Creatio vs. LibreOffice

Creatio is well suited in following scenarios: Complex Business process modelling and automation, Low code No code development which is best for efficient timelines, customized reporting and dashboarding, seamless integration with other technologies. Scenarios where Creatio is less appropriate: Solutions which require high cutomizations on the frontend side as this can be done by javascript modifications but it increases the load on the page and slows it down.

Incentivized

LibreOffice is a good alternative to MS Office. I like it better than Google Docs. It's compatible with MS Office applications. However, many of the features or functions are difficult to find even when utilizing the help menu. The website isn't too helpful either. My greatest disappointment is that I paid for the premium version a year ago but never received the features that were supposed to be available with a premium subscription. The upper right-hand corner of the app shows the subscription type and date of expiration of the subscription. I have premium yet every time I try to access a premium feature it requests me to pay. I have contacted LibreOffice several times over the year and they never responded or provided a refund. I can only recommend the free version because even with a premium subscription, which mine is supposed to expire on 10/22/21 (the date of this review is 08/04/21), I have yet to be able to utilize the premium features I paid for last year. I would not use this as my primary app for Word processing which is where I am experiencing the majority of the blocked features issues. Even with a paid premium subscription, I am unable to create labels. It's asking me to pay again. I think LibreOffice has greater potential but a user must get the features they paid for. I hesitate to call the company a scam but I can say I have contacted LibreOffice numerous times over the past year about the ongoing issues and have not received a response at least once. Along with the features and subscriptions issues that needed to be addressed, another area of improvement is their website. It is very difficult to locate information. Even when using the search field the instructions often do not match the app. I am not sure how often they update their online guides but I have never found it to be helpful. I have also found it very difficult to impossible to download templates. I usually get weird links with garbled codes and no template when trying to download a template. I'm not sure if it's an issue with their site or not but since they don't respond to inquiries I cannot determine a possible cause for the problem.

• Creatio's client success team is super. The team is collaborative, solution-oriented, and client-driven. We have weekly meetings with the team. They show up prepared with solutions/ideas to business requests and they are clearly engaged.
• Creatio's infrastructure team has been critical to our ability to execute our cloud strategy. They have worked with us to set up our testing and production environments within Azure, assisted in testing, and are responsive and flexible to our unique requirements.
• Creatio has been very flexible to requests for customization. We have taken their low-code out-of-the-box solution and "Ringlerized" it. The benefit for us is an application that meets our niche business needs.

• The text word processing (Writer) has come a long way and, if you are able to install your corporate fonts, there is basically nothing LibreOffice cannot handle. It works very well with document reviews and comments, and it can save in a variety of formats, making it compatible with the likes of Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
• The spreadsheet software (Calc) can also handle most of the common tasks you may need, link various sheets, and perform some automated functions quite well. It is, I must say, somewhat less complete than the word processing side (Writer).
• The Draw program allows you to do organizational charts and basic publications very well. It was a deficit in the past, but not anymore.

Incentivized

• When we started using Creatio in 2022 the new user interface had just been released and did not include all the features we needed; however, we used a more classic user interface and were still satisfied with the results.
• The ability to capture a digital signature directly within the application was missing in the base system; however, Creatio connected us with a partner that provided a solution for this specific situation.

• Name brand office suites vendors such as Microsoft and Google have online portals where documents can be saved and shared for automation/integration. LibreOffice would do well to expand into this space.
• Memory handling in large spreadsheets (i.e., 60k rows or more) seems a bit quirky on my Macbook Air. It might just be a memory issues, but scrolling with the trackpad behaves strangely (i.e., cell selection jumps around unexpectedly).

Incentivized

We have always used a CRM and Creatio has proven to be much more effective in meeting our needs than our previous provider. Its customizability will allow us to adapt this product as our business may change in the future.

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

Because it is so easy to use and navigate through - even the most technophobic people in our company are using it on a regular basis. It is easy to change around and switch through different sections and keep neat and tidy.

Most people can quickly start using Writer or Calc or Impress for basic tasks even if they see Libreoffice for the first time, because the interface is similar to older (97-2003) MS Office or other software. Some features are less intuitive than in recent MS Office and some power users of MS Office need to re-learn some things before being proficient in Libreoffice.

Incentivized

Other than the daily maintenance window where the server may be inaccessible for a few minutes, there have been no issues with accessing our Creatio site. The daily maintenance window is outside normal business hours so it does not affect our Users - just myself when I am looking to implement changes.

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

Some Users have reported slow responses from the server at times which seems to be localized. Users are based across four different time zones and the issue is intermittent.

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

The people at the Creatio offices world wide are very friendly, patience and always happy to help. I have a huge respect for them, especially the people that were based in the Ukraine. Still in these strange times they always keep the focus on the customer, where we would have totaly understanded it if it was any different. So huge compliments to the whole team, keep up the energy and the good work

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

Most of the roadblocks to learning were not discovered until the users were actually in the system using it on a day to day basis. Our Customer Success Manager has offered to setup additional training sessions as needed to close the gaps in our learning. Some areas which required some additional training are setting up filters, dashboards, and generating reports.

Incentivized

The project manager for our implementation was great to work with and took the time to understand our business. We felt very comfortable going into the project with a reasonable scope of work to provide us with a functional version of Creatio to meet our needs. Unfortunately, we came across multiple challenges with this partner in their deliverables and timelines. Thankfully Creatio was able to provide support resources to ensure we were able to launch. We have since changed partners for our third-party support.

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

The user-friendliness of Creatio was a big selling point along with the low-code initiatives, both of which were important to our business. With Salesforce, unlimited wasn't really unlimited. You couldn't deploy an on-site instance and the overall cost of the system far outweighed the ROI. These are all things Creatio offers, out-of-the-box.

As noted previously, LibreOffice blows Google Docs (G Suite) out of the water in terms of singular application quality, and comes close but misses the mark as a drop-in replacement to Microsoft Office. We currently are evaluating the latest release of LibreOffice to see if we can replace Microsoft Office with it entirely as we've had more time to fill in the holes that were left when losing out on Outlook and OneNote and all of the integrations that come with Microsoft Office.

Incentivized

I can see the promise of how it can be customized to other aspects of our business.

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

• We went from manually processing Work Orders into Invoices once a day - representing significant impact to turn around speeds - to submitting automatically in real time, eliminating a great deal of human transcription errors and freeing up a great deal of operations time
• Custom Implementation automation in Creatio has eliminated 4-6 hours of configuration work per sale in comparison to our old manual methods

• A lot of ROI because their license price, 100% of return.
• Sometimes we lose time finding how to do things, lowering a little bit of productivity.
• We need to spend on training for employees because most people only know how to use Microsoft Office

Incentivized