Free for home and business · private · open source
Thirteen office apps. One download. No account to start.
Mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, slides, PDFs, pictures, image editing, video, screen recording, messages and calls, and databases. They run on an engine we wrote ourselves, reading the Microsoft formats and the mail archives you already have. Unplug the machine and all of it still works.
Windows today; macOS and Linux build from source. Open source under the AGPL, with a commercial licence for anyone who needs one.
13
apps in one installer
0
telemetry, crash reports or trial periods
30
file formats read or written
3047
engine tests, all passing
What you get
The whole day’s work, in one window
Each app opens in the same shell, with the same design and the same shortcuts. Nothing here is a web page in a frame.
Every account, every archive, one inbox
Calendar
Meetings, kept on your own machine
Contacts
The address book Mail completes from
Documents
Pages as you type, and everything Word puts on them
Worksheets
Real formulas, real recalculation
Presentations
Slides that survive the round trip
Read, comment, fill, sign, redact and put pages in order
Pictures
A viewer that opens before you blink, and stays quick on a folder of thousands
Image
Crop, correct, select, paint, layer, export
Video
A player, an editor, a screen recorder and introduction videos, without a render farm
Recorder
Record your screen, camera and voice as one video, and stream it live
Talk
Messages and calls with your contacts
Data Files
Tables of records, related to each other, in one file
In pictures
The real application, not a mock-up
Every picture here is captured from the suite’s own build.
Why this exists
Most free office software asks you to give something up
Your file format, your privacy, your old mail, or your patience. This asks for none of those.
It opens what you already have
Microsoft formats are the point, not an afterthought. So are the mail archives you have been carrying between computers for fifteen years (.pst, .ost, .olm, mbox), which most clients simply cannot read.
It works offline
No telemetry, and no account anywhere except Talk, which signs in because it connects you to other people. Apart from Talk, the suite makes two network calls of its own (an update check and a once-a-day announcement check), and both are switches you can turn off. Everything else runs on your machine.
It does not damage your files
The engine rewrites only the parts of a document it deliberately edited. Charts, pivot caches, macros, signatures and embedded media are returned byte-for-byte as they arrived.
The source is published
Under the AGPL, which means you can read it, change it and share it, and check every claim on this page against the code rather than taking our word for it.
The engine
Two decisions shape everything else
They are worth stating out loud, because they are the reason fidelity is high on day one instead of after five years of bug reports.
Documents live in the backend
The OOXML engine inflates with zlib and works in buffers. It is a Node engine, not a browser one. A document opens, edits and saves in the main process, and the window draws the view model it is sent. A spreadsheet asks for the viewport it is about to paint and nothing else, which is why the size of a workbook has no bearing on the size of a window.
We only rewrite what we edit
An .xlsx is a zip of XML parts, and almost everything we will not implement for years lives in a part that can be carried through untouched. So fidelity degrades only in the specific places we choose to touch, which are also the places we test.
The part nobody else does
Fifteen years of Outlook mail, opened without Outlook
.pst and .ost are read in full: the node and block B-trees, the heap, property and table contexts, folders, messages, recipients and attachments. Verified against a real 906 MB .ost: 467 folders and 12,172 messages indexed in under a second.
That work found three things no amount of reading the specification would have given, including that Outlook 2013 and later compress the larger blocks of an .ost with zlib, which is not in the published structure and which a reader that does not notice sees as an archive full of empty messages.
Questions
Frequently asked
Is it really free?
Yes. Free to download, free to use, for anything, including at work. It is published under the GNU AGPL v3.0. A separate commercial licence exists for the specific case of embedding it in a closed-source product or running a modified version as a hosted service, which is a conversation rather than a price list.
What is the catch?
There is no upsell inside the application, no account, no cloud tier and no file limit. Rutba sells business software at rutba.io; this suite exists because the engine underneath it was built for that platform anyway, and a desktop suite is a better use of it than a drawer.
Will it break my .docx or .xlsx?
It is designed not to. The engine rewrites only the parts it edited and returns everything else byte-for-byte: charts, pivot caches, macros, signatures, embedded media. That said: it is in beta, and every release says so. Keep a copy of anything irreplaceable, as you would with any new tool.
Does it send anything anywhere?
Two requests, both switches. One to GitHub for the release feed, so the app can tell you a new version exists. One to office.rutba.io, once a day at most, asking whether there is an announcement worth showing you. It sends the version and the name of your operating system and no identifier of any kind, which means we can count that a copy was opened somewhere today and nothing more than that. Turn either off and that request is not made at all. Nothing else in the suite contacts anything.
Does it keep itself up to date?
Yes. An installed copy checks GitHub for a newer release shortly after it starts and every six hours. When it finds one it says so in the window you are working in, downloads it in the background, and offers Restart and update the moment it is ready; Not now puts that version away for a day, and if you simply carry on it installs when you quit. Nothing is ever installed while you are working. Every window’s status bar counts the download meanwhile, and the first window of the new version says which version arrived, with What’s new opening the release’s notes. That is one of the two network calls on the privacy page, it carries nothing about you or your machine, and the switch in About turns it off. Every release is proved this way before it is called done: an older copy is installed on a test machine and watched until it has updated itself to the new one.
How do I report a bug or ask for a feature?
On GitHub. The issue tracker is the support desk for this product and the place the roadmap is argued out in public (see the community page). Organisations that need a commitment rather than a queue, or a gap closed to a date, can buy priority support and work to order; the licence page explains what that is.
Download it and see
Windows today, and macOS and Linux from source. No sign-up, no email address, no trial period.