LibreOffice vs. Microsoft 365

LibreOffice is well-suited for just about anyone who has used MS Office or Google Docs. I find it to be more powerful and feature-rich than both, and its ease of use and intuitiveness are far better. I've primarily used Writer and Calc, but also have some experience with Impress, Draw, and Base, and find them top-notch as well. On the other side of things, I find collaboration to be more difficult than with Google Docs, and to a degree, even MS Office. LibreOffice does have a fairly robust Tools > Share Spreadsheet… feature, but I've never been able to find one for Writer. I have little need for collaboration, but when I once did, I found it somewhat convoluted.

Incentivized

Microsoft 365 would be well suited for medium to large enterprises. This is where there are several hundreds or thousands of people. Since most everyone has used one of the applications the learning curve would be reduced. Another reason would be the ability to implement security measures to prevent access to sensitive data. This could justify the cost of an Enterprise license.

Incentivized

• 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

• Chat with teams and the integrations with the other apps, and many more smaller ones, like to-dos, news, and the recent Outlook integration.
• Easy embedding on SharePoint to broadcast all the content created in the different tools.
• The office package is still robust with the good things from the past and new additions.

Incentivized

• 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

• Fix Outlook. It crashes constantly, uses way too many resources, and freezes to the point that I need to shut it down in the Task Manager.
• Excel could use an easier numbering function. I used to drag down, and it would number the cells ascending. Somewhere, it lost this function and just copied the same number down the column, which is kind of useless.
• Someone needs to create (and include) a quick and easy cheat sheet for commonly used formulas. It would be nice if a drop-down would let you choose a formula (without all the prior programming).

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

I am completely satisfied with the product, and helps me on a daily basis. I do not the exact cost (it is not a cheap suite) but on the medium and long term the return on investment is guaranteed.

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.

Because it's efficient and cost effective. I can work offline even when there is no Internet or I'm travelling. I am able to meet deadlines because it is user friendly which makes it easy to use. I make good use of the cloud storage as well so I have all my files in one place.

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

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

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

Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the 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

Everything works and I use it all the time.

Incentivized

Versus Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice is a workable solution for collecting, manipulating and reporting data. Excel is not. Apache OpenOffice is the idea LibreOffice is based on, but LibreOffice has advanced beyond OpenOffice. New features, within the LibreOffice framework are much quicker and easier to distribute to the end users (me) than OpenOffice. The last version of WordPerfect I used was a DOS version. I moved to Microsoft Word and then they changed everything with the 2007 version. I immediately started looking for an alternative and found LibreOffice Writer. I no longer have any interest in using Microsoft Office products.

Microsoft 365 works together well with other apps and performs well as it is the standard setter in many settings. Salesforce is good at what it excels and functions at. The two products do not compete in the same field and are good complementary tools to achieve project management goals and tasks.

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

• I have been able to use it sufficiently for documents I would normally use MS Excel for.
• I have had limited use with Writer so I can't accomplish much with it and have to use an alternate program.
• I have been able to use Impress a little but a lot of the features, like with Writer, are blocked even with a Premium subscription which means I must use an alternate program.

• 1600+ users have adopted Microsoft 365 in our company. We even created enablement sharepoint pages for every department and for new hires to go to as the source of truth or see what ERGs to join.
• Huge time saved with the meeting scheduling assistant especially when trying to book time with busy leaders.
• Copilots meeting summaries and email summaries are amazing. We can even use your own AI within Teams and ask it questions about our customer accounts, HR questions, etc. right within the Teams platform.

Incentivized