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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    Microsoft Access

    Score7.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Access is a database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools.

    $139.99

    per PC

    Pricing
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft Access
    $139.99
    per PC
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Considered Both Products
    The Document Foundation
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    Chose Microsoft Access
    [Selected Microsoft Access for] employee learning simplicity, attractive graphical environment and features of Microsoft 365 with responsive Microsoft support.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    12 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    29 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    12 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    29 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    28 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    19 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    12 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    21 Answers
    Features
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Relational Databases
    Comparison of Relational Databases features of LibreOffice and Microsoft Access
    Feature
    LibreOffice
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Access
    7.7
    3 Ratings
    5% below category average
    ACID compliance00 Ratings7.02 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Database locking00 Ratings8.03 Ratings
    Encryption00 Ratings7.02 Ratings
    Disaster recovery00 Ratings7.73 Ratings
    Flexible deployment00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Multiple datatypes00 Ratings8.03 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Small Businesses
    Google Workspace
    Score9.1 out of 10
    Amazon RDS
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Google Workspace
    Score9.1 out of 10
    SingleStore
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Microsoft 365 Business Premium
    Score9 out of 10
    SAP IQ
    Score5.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (33 ratings)
    7.4
    (102 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (15 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    7.6
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.3
    (6 ratings)
    6.4
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    LibreOfficeMicrosoft Access
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    Microsoft
    As a Material Purchasing/Planning/inventory tracking application, Microsoft Access serves its purpose well. It's presentation is clean, data entry is simple and the ability to customize search fields is welcome. It does, however, come with some caveats; namely, when setting search filters and the need arises to back up a step or two, with Microsoft Access you have to reset, or "clear all", adding extra steps/time to a query.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Microsoft
    • Very easy to create entity-relationship diagrams for various tables and designing mock layouts.
    • Really easy to navigate as it hold[s] the classic Microsoft UI. Another good thing is that it comes with the complete MS Office Suite.
    • It is really fast when joining multiple tables no matter what type of join.
    • Works on pretty much same SQL scripts so no need to learn a new language!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Access has not really changed at all for several years. It might be nice to see some upgrades and changes.
    • The help info is often not helpful. Need more tutorials for Microsoft Access to show how to do specific things.
    • Be careful naming objects such as tables, forms, etc. Names that are too long can get cut off in dialog boxes to choose a table, form, report, etc. So, I wish they would have resizable dialog boxes to allow you to see objects with long names.
    • I wish it could show me objects that are not in use in the database for current queries, tables, reports, forms, and macros. That way unused objects can be deleted without worrying about losing a report or query because you deleted the underlying object.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    I and the rest of my team will renew our Microsoft Access in the future because we use and maintain many different applications and databases created using Microsoft Access so we will need to maintain them in the future. Additionally, it is a standard at our place of work so it is at $0 cost to us to use. Another reason for renewing Microsoft Access is that we just don' t have the resources needed to extend into a network of users so we need to remain a single-desktop application at this time.
    Read full review
    Usability
    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.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Access is easy to use. It is compatible with spreadsheets. It is a very good data management tool. There is scope to save a large amount of data in one place. For using this database, one does not need much training, can be shared among multiple users. This database has to sort and filtering features which seem to be very useful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    I don't think the program has ever failed me. It is one of those programs where there is always a solution if you know where to look.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    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
    Microsoft
    While I have never contacted Microsoft directly for product support, for some reason there's a real prejudice against MS Access among most IT support professionals. They are usually discouraging when it comes to using MS Access. Most of this is due to their lack of understanding of MS Access and how it can improve one's productivity. If Microsoft invested more resources towards enhancing and promoting the use of MS Access then maybe things would be different.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    there is no key idea, since it is easy to implement Microsoft Access
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Excel is a fantastic - robust application that can do so much so easily. Its easy to train and understand. However - excel does not provide a reporting function and that is typically where we will suggest a move to [Microsoft] Access. [Microsoft] Access requires a little more knowledge of data manipulation.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    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
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Not having to recreate queries or reports every time you want to use them.
    • Once an item is created and saved as part of the database, you save manpower by not having to recreate them.
    • ROI from a usability standpoint is great. Solid product with great functionality that requires low maintenance usually.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots