3 reasons you should use ClickMonitorDDC or Monitorian to control your monitor brightness

A while back, I wrote about Twinkle Tray and how it’s a fantastic app for customizing the settings for your external monitor. But while that’s still a great app, there are other options worth considering if you want monitor controls, with two great examples being ClickMonitorDDC and Monitorian. The latter was actually mentioned by one of our readers in the comments of the aforementioned article.

At their core, both of these apps do something that Windows 11 doesn’t do and should be able to: control the brightness and settings of an external monitor connected to your PC. But even aside from that, both of these apps have good reasons to use them, so let’s take a closer look.

They’re incredibly light

While keeping all the features you need

One of the big points that got brought up in the comments of that Twinkle Tray article is how big of an app it is, since it takes a couple hundred megabytes on your PC. Both Monitorian and ClickMonitorDDC are on the opposite end of the spectrum here, as they’re incredibly lightweight. ClickMonitorDDC takes up under 2MB of space according to the Settings app on Windows 11, and Monitorian doesn’t even reach 1MB. They’re both incredibly lightweight by comparison with Twinkle Tray.

If you’re someone who values your system resources a lot, this is a great reason to use these apps instead of Twinkle Tray, as it can help free up storage for other things. I would say most modern PCs shouldn’t have much of a problem with this, but considering these apps have most of the same features that Twinkle Tray has, this does make it seem odd that Twinkle Tray is as big as it is.

All the features at a moment’s notice

It’s much faster to change settings

Since these two apps are so light, it also means you don’t really need to have a separate window for more in-depth settings. Any options you want to change are available directly in the flyout menu in your taskbar. Monitorian starts out a bit more basic with a simple brightness slider, but you can add things like contrast sliders and even change the minimum and maximum brightness for each monitor directly from the flyout.

ClickMonitorDDC goes even further with a more complex UI that has even more capabilities. You can change the brightness, contrast, and even volume and saturation of supported monitors directly from the flyout that appears, and you can also see a summary of your settings as separate icons in the notification area. You even have direct access to the ability to change the red, green, and blue levels of your monitor to suit your needs. The UI of ClickMonitorDDC looks like it would be a dedicated settings window, but it’s just right there when you click the system tray icon. It shows all your monitors and all the options you need without jumping through hoops.

Command line controls

For terminal users

Twinkle Tray provided you with the ability to set shortcuts for changing certain settings, and Monitorian does that too, though it requires a payment. However, ClickMonitorDDC has a slightly different feature: the ability to change commands using the command line. It supports a wide range of arguments, which allow you to change brightness, contrast, color levels, setting color temperatures, switching between presets, and even changing the input used by the monitor. There’s a lot more than the avergae user would ever need here.

You can also add the command line commands you use the most to the pop-up menu in the taskbar, so you can make more specific settings changes more quickly without even to type in the command each time. Alternatively, you can assign these command-line arguments to a hotkey, so you can still use the keyboard but not have to open the Windows Terminal.

There’s even an option to assign commands to a combination of keyboard presses and mouse wheel movements. For example, I can press Ctrl and Shift while scrolling up to increase my monitor brightness. It’s truly impressive how much functionality ClickMonitorDDC offers with such a small app size.

They’re great ways to add features Windows is missing

At the end of the day, both of these apps are good choices if you want the ability to change the monitor brightness and other settings for your external monitor, since Windows is somehow still not offering this feature out of the box. At first, I thought I would be sticking to Twinkle Tray, but when I finished testing these apps, I changed my mind.

ClickMonitorDDC, specifically, is super impressive. It has so many features and the fact you can control it all with the command line is awesome. It’s a shame this project seems to be abandoned, but even with the last update being three years ago, the app is still functional and does more than most of the alternatives do. In fact, that part about changing brightness using keyboard and mouse shortcuts pretty much got me to switch away from Twinkle Tray.

And then there’s the fact they’re so light. Both of these apps are so small that I do hope the developer of that app will look into ways of making it smaller.