Adobe Acrobat vs. LibreOffice vs. Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued)

If your work involves a lot of received PDFs, be it contracts, scanned docs, or multi-part files that need reorganizing before they go anywhere useful, Acrobat fits there well. It's basically what we use it for, and it does that job reliably enough. Where it gets less appropriate is anything collaborative or when you are on a tight budget: paying this much for a tool that slows down on heavy files and doesn't do real-time editing is hard to justify unless you genuinely need the OCR and format editing on the side. For a lighter use case, there are cheaper options that cover most of what people actually need.

Incentivized

If you're working with numbers, LibreOffice doesn't get in your way and try to make changes as it sees fit, forcing you to repeatedly go back and undo processes you didn't want, didn't ask for, and that have no place in the document you are trying to produce. All I want to do is assemble the data, process it for the task at hand, and then print it for distribution. LibreOffice allows me to do that.

I'd recommend [Microsoft] Office2016 for any business that has more than a couple of users, as the software is very scalable from just a small business to a large enterprise corporation. I don't know of any case where it might not be appropriate, as even home users and students use the software suite as well.

Incentivized

• ISO standard PDF creation is critical for print production, so that there are no surprises on press.
• Adobe Acrobat's security features are simple to use, and effective.
• Most clients have no difficulty with the commenting features in Adobe Acrobat, which makes review quick and simple.

Incentivized

• Tools like speeling, grammar, and thesaurus are super fast and intuitive
• Read-only content can be created by adding a section and password
• The right-click menus are very intuitive and change on the fly with what is needed depending on the content and situation
• Documents can be saved natively as *.docx or *.xlsx

Incentivized

• Data manipulation. Excel takes the raw data we receive and allows us to digest it in ways that are useful to our business processes.
• Communication. Outlook serves as our primary means of communication and setting up appointments.
• Documentation. Word is the default standard when it comes to using a word processor and we are no different in this regard. Nearly every user has to use the application on a regular basis in order to accomplish their work.

Incentivized

• For as amazing as Adobe Acrobat is, a lot of the time it does feel like one of the more clunky and slow Adobe programs.
• Ability to edit text! Adobe Acrobat sometimes struggles with fonts and editing the text ends up messing with the text in weird ways.
• It would be cool to have multiple versions of the same preflight single fixups! I use the same single fixup but need to adjust it for multiple sizes! I'd like to be able to save another version of it with the different sizes.

Incentivized

• It doesn't provide all the functions it should with a paid subscription.
• There are features that are only available with Premium and I have premium and they are still not available.
• Paying for the premium version doesn't provide additional services than free version
• Customer service is nonresponsive and has been nonresponsive for years even prior to COVID.

• Office 2016 professional edition can be priced for a single user license, it would be nice to see a drop in the pricing.
• Office 2016 home edition is a better price but does not include outlook 2016, so it is not a good fit for the workplace environments.
• Office 2016 can run slowly on older systems, so you need to make sure you have a machine that is 4 years old or less for it to run smoothly.

Incentivized

Adobe Acrobat works seamlessly with the other Adobe products we use that are industry-standard. We will certainly continue to use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, meaning it will always be convenient to work seamlessly with Adobe Acrobat for our organization. We are happy with the performance of Acrobat and it's meets our expectations.

Incentivized

We use it consistently and have a lot of documents in the OpenDocument format so it will be necessary to use LibreOffice or a compatible product such as Openoffice in the future to be able to open these files. Because the license fee for Libreoffice is zero it is not very costly to keep using it - the costs are mostly for keeping it installed on the office PCs and regularly updated, and solving employee issues with the user support.

Incentivized

We believe that office 2016 offers the best value when it comes to features included out of the box. The software is used in its entirety by our organization and is easily supported by our staff of IT technicians. Users find this software to be easy to learn and easy to use with minimal learning curve.

Incentivized

It’s a very easy app to learn and software is essential. I feel like the app could load a bit faster but overall, is one of my go to apps. Makes reading and editing pdfs easy and I enjoy the usability of the app. It is definitely something I make sure to have downloaded on any computer I’m working from

Incentivized

For all of the reasons in the foregoing evaluation. Its menus are clean, intuitive and straightforward. Any function I need to use can be accessed via keystrokes, without having to stop, move my hand to the mouse, deal with it, and then get back to the keyboard to proceed. It helps me keep my mind on my work and not worry about dealing with the mouse all the time.

It's fairly easy to use, but the automatic formatting or capturing of formatting when pasting is wonky - especially when there are outlines or other bullets/numbered lists. Fixing and sizing up tables can be annoying, and there are sometimes formatting issues that we just absolutely cannot fix for some reason

Incentivized

We have not had availability issues with Adobe Acrobat, or at least none that I am personally aware of. Some may encounter crashes of the software during outages of electricity in their city or neighborhood, which no one can plan for, but with generators in our organization, we have been lucky not to have outages

Incentivized

Libreoffice is a desktop app not requiring any server part so it is always available when the PC is working normally. Installing it on another machine if one PC fails is very quick and easy. This is a non-issue.

