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.
We make competing software. Rutba Office is a free office suite, so we have an interest in this comparison and you should read it knowing that. Neither product below is ours. There is a short section about ours at the end, marked as such, and it only addresses things this page actually examined.
The decision
What you are actually choosing between
Whether the Apache licence matters to you enough to outweigh the difference in development pace. For nearly everybody it does not, and this is one of the few software choices with a clear answer.
Head to head
Where they genuinely differ
| LibreOffice | Apache OpenOffice | |
|---|---|---|
| Where they came from | The 2010 fork, taken up by most of the original developers and by the Linux distributions. | The original project, donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011. |
| Release pace | Several feature releases a year, continuously. | Rare, and mostly maintenance. This is the difference that decides it. |
| Licence | Mozilla Public License 2.0 — weak copyleft, file-level. | Apache 2.0 — permissive. The one axis on which OpenOffice has the advantage. |
| Microsoft format support | Improved steadily for a decade and a half. | Reads .docx; writing it has never been its strength. |
| Packaging | In essentially every Linux distribution, and supported by them. | Available, and increasingly the one you have to go and find. |
Choose LibreOffice if
- You want the suite that is actually being developed — which is nearly everyone
- You exchange .docx and .xlsx files and want the best handling of them from an ODF-native suite
- You deploy on Linux and want the distribution to support it
- You want the security fixes to arrive on a schedule
Choose Apache OpenOffice if
- Your organisation requires a permissive licence and MPL 2.0 does not satisfy it
- You have an existing OpenOffice deployment that works and no reason to move it
- You are on hardware old enough that the difference in demands matters
- You are building on the code and Apache 2.0 is the term that decides your project
Our own product, and we said so at the top
Where Rutba Office fits
On the format row, we made a different bet from both
Both are ODF-native suites that convert to the Microsoft formats. Ours is OOXML-native and preserves the parts of a file it did not edit, which is a different mechanism from converting well — narrower, and it fails in fewer places.
On licence, we are stricter than either
AGPL, not MPL and not Apache. If the licence row is what decided this for you, we are the wrong end of it — with a commercial licence for anyone who needs to be free of it.
On development pace, we are the newest thing here
Which is a two-sided fact. Moving quickly is not the same as being proven, and against LibreOffice specifically we are the unproven one.
Model-level descriptions from each vendor’s published licensing and product structure, as of 8 September 2026. No competitor prices appear on this page.
Or take the free one and decide later
It installs beside whatever you use now and costs nothing to try.