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.
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 documents you produce are read by people who will open them in Word — and how much it costs you when one of them does not look right.
Head to head
Where they genuinely differ
| Microsoft 365 | LibreOffice | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | A per-user subscription, renewed. | Free, permanently, including commercially. |
| Format authority | The reference implementation. If Word renders it that way, that is what the file means. | A very good independent implementation of somebody else’s format, and independence has a cost in the corner cases. |
| Depth | Deeper in every editor, plus an ecosystem of add-ins and people who know it. | Deep, and broader in a different direction — Base, Draw and Math have no Microsoft 365 equivalent in the standard licence. |
| Macros | VBA, and everything anybody in your organisation has ever built with it. | Its own Basic, plus a VBA compatibility layer that handles a lot and not all of it. |
| Collaboration | Real-time co-authoring across desktop, web and phone. | Not what it is for. |
| Control | A vendor relationship with a roadmap you do not set. | Source you can read, a foundation with no shareholder, and a version that cannot be discontinued out from under you. |
Choose Microsoft 365 if
- Documents leave your organisation and their exact appearance matters
- Anything in your work runs on VBA, pivot tables or an add-in
- Several people edit the same document at once, often
- You need somebody to call, and a support contract to call them under
Choose LibreOffice if
- Documents mostly stay inside, or leave as PDF
- Cost is a real constraint — a school, a charity, a public body, a large estate of light users
- Policy or principle requires software you can inspect and keep
- You want Base, Draw or Math, which the standard Microsoft licence does not include
Our own product, and we said so at the top
Where Rutba Office fits
On the format-authority row, we made a different trade
Not "render it as faithfully as we can" but "do not rewrite what we did not edit". The parts of a file this engine has no opinion about come back byte-identical, so a document that goes out and comes back has changed only where somebody changed it. That is a narrower promise than Word’s and a more mechanical one than a re-render.
On cost, we are where LibreOffice is
Free, permanently, commercially, with the source published — the same answer, under a stricter licence.
On depth and macros, we are behind both
This is a version 1.0 and it does not execute VBA at all — a workbook’s macro project is preserved through an edit and handed back untouched, and nothing runs it. If either of the depth rows decided this for you, we lose that row too.
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.