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.
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 your files are going to people who use Microsoft Office. If they are, that decides this. If they are not, the deeper suite wins and it is not close.
Head to head
Where they genuinely differ
| LibreOffice | ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors | |
|---|---|---|
| The native format | OpenDocument. .docx and .xlsx are import and export formats, handled by a conversion layer. | OOXML. .docx and .xlsx are what it is built around, and OpenDocument is the import. |
| Fidelity on a complex Microsoft file | Good and improved for years, but a heavily formatted .docx can still shift on the round trip. | Widely reported as the closest of the free options, which is the direct consequence of the row above. |
| Depth | Far deeper. Writer, Calc, Impress, plus Base, Draw and Math, with macros, extensions and a scripting layer. | Three editors. Deliberately narrower, and it shows in the long tail of features. |
| Who is behind it | The Document Foundation — an independent non-profit with no product to upsell you to. | Ascensio System SIA, a company whose desktop editors are free and whose collaboration server is commercial. |
| Collaboration | A desktop suite. Real-time co-authoring is not what it is for. | The same editors connect to their document server for co-authoring — a genuine path the other does not have. |
| Licence | Mozilla Public License 2.0. | AGPL v3 for the desktop editors. |
Choose LibreOffice if
- You need the depth — Base, Draw, Math, macros, or a feature that only exists in a suite with twenty-five years behind it
- OpenDocument is your archival format, by policy or by preference
- You want an independent foundation rather than a company with a paid tier above the free one
- You are deploying at scale on Linux, where it is packaged everywhere and supported by the distribution
Choose ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors if
- Your files go to people using Microsoft Office and must come back unchanged
- You want the closest free rendering of a complex .docx and will trade breadth for it
- Co-authoring matters enough that a path to a document server is worth having
- Three editors is all you need, and a smaller, more familiar interface is an advantage rather than a limit
Our own product, and we said so at the top
Where Rutba Office fits
We took ONLYOFFICE’s side of the format argument
The Microsoft formats are the native ones here too, on an engine that goes further than converting well: it rewrites only the parts of a file it deliberately edited and returns everything else — charts, pivot caches, macros, signatures — byte-for-byte. That is a different mechanism from a faithful re-render, and it fails in fewer places.
And LibreOffice’s side of the "who is behind it" argument, differently
Ours is AGPL like ONLYOFFICE, but there is no server edition to be upsold to and no connected account, so the free product is not the free half of something. What there is instead is a commercial licence for people embedding the engine — a different customer entirely from the person downloading a suite.
Where both of them beat us on depth
Both are more capable and more proven than a version 1.0, and LibreOffice enormously so. If the deciding factor between those two was a feature either of them has, it is not a factor we win either.
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.