Third Party

A third party company refers to another company that is not related or affiliated to a said company. It is a term usually used to describe a company that provides hardware or software for use with another company’s product.

Third party hardware is often used by users who want to get additional performance out of their computer by purchasing better, faster components. For instance, someone may have an HP desktop and purchase an Nvidia graphics card in order to be able to run certain games or programs. In this case the graphics card would be considered third party hardware because it is produced by Nvidia and not the company that produced the computer, HP.

Similarly, third party software is installed by many users who want programs that the original company did not preinstall on their machine. Programs such as Google Chrome, Apple Safari or any other non-Microsoft software would be considered third party software on a computer running Windows, while Microsoft Edge and any other non-Apple software would be considered third party on a Macintosh. [1]

Additionally, some software also supports the use of third party plug-ins, which are extensions to the program to add functionality. A great example of this is a program like FL Studio, which can use a large amount of different third party plug-ins to allow for different synthesizers and effects to be added to a project. Although the plug-ins are produced by different companies, they are designed to be used in FL Studio and as such are referred to as third party plug-ins.