for a review, nor did it have any input in its contents.

Pricing and availability

Start11 has been around since the launch of Windows 11 back in 2021, and predecessors existed before that on Windows 10. Start11 v2, however, launched earlier this year on Nov. 8. The program will cost you $6.99 for a perpetual license, meaning you can use Start11 v2 forever with that single purchase. If you have Start11 v1, you can get the upgrade for just $3.99.

Personalization

You can make the Start menu look like almost anything you want

As the name suggests, Start11 is heavily focused on customizing the Start menu, and it does an excellent job. Start11 v2 is especially great because it adds three new styles, and in my opinion, they're the best ones yet. The older ones include Windows 7, Windows 10, and a standard Windows 11 style, plus a Windows 7 variant with a modernized look. These options are great if you prefer an older Start menu, and I'll say the Windows 7 style does bring some nostalgic feelings.

But to me, the highlights are the new Windows Pro, Windows App, and Windows Launcher styles. These all tweak the standard Windows 11 menu differently to make it more focused or more capable, depending on your preference. My favorite is definitely Windows App style, which lets me see my pinned area next to the list of all the apps installed on my PC. I feel like I can access my apps so much more quickly this way.

Once you get past the general style choice, there's so much more to dive into in terms of customization. In fact, you can customize so much that it would be crazy to dive into all of it here. In terms of looks, Start11 allows you to choose a custom color for the background of the Start menu or even use a custom image to serve as the background for an even more eccentric style. You can also adjust the transparency level, which is something I wish Microsoft would let me do, so the background shines through even more. You can also choose the color of highlighted items.

As you dive deeper into the customization options, you can do even more. Each style has different settings, so you can customize the shortcuts that appear. Some of the styles based on Windows 11 let you create groups and tabs, and you can change the background color and transparency for each group and tab, making them even easier to identify at a glance and adding a touch of personality to the design. Start11 v2 even adds a new option called icon tinting, which basically forces the icons of apps inside a group or tab to have the color you choose, so you can theme the entire group to a specific color. I absolutely loved this option from the moment it was announced. Not every style will offer as many options because there's not as much you can do while keeping the Windows 7 style, for example, but you still have a ton to choose from.

The taskbar has tons of options, too

Even though the Start menu is the focus of the Start11 experience, the taskbar also gets a ton of love. By default, Start11 won't do too much, but there are still many options. Just like the Start menu, you can choose a custom color or texture and adjust the transparency of the taskbar, allowing the background to shine through, and it looks as great as it does with the Start menu. In both cases, you can also choose to enable or disable background blur or use the official Mica material from Microsoft. Still, one thing I wish I could do is adjust the intensity of the blur effect. As it is, the blur effect is a little strong, and I feel like it still affects the background too much. Some more granular controls would be great here.

Even though the Start menu is the focus of the Start11 experience, the taskbar also gets a ton of love.

One thing it can also do is add rounded corners to the taskbar and turn it into a floating UI. This can steal some pixels away from your screen real estate, but it's very minor and I love how it looks. Start11 lets you choose the amount of padding on the X and Y axes, so you can reduce how much space is used up by the rounded corners and the floating design. I love the rounded floating taskbar, so I'm okay with losing a few pixels.

There's a bit more you can do, like aligning the taskbar at the top of the screen (but not the sides), something Microsoft no longer allows in Windows 11 natively, or choosing a custom icon for the Start menu. And even more options are unlocked once you enable the enhanced Start11 taskbar. This lets you resize the taskbar, autohide it, customize how taskbar buttons should be combined, disable animations, and even change the font of taskbar app labels. I didn't have a use for the enhanced taskbar, as most of the cool personalization settings are available without it. There is one cool feature that the enhanced taskbar allows, though, which is centering app icons on the taskbar while aligning the Start icon to the left.

It's worth mentioning that Start11 also works with other Stardock apps like WindowBlinds, so if you use a custom theme from that app, it will work beautifully with the Start11 Start menu and taskbar. That may depend on your chosen theme, but in my experience, it works very well.

Organization and productivity

Groups, tabs, and pages

As important as looks are, Start11 is about so much more, specifically its productivity-boosting settings. As I mentioned, my primary Start menu style is the new Windows App. I've already noted how you can create groups of apps, but you can also create tabs in a group, which basically act as their own groups. This is in addition to folders, a feature that Windows 11 offers natively; you can even create brand-new pages where you can have more groups and tabs with more content.

With a Start menu that can actually display all my apps in an organized and beautiful way, I find myself using the mouse a bit more to launch what I want.

But even without all that, because the Start11 menu is scrollable, you can have all the content you want and just scroll through it more naturally. It's really up to how you want to organize things, but if you want to fit a lot more content and keep it all organized with this approach, it works across all Windows 11-based styles.

One thing I've been finding over the past couple of years is that I use my keyboard more and more to find the things I want more quickly. But with a Start menu that can actually display all my apps in an organized and beautiful way, I find myself using the mouse a bit more to launch what I want.

You can bring folders to the Start menu and taskbar

Start11 then goes beyond just allowing you to have apps in your Start menu. A bigger highlight is that you can add folders from your PC to the Start menu as well. And I don't mean just pinning links to that folder (which you can also do) — you can add folders as groups, too. This makes it so that the contents of that folder are displayed directly on the Start menu, so you don't have to open File Explorer, navigate to the folder you want, and find what you're looking for. Start11 can also create an apps folder, like one for your Steam software, so your game library is automatically added and updated on the Start menu. You can even make it so that subfolders open as a menu, too. It's seriously amazing how much you can tailor the experience to make it work just right for you.

