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).
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free and open source under the Mozilla Public License v2.0
Quip
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Quip offers a suite of productivity/collaboration tools. The vendor says Quip combines documents, spreadsheets, checklists and chat into one interface.
$0
per month
Pricing
LibreOffice
Quip
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$0
Team
$10
per month (10 seats included)
Business
$12
per user per month
Enterprise
$25
per user per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
LibreOffice
Quip
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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All editions include unlimited personal documents and folders and a custom subdomain. Paid versions include unlimited document revision history, message archive and group sharing.
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.
Well, they are suited. 1. We use it as an effective way of collaboration between teams. 2. Can be used as an online spreadsheet. 3. It helps in accessing the data by multiple teams hassle-free. 4. Can customize the action, like editing or locking the spreadsheet to the other users based on the business need. Less Suited/inappropriate: 1. The UI is very much outdated. 2. The number of rows to be added to the spreadsheet has limitations. & We have to create a new Quip every now & then once the row limits are reached. 3. Can't do a detailed analysis like pivots tables etc. 4. Other functions like sort & filter options in Quip are not so user-friendly, unlike other spreadsheets out there in the market.
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.
Our experience with Quip has been nothing short of astounding; I love everything about this collaboration tool.
I love that it is cross-platform and works so well on mobile devices; it makes it unhindered to make progress on to-dos, take notes, export spreadsheets and documents, and have all my information organized within one environment.
I also love that it notifies me when someone has done something in shared documents and the incredible ease of linking documents in chats.
Quip's user interface is friendly and comfortably navigable; it feels right.
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).
When using Quip Desktop, it can be slow to update with content from other users
I think it would be cool to have a PDF proofing system integrated into Quip. Once copy has gone to design, we are basically done using Quip - I'd like to bring that all together within Quip
Multi -select and group export of documents would be helpful
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.
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.
It is the best collaboration tool in my company. Through it, the organization has achieved better connectivity and efficiency in its communication. Primarily, the docs feature of this software is the most utilized in the company. Slowly, dash-boarding and project management features have also been utilized. Generally, it is the best tool, very easy and fairly streamlined
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.
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.
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.
I have never used Quip's support. To be fair, we hired someone who used to work for Quip before working at our company, and he implemented it and pushed it with the team. He was very biased toward the product, and yes it was better than Google Drive, but by how much?
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).
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.
Google Drive is an obvious choice for a collaboration suite, but it still has this old-fashioned Windows 95 feel to it, with the standard file system hierarchy and spread-sheet like lists of files. Quip has a fresh take on the user interface, and the comments and discussion on a given file or line within a file seems more integrated and seamless, rather than a bunch of boxes out in the margin away from where you're actually reading and working. Having everything just to the left of a list or paragraph makes it easier to focus and maintain context while you're working or discussing a certain point.
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.
