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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Google Sheets

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AGoogle Sheets is the spreadsheet app available on Google Workspace, or standalone, with a free plan for personal use and accessible via mobile apps for iOS and Android.N/A

    LibreOffice

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ALibreOffice is a free and open-source Office Suite from The Document Foundation, presented as the successor to OpenOffice.org. The suite includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).

    $0

    free and open source under the Mozilla Public License v2.0

    Pricing
    Google SheetsLibreOffice
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Google SheetsLibreOffice
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Google SheetsLibreOffice
    Considered Both Products
    Google
    No answer on this topic
    The Document Foundation
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    90 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    12 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    86 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    12 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    89 Answers
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    49 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    60 Answers
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    12 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Google SheetsLibreOffice
    Small Businesses
    Stackby
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Google Workspace
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Microsoft Excel
    Score9 out of 10
    Google Workspace
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Microsoft Excel
    Score9 out of 10
    Microsoft 365 Business Premium
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Google SheetsLibreOffice
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (93 ratings)
    9.0
    (33 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.7
    (55 ratings)
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    9.5
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.5
    (2 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.3
    (6 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.8
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Google SheetsLibreOffice
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Google
    Google Sheets is well suited in two main areas: is free to use and you don't need to buy a license to use it, comparing to the most direct competitors ; collaboration is in my opinion the best advantage, with multiple people working together and seeing others working in real time. It's less appropriate in low connectivity environments (offline capabilities)
    Read full review
    The Document Foundation
    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.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Google
    • Collaborative planning : In the initial phase of project, Team leads and architects create a permission matrix along with the naming convention simultaneously, seeing who is editing / adding the details in real-time.
    • Cost tracking : We use this tool to track cloud resource usage monthly costs, so that we can analyse it and send out comms for high cost based resources. By storing cost data here, it's easy for use to store data of last couple of years.
    • Flexible documentation : For change logging of different scenarios we would need different / ad-hoc columns to be added on the fly, which makes using this tool much simpler then reputed third party tools.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    The Document Foundation
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    Google
    • Ease of use - I collaborate with a lot of folks on these and a lot of them have trouble using it.
    • Would love more live features; for example, being able to have cells react to other inputs (checkboxes, etc) with reactive formatting
    • More cross-usability with other Google products; it's hard to think of drawbacks honestly, this is a pretty seamless software.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    The Document Foundation
    • 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.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Google
    I am not involved in the purchase/selection process, but my organization is a Google shop, and Sheets meets most of our spreadsheet needs and works seamlessly with our other tools. I don't anticipate our switching anytime soon.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    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
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    Usability
    Google
    It can easily handle most uses and functions. It is only for very large datasets or advanced analysis that it either lacks the proper functions or performance begins to slow. Most employees who continue to use competitors' products do so out of preference, familiarity with the user interface, or other surface-level reasons.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    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.
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    Reliability and Availability
    Google
    Like most Google products, Google Sheets rarely has outages or slowness, and when it does, connection is always momentarily restored. I can't recall a time when I've been unable to access Google Sheets but able to access other sites just fine. That said, errors aren't uncommon when handling large data volume. You know what they say about using spreadsheets as databases, but sometimes it's just the most convenient option, especially for smaller or one-off projects, and not being able to store large amounts of data hampers our ability to move quickly with scrappy prototypes or full solutions. It would be great if we could better integrate our data manipulation (Apps Script) with big data in the sheet.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    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
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    Performance
    Google
    Again, Google Sheets is no exception to Google's general high speed and reliability, but load times can be slow for larger amounts of data. I've used Sheets with Zapier and have used the Python API, and speed has never been an issue.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    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
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    Support Rating
    Google
    I have never contacted Google Sheets support, but Google Sheets makes it very easy to report an issue or suggest a feature from Sheets itself (Help > Help Sheets improve), and I've had mostly good experiences with support for other Google products.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    The Document Foundation
    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
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Google
    No answers on this topic
    The Document Foundation
    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
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    Alternatives Considered
    Google
    I have found that I can do almost everything I could have done in Microsoft Excel faster and easier in Google Sheets. We recommend Google Sheets in 99.9% of our use cases and feel it meets the needs of our workers very well. I am sure there are other spreadsheet creation programs out there, but because we are already in the Google environment, adopting Google Sheets in very easy.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    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
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Google
    I'm not involved with the purchase, but I assume everything goes smoothly and that the pricing structure is predictable and reasonable. We do not get surprise fees.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Google
    Google Sheets works very well with multiple users. It's convenient to see in real-time who is collaborating in a sheet, down to the specific cell that they're viewing/editing. Linking Sheets across departments is convenient with the IMPORTRANGE function.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    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
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    Return on Investment
    Google
    • Don't need to pay for windows 365 license as it is free
    • Has a positive impact since I am not cursing excel for annoying problems(I don't want the new Pivot table format, I want to use Classic and I don't want to expand/collapse arrows. "x$#%")
    • [Haven't] looked at return on investment on work, but has "simplified" for basic and medium spreadsheets.
    Incentivized
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    The Document Foundation
    • 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
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    ScreenShots