Compared
Where each of these is better than ours
Every product below beats this one at something, and in several cases at the thing most people need most. That is written first on each card, because a comparison page that finds no advantage anywhere else is read as marketing and discounted entirely — including the parts that were accurate.
Model-level descriptions from each vendor’s published licensing and product structure, as of 8 September 2026. No competitor prices appear anywhere on this page: a list price goes stale within a quarter, and every card links to the vendor’s own site for the number.
Desktop office suites
Seven structural questions
What somebody replacing Microsoft Office actually shortlists. Read the labels carefully: three of these are more capable and more proven than ours.
| Question | Rutba Office | Microsoft 365 | Google Workspace | LibreOffice | ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors | WPS Office | Apache OpenOffice | La Suite numérique |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FreeUsable in full, at work, without paying | Yes | No | Partly | Yes | Yes | Partly | Yes | Yes |
| Works offlineEverything functions with the network off | Yes | Partly | Partly | Yes | Yes | Partly | Yes | Partly |
| No accountUsable without signing in to anything | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Partly | Yes | No |
| Microsoft formatsReads and writes .docx, .xlsx and .pptx | Yes | Yes | Partly | Partly | Yes | Yes | Partly | Partly |
| Mail includedA mail client in the same suite, not a separate download | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Outlook archivesOpens .pst and .ost files | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Source publishedYou can read and change the code | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
A column of ticks is not a recommendation. These seven questions are the ones this project was built to answer, so of course it answers them. They are not the only questions that matter — feature depth, maturity, collaboration and mobile apps are not on this table, and three of the products above beat us on all four.
Microsoft
Microsoft 365
The desktop suite the formats are named after, sold as a per-user subscription with cloud storage and a mail service alongside it.
Where they win
It defines the formats
When a .docx renders differently anywhere, Word is right by definition and everyone else is wrong. No compatible implementation can ever fully close that gap, including this one.
Depth nothing else has
Decades of features — mail merge, pivot tables, VBA, add-ins, an ecosystem of consultants. If your work depends on one of them, nothing on this page is a substitute.
Collaboration that works
Real-time co-authoring across desktop, web and phone, with the storage and identity underneath it already in place.
Where we win
Nothing to subscribe to
No per-user fee, no renewal, no seat count to manage — and no risk of losing access to your own documents because a card expired.
No account at all
The desktop apps want you signed in. This one has nothing to sign into and collects nothing, which for some organisations is not a preference but a requirement.
It opens the archives their own client left behind
A .pst or .ost from an old machine opens directly, with no Exchange, no import wizard and no licence.
Verdict
If your work runs on Excel macros, mail merge or co-authoring, stay. Nobody should switch away from the reference implementation to save money on software that is already paid for. This is for the machine that does not have a licence, the archive nobody can open, and the person who does not want an account.
Check us: microsoft.com/microsoft-365
Google Workspace
Documents, spreadsheets and slides that live in a browser, with mail and storage in the same subscription. The consumer tier is free; the business tiers are per user.
Where they win
Collaboration is the product
Several people in one document with no merge step and no file to send. Nothing desktop-first competes with this, and it is the reason most teams are there.
Nothing to install or update
It runs on any machine with a browser, including the ones you do not administer.
Search and sharing across everything
One place, one identity, one search box, on every device you sign in on.
Where we win
Your files stay files
A .docx imported to Docs becomes a Google document and comes back converted. Here a .docx is opened, edited and saved as the same .docx — the parts we did not touch return byte-for-byte.
It works with the network off
Not a limited offline mode for recently opened files. All seven apps, all features, no connection.
Nothing is uploaded
The documents never leave the machine, because there is nowhere for them to go.
Verdict
If your team lives in shared documents, this suite is not trying to replace that and would be a downgrade. Use it for the work that should stay on one machine, and for the formats that should survive a round trip untouched.
Check us: workspace.google.com
The Document Foundation
LibreOffice
The established free and open-source office suite: writer, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, database and formula editor, native to OpenDocument and reading the Microsoft formats.
Where they win
Fifteen years of features, and a database
Far deeper than this suite in every editor, with Base, Draw and Math besides — plus macros, extensions and a scripting layer we do not have.
A community and a foundation behind it
Independent governance, a long release history, translations into scores of languages, and packages in every Linux distribution. It will outlive most software on this page.
It is the safer bet today
A mature codebase against our version 1.0. If you need one thing to work on a hundred machines this month, that maturity is worth more than anything below.
Where we win
Mail is in the suite
LibreOffice has no mail client — that is Thunderbird, a separate project and a separate download, which cannot read .pst or .ost either. Here mail is one of the seven apps, and the Outlook archives open in it.
Microsoft formats are the native ones
LibreOffice is ODF-native and treats OOXML as an interchange format. We write .docx and .xlsx as the primary format and preserve the parts we did not edit, which is a different design with a different failure mode.
Image and video editing in the same shell
Cropping a photo and trimming a clip are the two jobs that always need a second program. Here they do not.
Verdict
The closest thing to a straight competitor, and for most people today the more sensible choice — it is more capable and more proven. Take ours if the Outlook archives, the byte-preserving round trip or the single-window mail-and-documents shape is what you are missing.
Check us: libreoffice.org
Ascensio System SIA
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors
Free desktop editors for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, published under the AGPL, built OOXML-first and paired with commercial server products for collaboration.
Where they win
The closest OOXML rendering of the free options
Built around the Microsoft formats from the start rather than converting into them, and widely reported as the most faithful free renderer of a complex .docx.
A collaboration server exists
The same editors connect to their document server for real-time co-authoring, which is a path we do not offer at all.
Mature and shipping for years
Packaged, translated and supported, with a commercial tier behind it if you need one.
Where we win
Seven apps, not three
Mail, pictures, image editing and video are in the same download. Theirs is documents, spreadsheets and slides.
Outlook archives
No mail client, so no .pst or .ost. That is the gap this suite was built around.
Nothing is a funnel
There is no server edition to upsell and no connected account, so the desktop app is not the free half of something.
Verdict
If you only need documents, spreadsheets and slides, and fidelity matters more than breadth, theirs is more mature and you should use it. Ours is the better answer when mail — especially old mail — is part of the problem.
Check us: onlyoffice.com
Kingsoft
WPS Office
A proprietary office suite with a free tier and paid upgrades, a familiar ribbon interface, a connected cloud account, and apps on every platform including mobile.
Where they win
It feels like the thing people already use
The interface is close enough to Microsoft Office that most people need no retraining, which is a real and underrated advantage.
PDF tools and mobile apps
A capable PDF editor and genuine phone and tablet applications, neither of which this suite has.
Good OOXML fidelity
Years of work on rendering the Microsoft formats accurately, and it shows.
Where we win
The free tier is the whole product
Theirs is a tier: features, storage and prompts sit behind an upgrade and a cloud account. Ours has no paid version to be steered towards.
You can read the source
Proprietary against AGPL. Every privacy claim we make is checkable in the repository; theirs has to be taken on trust.
Nothing is connected
No account, no cloud, no sync — which is the point for some people and irrelevant to others.
Verdict
If the familiar ribbon and the mobile apps are what you need, take theirs. Take ours if "free" mattering permanently, and nothing phoning home, are what you are actually buying.
Check us: wps.com
The Apache Software Foundation
Apache OpenOffice
The original open-source suite, from which LibreOffice was forked in 2010. Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math, under the Apache 2.0 licence, native to OpenDocument.
Where they win
A permissive licence, which matters to some people a great deal
Apache 2.0 rather than a copyleft one. If your organisation ships modified software and will not publish the changes, that difference is the whole decision — and it is an advantage over LibreOffice as much as over us.
Familiar to a very large installed base
Two decades of users, documentation and books. Somebody who learned OpenOffice in 2006 opens it and knows where everything is.
Undemanding on old hardware
It runs comfortably on machines that struggle with newer suites, which is a real reason it is still deployed.
Where we win
Microsoft formats are the native ones here
OpenOffice writes OpenDocument and treats .docx as an export — and its .docx handling in particular is the reason most people who left it, left it. We write the Microsoft formats as the primary format and preserve the parts we did not edit.
Mail, and the archives
No mail client in OpenOffice, so no .pst or .ost. That is the gap this suite was built around.
Actively developed
The awkward one to say politely, and it decides the comparison: OpenOffice releases have been rare for years while LibreOffice — the fork of the same code — ships several times a year. Choosing between the two ODF suites today, that is the fact that matters.
Verdict
If you are running it happily, nothing here is urgent. If you are choosing today, LibreOffice is the same lineage under active development and is the better choice for almost everybody — including over us, unless the Outlook archives or the Microsoft-native round trip are what you are missing. The one real case for OpenOffice over LibreOffice is the Apache licence.
Check us: openoffice.org
DINUM — the French state
La Suite numérique
The French government’s own open-source workplace suite, built by its interministerial digital directorate with Dutch and German counterparts. Docs for collaborative documents, Grist for spreadsheets, plus Tchap, Visio, Messagerie and Fichiers. Used monthly by more than 500,000 civil servants across 15 ministries.
Where they win
Sovereignty is the product, and it is not a marketing word here
A public administration built it for its own use and published it. The governance, the hosting and the roadmap belong to the institutions using it, which is something no commercial vendor can offer at any price — including us.
Collaboration and structure, which we have none of
Real-time editing with live cursors, comments, subpages and a document hierarchy, granular access control, search across everything. Docs is closer to Notion than to a word processor, and for a team writing together it is the better shape.
MIT, and self-hostable
A more permissive licence than our AGPL, deployable on your own Kubernetes or Docker Compose. If you intend to modify and ship it without publishing your changes, theirs allows that and ours does not.
Where we win
It is a service; this is a program
La Suite needs servers, accounts and somebody to run them — reasonably, because it is built for an organisation of half a million people. Rutba Office is an installer on one machine, with nothing to administer and nobody to add you to it.
A .docx here is the document, not an import
Docs imports and exports DOCX, ODT and PDF around its own block model — a genuine and useful conversion, and still a conversion. Here the .docx is opened and saved as itself, with the parts we did not edit returned byte-for-byte.
The old mail
La Suite has Messagerie for live mail, which we do not compete with. What it is not for is an Outlook .pst or .ost from a machine that no longer exists, which is the specific thing our mail app was built around.
Verdict
If you are a European public body looking for sovereign collaborative tooling, this is a better answer than anything we make and the governance is most of why. Take ours for the offline machine, the archive nobody can open, and the file that has to come back unchanged.
Check us: lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
Editors and engines you build with
Seven structural questions
The other half of what this repository is. Rutba Office is fourteen packages with an application on top, and the packages compete in a different market from the suite — against components sold per developer seat. This group is for the reader evaluating the engine rather than the suite.
| Question | Rutba Office | SpreadJS | Editor.js |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free in productionUsable in a shipping product at no cost | Yes | No | Yes |
| Source publishedYou can read and change the code | Yes | No | Yes |
| Microsoft formatsReads and writes .docx, .xlsx or .pptx as such | Yes | Yes | No |
| Runs server-sideWorks in Node with no browser and no DOM | Yes | Partly | No |
| Preserves what it does not understandA round trip returns untouched parts byte-for-byte | Yes | No | No |
| Closed-source embeddingA licence exists that permits it without publishing your source | Partly | Yes | Yes |
| A whole suite above itDocuments, sheets, slides and mail from the same codebase | Yes | No | No |
A column of ticks is not a recommendation. These seven questions are the ones this project was built to answer, so of course it answers them. They are not the only questions that matter — feature depth, maturity, collaboration and mobile apps are not on this table, and three of the products above beat us on all four.
MESCIUS
SpreadJS
A commercial JavaScript spreadsheet component, licensed per developer, with a companion visual Designer. It imports and exports .xlsx and is embedded in the host application’s own interface.
