Free alternatives to Microsoft Office, honestly compared
There are four serious ones and they are good at different things. The right answer depends almost entirely on who receives your files and whether you need to work offline.
8 September 2026 · 9 min read
Answer two questions first
Almost every recommendation in this category is wrong because it skips these.
Who opens your files afterwards? If documents leave your organisation and are opened in Word and Excel by people who will notice a shifted table, format fidelity outranks every other consideration. If they stay internal, or leave as PDF, it barely matters and your options widen enormously.
Do you need it to work with no connection? A browser-based suite is a genuinely different product from a desktop one. Offline modes exist; they are not the same as an application that does not know whether the network is there.
LibreOffice
The established option: free, open source under the MPL 2.0, run by an independent foundation, and by a distance the most capable free suite. Writer, Calc and Impress, plus Base for databases, Draw for diagrams and Math for equations — three applications with no equivalent in a standard Microsoft licence.
It is native to OpenDocument and treats the Microsoft formats as interchange. That is the whole trade: enormous depth, and a round trip through a complex .docx that can shift. For internal documents, archival work, or anywhere OpenDocument is policy, it is the obvious choice and has been for years.
No mail client — that is Thunderbird, a separate project.
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors
Free desktop editors under the AGPL from Ascensio System SIA, built OOXML-first — the Microsoft formats are the native ones rather than an import. Widely reported as the most faithful free renderer of a complicated .docx, which follows directly from that decision.
Three editors, deliberately narrower than LibreOffice, and a commercial document server behind them if you want real-time co-authoring. The free desktop product is genuinely free and genuinely useful; it is also the entrance to a paid one, which is worth knowing rather than worth objecting to.
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides
Free at the consumer tier and unbeatable at collaboration. If several people work on the same document at once, nothing desktop-first competes and this is where you should be.
The costs are specific: files convert on the way in and on the way out, so a .docx that has been through Docs is not the .docx that went in; offline is partial and needs setting up; and your documents live on somebody else’s servers, which for some work is fine and for other work is not permitted.
WPS Office
Proprietary, with a free tier and paid upgrades. Its strongest card is familiarity — the interface is close enough to the Microsoft ribbon that most people need no retraining, which for a team that will not tolerate relearning is decisive and not a trivial advantage. Good OOXML fidelity, a capable PDF editor, and real mobile applications.
The trade is that the free version is a tier rather than the product: some features and conveniences sit behind an upgrade and a connected account, and the source is closed, so its privacy claims have to be taken on trust rather than checked.
The gap all four leave
Old mail. If part of what you are replacing is Outlook, none of the four above will open an Outlook .pst or .ost archive — LibreOffice has no mail client at all, ONLYOFFICE is three editors, Google imports messages from live accounts rather than from archive files, and WPS is documents.
That is a real gap, and it is usually discovered late, after the documents question has already been settled.
The short version
- Files leave your organisation and formatting matters: ONLYOFFICE, or keep Microsoft 365 and stop reading comparison articles.
- You need depth, a database, or drawing: LibreOffice, and it is not close.
- Several people edit the same document: Google Workspace.
- Familiar interface, PDF editing, phone apps: WPS Office.
- Everything must work offline with no account: LibreOffice or ONLYOFFICE.
And in every case: test with your own worst document before committing anybody else to the decision.
Our own product, disclosed
Where our own software comes into this
We make a fifth option and left it out of the comparison above deliberately, because a vendor placing itself inside its own roundup is how these articles lose their value.
Rutba Office is a free, open-source desktop suite of seven applications — documents, spreadsheets, slides, pictures, image editing, video, and a mail client that reads the Outlook .pst and .ost archives the section above describes as the gap. The Microsoft formats are native, and the engine rewrites only the parts of a file it deliberately edited.
It is also the newest and least proven thing on this page, by a wide margin. LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE are mature products with years of use behind them and ours is a version 1.0. If you need one thing that will work on a hundred machines this month, that maturity is worth more than anything in the paragraph above — and we would rather say so here than have you find out.
Related
How to open a .pst file without Outlook
A .pst is a complete mail archive in one file, and almost nothing outside Microsoft Outlook can read one. Here is what is actually inside it, what your options are, and which of them will lose data.
Why your .docx looks different in another program
It is rarely a rendering bug. Most formatting loss happens at save time, when a program rebuilds a file it only partly understood — and that is a design decision, not an accident.
Seven apps, one free download
No account, no telemetry, and it works with the network switched off.