When asked for an alternative to Microsoft Office I almost always recommend LibreOffice. In fact I generally recommend LibreOffice over Microsoft Office because:
- It’s free (both as in freedom and cost)
- When pasting from the web it tends to format better than Microsoft Word (in my experience)
- It can be shared with others freely (you don’t become a pirate by sharing)
But LibreOffice isn’t the only office suite with Microsoft Office-compatibility. OnlyOffice by Ascensio System is another free as in freedom and cost office suite. I spent a bit of time working with OnlyOffice and here’s what I noticed:
- It saves to OpenXML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) by default. This makes it easier for those sharing documents with others to share something that is compatible with Microsoft Office.
- It looks more like Microsoft Office than the default LibreOffice suite.
- It can open both OpenXML/MS Office documents and OpenDocument Foundation/LibreOffice documents.
- Everything is integrated into one application, there’s no searching for several different apps.
As polished as OnlyOffice looks in my brief look I found some issues:
- There’s no database program (like LibreOffice Base)
- There’s no draw program (like LibreOffice Draw). There is an image program embedded in OnlyOffice’s Word Processor, but dragging and dropping an image to its window didn’t work, and not quite sure how it’s suppose to work – it’s not intuitive at all.
- There’s no math program (like LibreOffice Math)
- PDF functions are present, but hidden in the save as menu (LibreOffice has a single button click to create PDFs)
- There’s a panel of icons along the right hand side, similar to LibreOffice, but only the paragraph icon seems active (whereas LibreOffice lets you switch between any of the icons).
I’m sure with a bit more digging I’ll discover alternatives or things embedded in OnlyOffice that can do some of the functionality of LibreOffice. As far as office suites go I think OnlyOffice is probably a great alternative to Microsoft Office if you need to create standard documents. If your needs are a bit more complex then I’d still pick LibreOffice over either Microsoft Office or OnlyOffice for its standardization on the OpenDocument Foundation, MPL license, and overlooked features.