Where they win
Spreadsheet depth we are years from
Hundreds of functions, pivot tables, charts, conditional formatting, data validation, sparklines, a formula editor. If your product needs a spreadsheet that behaves like Excel to a demanding user, this is what that looks like.
A Designer, and a support contract
A visual designer for building sheets and templates, plus commercial support with somebody to escalate to. Neither exists here at any price.
Browser-native, and built for it
Designed to render and recalculate in the browser at scale. Ours is a Node engine that sends a view model to a window — a different architecture, and theirs is the right one for a web application.
Where we win
Free, and the source is published
Per-developer commercial licensing against the AGPL. For a project that can live with copyleft, that is the difference between a line in a budget and no line at all.
It runs where there is no browser
The engine works in Node, in buffers, with no DOM — so a server can open, recalculate and save a workbook inside a job, which is a different task from rendering a grid to a person.
Documents and slides from the same codebase
A spreadsheet component is a spreadsheet component. Ours ships beside a .docx engine, a .pptx renderer, a PDF writer and a mail library that reads .pst — one dependency and one licence conversation for all of it.
Verdict
If you are embedding a spreadsheet in a commercial web application and it must satisfy people who use Excel all day, buy theirs: the depth is not close and the support is real. Take ours if you need the engine server-side, if the whole document family matters rather than sheets alone, or if a per-developer licence is the thing standing in your way.
Check us: developer.mescius.com/spreadjs
CodeX
Editor.js
A free, Apache-2.0 block-style editor for the web. Content is a list of typed blocks serialised as JSON, extended by plugins. It is not an office-format editor and does not set out to be one.
Where they win
A permissive licence, and a small one
Apache 2.0 against AGPL — it goes into a closed product with no conversation and no commercial licence. It is also a fraction of the size of a document engine, because it is doing a fraction of the job.
The right model for web content
Clean JSON out, one block at a time, with a good plugin ecosystem. For a CMS, a comment box or an article editor that is a far better fit than a word-processing document model, and we would not argue otherwise.
Mature and widely deployed
Years of production use, a real community, and plugins for most of what people ask an editor to do.
Where we win
It is a different job, and that is the honest comparison
Editor.js produces JSON blocks. It does not open a .docx, does not save one, and has no concept of styles, sections, tracked changes or pagination. If what you need is a web content editor, nothing in our engine substitutes for it — and if what you need is to open the file a client sent you, it is not a candidate at all.
A document model, not a block list
Runs, paragraph and character formatting, styles, sections, comments, tracked changes and page geometry — the things a word processor has to model because the format has them.
Fidelity on the way back out
The round trip is the point here: a document opened and saved returns the parts we did not touch byte-for-byte. A block editor has no round trip to preserve, because it never had the original.
Verdict
Not really a competitor, and pretending otherwise is how comparison pages become worthless. Use Editor.js for web content in a browser — it is better at that than anything we make. Use ours when the artefact is a file somebody else will open in Word.
Check us: editorjs.io
Not about us
And these two, against each other
The same questions with our thumb off the scale. We are not in the comparison; there is a short section at the end of each saying where we would fit, marked as ours.
LibreOffice vs ONLYOFFICE
The two serious free desktop suites, and they disagree about the most important thing in the product: which file format is the native one.
Read it →
Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace
The two subscriptions almost every organisation ends up choosing between, and the choice is less about features than about where a document is supposed to live.
Read it →
Microsoft 365 vs LibreOffice
The paid standard against the free one that has been shipping for over a decade. The honest version of this comparison is shorter than most: it turns on how much your formatting has to survive.
Read it →
LibreOffice vs WPS Office
Free and open against free-with-a-paid-tier, and the difference between them is not really features — it is what the free version is for.
Read it →
LibreOffice vs Apache OpenOffice
The same code, forked in 2010, and fifteen years apart in how much has happened since. This is the shortest honest comparison on the site.
Read it →
It costs nothing to find out
Install it beside whatever you use now — a normal per-user install, a normal uninstall, and nothing to cancel afterwards.