LibreOffice Alternatives

ONLYOFFICE is the swap most people make when LibreOffice mangles a client's Word file. Its editors are built around DOCX, XLSX and PPTX as native formats, not as import filters, so tables, tracked changes and slide layouts survive a round trip far more often. The Desktop Editors run on Windows, macOS and Linux, open ODT, ODS and ODP too, and are free for personal and professional use. The interface uses tabs and a ribbon, which feels like Word, not like the menu bars of LibreOffice 26.8.

The online side is where the money starts. ONLYOFFICE Docs, the server that lets several people co-edit in a browser, ships a Community edition under GNU AGPL v3, recommended for up to 20 users and supported only through the forum and GitHub. Docs Home, sold to individuals, costs $149 per server per year for 10 users, and Enterprise starts at $33 per connection per year with a minimum of 50 connections, so $1,650 a year before support upgrades. It plugs into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Moodle and Confluence. In 2026 ONLYOFFICE suspended its partnership with Nextcloud after Nextcloud, IONOS and other European companies announced Euro-Office, a fork of its code; the ONLYOFFICE connector is still offered on the Nextcloud App Store. Version 10.0 ships AI tools that connect to cloud providers or to fully local models. Watch the seat rule on paid plans: each user ID is held for 30 days before you can reassign it, external users included. A 2026 bug report on versions 9.4.0 and 9.4.1, still open, describes the editor stopping with an error after 20 to 30 seconds of work or right after a paste, on macOS and Fedora. If you run Nextcloud and want to rethink the whole stack, see our Nextcloud alternatives.

Microsoft Office's file formats are the ones LibreOffice keeps trying to match, so moving to Microsoft 365 ends the conversion problem at the source. Word, Excel and PowerPoint open their own files with every pivot table, VBA macro and SmartArt intact, and co-authoring in real time works across desktop, web and mobile through OneDrive and SharePoint.

The catch is cost and plan reading. Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the web are free with a Microsoft account. Business Basic costs $7.00 per user per month, paid yearly ($8.40 on a monthly subscription), but gives you only the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Desktop apps start with Microsoft 365 Apps for business at $10.00 per user per month, paid yearly, without Teams chat or calling; Business Standard, at $14.00 paid yearly, adds Teams and business email, so ten people pay $1,680 a year; Business Standard with Copilot is $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot $32.00, which adds device security. Business plans stop at 300 users, and after you cancel one, data left behind might be deleted after 30 days and is deleted no later than 180 days, so export before you stop paying. At home, Family costs $129.99 a year for 1 to 6 people. Every Microsoft 365 plan is a subscription that auto-renews, and the desktop apps target Windows and macOS. If you chose LibreOffice to avoid subscriptions, Office Home 2024 is a one-time purchase at $179.99 for 1 PC or Mac, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, for non-commercial use; a business buys Office Home & Business 2024 at $249.99, which adds Outlook. If you are leaving Microsoft instead, read our guide to switching from Microsoft 365.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides solve the problem LibreOffice was never built for: five people editing the same file at once, with comments, suggestions and version history, from any browser. There is nothing to install and no file to email back and forth, which removes the "which version is the latest" mess. A personal Google account gets the editors at no cost; a business adds Gmail on its own domain, Meet and admin controls through Workspace.

Business Starter costs $7 per user per month with a one-year commitment, with 30 GB of pooled storage per user; Standard is $14 and Plus $22 on the annual commitment. The annual commitment saves 16% against monthly billing, and ten Starter users pay $840 a year. The limits are real: you edit a DOCX either directly in Docs or in Office Compatibility Mode, a Chrome extension; macros are not supported when you edit in Docs (you rewrite them in Apps Script), and charts embedded in Word and PowerPoint files become images. Offline editing has to be turned on in advance, in Chrome or Edge. Business plans stop at 300 users. If you are already on Workspace and want out, our guide to switching from Google Workspace covers it. Our collaborative spreadsheet ranking compares Sheets with the rest, and our guide to switching from Google Sheets covers the spreadsheet alone.

WPS Office, from Kingsoft, is the alternative that looks most like Microsoft Office: Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation sit in one window with tabs, and the ribbon is almost a copy. It opens DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files cleanly in most cases, bundles a PDF editor, and runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. For someone who left Microsoft Office and found LibreOffice's menus slow, WPS feels familiar from the first minute.

The free version is ad-supported, and users often complain about those ads; the free plan also comes with 1 GB of cloud storage. Pro+ removes them and adds 20 GB of storage, PDF conversion and AI tools with a daily usage limit, for $69.99 billed yearly, shown as $5.83 a month; these prices apply to PC and Android. A Sharing Plan costs $41.99 per user per year with a minimum of two users, so $83.98 for a pair. The other point to weigh is the license: WPS is proprietary, its end user license treats the source code as a trade secret and bans decompiling, which is the opposite of what drew many people to LibreOffice. Avoid its cloud sync for confidential files if that matters to your company.

Collabora Online is LibreOffice in the browser. Its online suite runs the LibreOffice engine on a server, so Writer, Calc and Impress keep their ODF strength and their rendering. You plug it into Nextcloud, ownCloud or another file platform, and several people edit the same file at once while the documents stay on your servers. The code is under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the same family as LibreOffice. It is no longer browser-only: Collabora Office brings the same interface to a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, Collabora Office Classic is the long-term supported desktop suite based on LibreOffice, and mobile apps exist for iOS and Android.

Pricing is per user and low. The Collabora Online Development Edition, CODE, is free but meant for testing and home use, with rolling updates. Business costs $3.40 per user per month in the US dollar view (€3 in euros), on premise, up to 99 users, with long-term support, an SLA and signed security updates; ten users pay $408 a year. Enterprise covers 100+ users with volume discounts on quote, and is the plan that lists a desktop version and mobile support. It is the natural answer to the message on LibreOffice's own site, which recommends Enterprise versions from ecosystem partners to businesses. The trade-off: it inherits LibreOffice's handling of complex DOCX files, so it does not fix that problem. Schools and NGOs get special pricing on request, and three-year discounts exist for longer commitments.

SoftMaker FreeOffice is the free edition of SoftMaker Office, from SoftMaker, a Nuremberg publisher that has built office software since 1987. TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations open and save DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files directly, start fast on modest hardware, and offer a ribbon or a classic menu interface, your choice. FreeOffice is free for personal and business use, which matters: you can install it on every company PC without a license audit, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The same download page offers SoftMaker Office for iOS (14 or higher) and Android (9 or higher) as a free download.

On the computer it is a desktop suite and nothing else: there is no real-time co-editing and no server. The paid SoftMaker Office NX Universal adds language tools, AI writing and translation, for $49.90 per year or $4.99 per month. Read its license line carefully: one subscription covers 5 computers of the same household, but only 1 computer of a company or organization, so an office buys a volume license (10 computers cost US$398) or uses FreeOffice for free. FreeOffice is closed source (its license bans any attempt to discover the source code), and its promise is Microsoft compatibility, so open a sample of your ODT archive in it before you switch.