It's seriously amazing how much you can tailor the experience to make it work just right for you.

This applies to the taskbar, too. You can pin files and folders to the taskbar, but most notably, there's a new option to pin a folder menu, where, just like above, you can make the entire folder structure accessible straight from the taskbar without the need for File Explorer. And even the quick folder shortcuts in the Start menu can be displayed this way. By default, they're just links (similar to the native Start menu), but you can make those folders display as a menu, too. It's really cool.

Custom filtered folders

One extra thing worth mentioning is that Start11 also lets you create "custom filtered folders" that you can pin to the Start menu or taskbar. Custom filtered folders are essentially folders on your PC, but with inclusion and exclusion rules of your choice applied, so you only see certain types of content. Say, for example, you want to see your Pictures folder, specifically JPG files. You can create a folder that links to the Pictures folder and add "jpg" as an inclusion rule so only images appear.

Filters use RegEx (regular expressions), so you'll need to be familiar with them, but it works pretty well given those limitations. Start11 should have the ability to filter out any files and only show subfolders, which isn't the easiest thing to do using RegEx, but it's still an overall cool feature.

Search

A better search experience than Windows, for the most part

Start11 also features built-in search, which works better than the Windows tool in most areas. Start11 removes web searches from the results, which resulted in far fewer instances of unnecessarily launching Edge. I like how it's more focused on finding local files and that it shows more results in one go, while Windows 11 highlights a couple of recommended results and makes it harder to find any others.

There are a couple of things that I do miss from native Windows search, though. One is the ability to run simple calculations and conversions straight from the search bar. I convert from inches to millimeters fairly often, and it's a little annoying that I now have to open the Calculator app each time to do it. Another thing I miss is that Windows 11's search, as bad as it can be, does learn from my usage, so if there are multiple matches for a search and I select a secondary one, it will prioritize that going forward. Start11 doesn't seem to do that, which sometimes hindered my ability to quickly launch apps.

One cool thing about search in Start11, though, is that it can integrate with Everything, a custom search engine for finding your files on Windows. I haven't used Everything, but from what I could find, it's a fast, lightweight search engine that updates in real-time and can find pretty much anything on your PC quickly, So, if you want to use it, it might just be a better option than the standard search engine. Start11 can also find Microsoft Edge tabs in search results, which is useful if you use Microsoft's browser.

Extras

Some additional settings are available

Beyond the sheer customization of the Start menu and taskbar, Start11 itself can be customized in how it behaves. For example, you can choose when you want the Start11 menu to open or when the native Windows Start menu should appear. By default, pressing the right Windows key will bring up the Windows start menu instead of the custom one. There are a few other triggers you can customize, so you decide when one menu appears over another. You can also choose if Start11 or Windows search should be used by default when you start typing in the Start menu.

Beyond the sheer customization of the Start menu and taskbar, Start11 itself can be customized in how it behaves.

One big addition in Start11 v2 is that you can now back up your settings to a file. So, if you need to uninstall the app, move PCs, or have multiple licenses, you can customize one PC, backup your settings, and restore them on another. It's definitely been useful as I move between PCs.

There's a learning curve

Unfortunately, for all the options it offers, Start1 can be a bit overwhelming, and at first, not everything is super intuitive. There are a ton of options, and they're either crammed together or not laid out in the best way. For instance, the Start menu visual customization settings are a link on the same page as the more functional settings, but it would make more sense to have the visual settings and the layout/organization settings on the main page. Because the visual settings are so vast, it doesn't make sense to me for it to be a sub-page of an already long page of settings.

In some cases, not everything is where you might expect. For example, if you add a folder as a group in the Start menu, any subfolders will, by default, be links. To open that folder as a menu, you need to right-click it and enable that option. If you want the same behavior for folder menus on the taskbar, you have to enable the "open subfolders as menus" option in the Start11 settings window. This will applky automatically to all subfolders in a pinned folder (the Start menu approach lets you apply this setting per folder). This is a minor complaint, though, and it kind of makes sense when you consider how these things are presented. It's just something you have to get used to.

Performance is basically unaffected

With all the customization options available, you might think Start11 would impact performance, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all. Aside from the expected stutter when restarting the shell for the first time, Start11 runs smoothly. It might need a split second for all the UI elements to load, but that only happened occasionally.

Looking at Task Manager, Start11's background processes use under 1MB of RAM (based on my typical usage) and 0% of the CPU. Going deeper, the two processes listed under Start11 use a mere 177 handles and three threads. The Task Manager alone uses far more resources than that just to allow me to look at this data.

Should you buy Start11 v2?

You should buy Start11 v2 if:

• The native Windows 11 Start menu doesn't have enough customization options for you
• You want a Windows 7 or Windows 10-style Start menu
• You want to boost your productivity with quick access to apps and files

You shouldn't buy Start11 v2 if:

• Paying for customization software seems silly
• You don't want to deal with its sometimes confusing layout
• You're looking for things like having the taskbar on the sides of the screen or the ability to adjust blur intensity

If you've been bothered by the lack of options in the Windows 11 Start menu, you want a nostalgia trip, or you simply want to boost your productivity, Start11 is a no-brainer for any laptop or PC. It unlocks so many options that let you turn your Start menu and taskbar into a truly personalized experience, and it gives you so much control over what you have access to directly on the Start menu and taskbar. $6.99 is a tiny amount of money, considering it's a one-time fee, and you can use this product forever. Granted, you won't get free upgrades to new versions, but you do get a discount on them, so you won't be spending much on what you get in return.