The Document Foundation
Rutba Office vs 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.
Ours is the free one, so read this knowing whose page you are on. What follows starts with where LibreOffice beats us, because on this page that is the part you cannot get from them.
First, honestly
Where LibreOffice wins
Not a courtesy paragraph. Each of these is a real reason to choose them over us.
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.
And ours
Where Rutba Office wins
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.
Side by side
The seven structural questions
Asked of desktop office suites. A component and a desktop suite are not decided on the same seven, so each group has its own.
| Question | Rutba Office | LibreOffice |
|---|---|---|
| FreeUsable in full, at work, without paying | Yes | Yes |
| Works offlineEverything functions with the network off | Yes | Yes |
| No accountUsable without signing in to anything | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft formatsReads and writes .docx, .xlsx and .pptx | Yes | Partly |
| Mail includedA mail client in the same suite, not a separate download | Yes | No |
| Outlook archivesOpens .pst and .ost files | Yes | No |
| Source publishedYou can read and change the code | Yes | Yes |
These seven are the questions this project was built to answer, so of course it answers them. Feature depth, maturity, collaboration and support contracts are not on this table, and LibreOffice beats us on at least one of those.
Verdict
Who should choose which
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.
Model-level descriptions from The Document Foundation’s published licensing and product structure, as of 8 September 2026. No prices are reproduced here — check libreoffice.org for those.
Also worth reading
Compared with each other, not with us
We are not in these. They are the same two questions asked without our thumb on the scale.
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.
Against ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors →
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.
Against Microsoft 365 →
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.
Against WPS Office →
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.
Against Apache OpenOffice →
It costs nothing to find out
Install it beside whatever you use now — a normal per-user install, a normal uninstall.