LibreOffice works best as an offline, single-user desktop office suite. Preceded by OpenOffice and StarOffice, this popular software has always been nipping at Microsoft Office’s heels.īy default, LibreOffice uses the ODF (OpenDocument) format, but it’s able to competently handle Microsoft Office document formats. Hundreds of open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office have been developed over the past few decades, and LibreOffice has emerged as the top dog. If you lose your internet connection, some features don’t work, making it a relatively poor choice compared to a desktop Office suite if you travel often. Workplace’s cloud-based nature can also sometimes work against it. This is more the fault of Microsoft’s convoluted file formats than anything else, but it’s something to be wary of if you need pixel-perfect document layouts. You can import and export Microsoft-format documents, but note that it can cause formatting mistakes. There are mobile apps for Apple and Android devices, so you can access your documents from all your devices wherever you are.Ĭollaboration is also excellent, so you can seamlessly work on the same documents with colleagues without stepping on each other’s toes, and there’s robust versioning so you can roll back to previous versions of documents if need be. The tools work well in any modern web browser, which makes deployment across an organization a cinch. These tools include Gmail (email), Drive (cloud storage), Docs (word processing), Sheets (spreadsheets), Slides (presentations), and Meet (video conferencing). It’s an amalgamation of 12 Google tools for a monthly subscription that starts at $4.20 per user a month. Google Workspace, previously known as G Suite, is a cloud-based productivity suite from internet giant Google. We’ve included a variety of free, paid, web-based, and desktop alternatives, and discussed the pros and cons of each. There’s no clear winner here because the perfect office suite for your needs depends on your unique requirements. In this article, we look at some of the best Microsoft Office alternatives on offer today. There are currently enough alternatives to Office with their own benefits that it makes sense to consider whether there’s a better option for your business. Other Microsoft Office alternatives emerged, too, that catered to particular niches, such as cross-platform office suites and open-source office tools. Google offered its online office suite for free, so it quickly captured much of the market. But around 2006, Microsoft felt pressure from web-based document editors such as the Google Docs Editors suite from rival Google, so an online version of Microsoft Office now exists known as Microsoft 365.

Traditionally, you were required to download the office suite to your Windows computer and run it offline, and some people still use Microsoft Office this way.

Microsoft word online free cloud