Incentivized

One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.

Incentivized

For big/imported tables or text documents with images loaded from the internet it is sometimes getting very slow, RAM and CPU intensive, and sometimes even hangs due to some memory leaks or other bugs. This is a long-term problem and is still not resolved perfectly.

Incentivized

For a while, Acrobat DC crashed pretty frequently. I contacted Adobe Acrobat support about the problem. At first support was unable to provide a solution. After about a month Adobe's software engineers provided a fix. I just wish it had taken less than a month to solve the problem.

Incentivized

Support is not officially offered. However, you can find answers to any usage questions or trouble-shooting online easily, typically starting with a Google search. (I believe that all forums / tips for OpenOffice apply equally to LibreOffice, and vice versa.) While Microsoft Office, for example, officially includes support, I find that typically you end up going to a Google search in any case. So, this is not really a downside. However, in all these cases, you end up doing a lot of figuring things out for yourself.

Incentivized

I am an MS feedback hub participant and they certainly don't pay enough attention to several bugs several people raise it in the portal. For the enterprise, it seems to me based on my prior experience that yes, they have a dedicated team to support operations. For mid to small companies or single users, it has been a struggle. So, you are pretty much with MS Blogs and others.

Incentivized

Answered basic questions.

Incentivized

I was not involved with the implementation process, so I cannot answer this question. However, when it was installed on my computer system, they did so virtually. I just sat there while they took control of my computer over the network and watch them install it, lickety split

Incentivized

Generally easy to perform, issues are how to ensure regular automatic updates on Mac OS X. Fortunatly we have only a few machines with OS X run by management and we can do these updates manually occasionally. Windows updates are quite easy with the support of third party software such as Ninite or Chocolatey, and Linux updates are super-easy thanks to the package manager (apt-get).

Incentivized

In my opinion, both complement each other. Microsoft clearly has with Copilot the AI Edge. However, the visual dynamics of Adobe Creative are Outstanding and provide a balanced approach to creativity, utilizing both Excellent, user-friendly Tools.

Incentivized

I think it is fair to say this:

• If you are looking for a well-rounded, GNU-licensed product that will encompass word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database then LibreOffice is probably all you need.
• For online collaboration, links with cloud storage, and more robust support, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs are probably what you or your organization needs.
• LibreOffice is at its best for regular document creation and spreadsheet management. It is more cumbersome when it comes to fonts but also when it comes to linkages with cloud-based services. It is there, but you need some more computer knowledge to make it work.
• There are other free alternatives, most notably Apache Open Office, which is also a very good alternative if you do not like LibreOffice.

Having said that, I honestly think off-line computers or laptops used off-site can certainly benefit from having LibreOffice installed.

Incentivized

We use Microsoft Office 2016 because at the time it was the best tool for us, but now with full attention to cloud products, we may be thinking of migrating our solution to a cloud service.

Incentivized

I am not responsible for sales or purchasing

Incentivized

I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.

Incentivized

With more users using it in the company there are more cases when a simultaneous editing of the same document is needed and this feature is lacking in Libreoffice even though the files concerned are shared and synced by some solution (we use ownCloud). Google Docs or MS Office365 via Sharepoint/Onedrive offer a better function for this.

Incentivized

• Adobe Acrobat has saved us time in managing documents. In this day, everything is fast, moves fast, and keeping up with that pace demands software that functions at the same level. Adobe Acrobat does that. It has streamlined the steps I need to take to edit and create documents we need to manage our customers.
• Adobe Acrobat removes the worry and stress associated with managing a large influx of documents. Something as simple as a document featuring an image that was sent to us upside down. Using the old method, I would have to open other software, click 'Edit', find the 'Rotate Image' button, click it a couple of times, save it as a JPEG, then attach it to Word, and finally save it as a PDF. It was a grueling process that consumed a great deal of time. Now, I simply open the image, and Adobe automatically recognizes it is upside down and fixes it for me. I can save and move on; it literally takes me seconds. Amazing.
• Adobe Acrobat is intuitive and easy to use, and the additional apps are relevant to the needs that come up. If I have an idea, I can go to the available apps and find exactly what I need. Impressive and speaks to the years of experience this company has had to fine-tune its product and make it obvious that it is aggressive in staying on top.

Incentivized

• I am able to quickly create and edit word processing documents and spreadsheets which are for all intents and purposes equivalent to documents I could create and edit in other tools such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs/Sheets.
• Lack of an online portal for sharing documents necessitates the use of Google Sheets for automation/integration. Ideal would be an all-in-one solution.
• Having open-source software that provides common functionality eliminates the need for expensive licenses.
• Lack of dedicated support is negligible. Most issues can be resolved using online search.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Office 2016 saves me a lot of time daily. I have functions and macros set up that calculate and show me a lot of things just from a couple of my inputs. This would take full days sometimes if not for that.
• Apart from time, it saves me money, I manage data in Excel, I don't have to buy software specifically for that.
• Sooner or later my company will have to switch to new edition, which will hurt revenues because of a subscription model.

Incentivized