Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office (Including Microsoft’s Own)

Start with the option almost nobody mentions: Microsoft gives away Office for free. Go to office.com, sign in with a free Microsoft account, and you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook in your browser at no cost. They are the real applications, they open your files perfectly because they are made by the same company, and there is no trial period.

If your objection to Microsoft 365 is the subscription rather than Microsoft itself, that is very likely the end of your search. Everything below is for the cases where it is not enough — you need to work offline, you need the advanced features the web versions lack, or you would rather not have a Microsoft account at all.

Microsoft 365 for the web — free, and actually Office

The free web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint handle the overwhelming majority of ordinary document work: writing, formatting, tables, charts, comments, track changes, real-time co-authoring, and 5 GB of OneDrive storage. Files open and save as genuine .docx and .xlsx with no conversion step and no formatting drift, because it is Microsoft's own rendering engine.

Where it falls short: the advanced end is missing. No macros or VBA. Excel's Power Query, Power Pivot and the more specialised data tools are absent. Word's mail merge, master documents and advanced reference features are not there. Offline use requires setup and is limited. And you need a Microsoft account, with your files living in OneDrive by default.

For students, for anyone writing ordinary documents, and for anyone whose real requirement is "open what my colleague sent me without it looking wrong", this is the correct answer and it is free.

LibreOffice — the full desktop suite

LibreOffice is a genuine desktop office suite: Writer, Calc, Impress, plus Draw for diagrams and vector work and Base for databases. It installs on Windows, Mac and Linux, runs entirely offline, requires no account, and is open source — no telemetry, no licence that can change, no upsell.

Feature depth is real. Calc handles pivot tables, hundreds of functions, solver and statistical analysis. Writer does master documents, proper styles, bibliography and indexes — it is arguably better than Word for long structured documents like theses. There is a macro language, and it can even run many VBA macros with some adaptation.

Where it falls short: two things, honestly.

First, the interface looks dated. It is functional and dense rather than polished, and after using Microsoft's ribbon it feels like stepping back a decade. A ribbon-style layout is available in settings but is not the default and is not as refined.

Second, and more consequentially: complex .docx files drift. A plain document round-trips fine. A document with heavy formatting, precise image positioning, text boxes, SmartArt or a corporate template will shift — spacing changes, a page break lands somewhere new, a diagram moves. For your own documents this does not matter. For a document going to someone who will open it in Word and judge the layout, it very much does. Export to PDF when the layout is what matters.

OnlyOffice — the best Microsoft format compatibility

OnlyOffice made a different architectural decision from LibreOffice: it treats Microsoft's OOXML formats as its native ones rather than converting in and out of ODF. The result is the best .docx and .xlsx fidelity of any free desktop suite — documents that visibly shift in LibreOffice frequently survive OnlyOffice intact.

The interface is a close copy of Microsoft's ribbon, so it is immediately familiar, and the desktop editors are free for personal use. It also handles collaborative editing properly if you connect it to a Nextcloud server.

Where it falls short: the feature set is shallower than LibreOffice's at the specialist end — fewer functions in the spreadsheet, less capable long-document handling, no database component. The ecosystem is smaller, so fewer extensions and less community documentation. And the free/paid boundary is murkier than a plain open-source licence: the desktop editors are free, the server products are not, and that line has moved before.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides

Google's suite is free with any Google account and remains the best collaborative editing experience available anywhere, including Microsoft's. Multiple people in a document simultaneously, comments and suggestions that work sensibly, unlimited revision history, and sharing that is a link rather than an attachment. Sheets is a capable spreadsheet with functions Excel does not have, including the genuinely useful IMPORTRANGE and QUERY.

Where it falls short: .docx fidelity is the weakest of everything here. Google converts to its own internal format on import and back on export, and complex documents lose layout in both directions. Offline works but requires setup in Chrome and is fragile. Sheets slows down noticeably past roughly 100,000 rows, where Excel is comfortable. And storage is the shared 15 GB Google allowance, which your photos and Gmail are also consuming.

WPS Office

WPS Office is a Microsoft-lookalike suite with good OOXML compatibility and a light footprint, including a solid mobile version. It is free with a paid tier.

Where it falls short: the free tier shows ads and pushes upgrades in a way the others do not, and some functions — certain PDF operations, cloud sync — are gated behind the paid plan. It is developed by Kingsoft, a Chinese company, which some organisations have policies about. Worth knowing before you install it on a work machine.

The things that genuinely do not transfer

Three specific gaps are worth naming, because they account for most of the cases where someone tries to switch and has to go back:

• VBA macros. If your workplace runs on Excel macros, none of these will run them reliably. LibreOffice comes closest and still requires rewriting.
• Power Query and Power Pivot. Excel's data transformation and modelling tools have no real free equivalent. For serious data work the honest answer is a different category of tool entirely.
• Precise layout in shared documents. Any document crossing between suites can shift. This is not a bug that will be fixed — it is the consequence of reimplementing an enormous and partly undocumented format. If the layout is the deliverable, send a PDF.