Grist vs. LibreOffice

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grist
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Grist combines the capabilities of spreadsheets, databases and app builders. Using a familiar spreadsheet interface, information can be organized as a relational database, and dashboards built using drag-and-drop. Solving spreadsheet problems Ensures data is well-structured and stored in one place with no duplication, no spreadsheet-wrangling, no merging documents. Collaboration on sensitive data Data is protected…
$8
per month per user
LibreOffice
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
LibreOffice 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
GristLibreOffice
Editions & Modules
Pro
$8
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Sales
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GristLibreOffice
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
GristLibreOffice
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Score 8.9 out of 10
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Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 8.9 out of 10
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Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GristLibreOffice
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(2 ratings)
10.0
(29 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
6.1
(2 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GristLibreOffice
Likelihood to Recommend
Grist Labs
This is well suited to someone (or a team) who are technically minded and have a dataset that they need to be able to use in many ways. It's less appropriate for a team who isn't technically minded and/or don't have the data they need to manipulate. It would be useful for things that you could use a database or spreadsheet for such as CRM, Advertising database, Business tracking, Health tracking etc.
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The Document Foundation
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.
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Pros
Grist Labs
  • Provides amazing customer service, help, examples, and explains what they are having you do
  • The layout is easy
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The Document Foundation
  • 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.
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Cons
Grist Labs
  • Making the user permissions more obvious on how to use them - They are highly adaptable, but hard to understand how to use them
  • Small changes such as auto colouring the choices/toggles options and being able to edit them once set.
  • Being able to copy the formatting from one column to the next
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The Document Foundation
  • 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).
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Likelihood to Renew
Grist Labs
No answers on this topic
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.
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Usability
Grist Labs
No answers on this topic
The Document Foundation
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Grist Labs
No answers on this topic
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.
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Performance
Grist Labs
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
Grist Labs
No answers on this topic
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.
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Implementation Rating
Grist Labs
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).
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Alternatives Considered
Grist Labs
Grist is easier to use, faster, and loads quicker with heavy data.
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The Document Foundation
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.
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Scalability
Grist Labs
No answers on this topic
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.
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Return on Investment
Grist Labs
  • It's saved a lot of time in both creating an advertising database and managing it week to week effectively. I had previously created in others that haven't worked, and this does, saving me a good 1 hour weekly, and 5 hours or more each time I had problems with the last ones
  • Being able to stay on track with this has meant I'm following up at the right time (advertisers) and keeping a professional manner and not losing business due to missed communication
  • Saving me $ from buying a program like Access (or Airtable monthly) and then the learning curve that that has. This has a much easier learning curve to say the least.
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The Document Foundation
  • 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
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ScreenShots

Grist Screenshots

Screenshot of the drag and drop dashboard editor used to build layouts.Screenshot of the custom user permissions that determine who can see what, down to each column and row.Screenshot of dynamic charts and reports that update with the click of a mouse.Screenshot of Grist's formula support for Excel-like functions or Python formulas. Technical users can drill into database structure in code view.