10 Productivity Suites that Aren't Microsoft Office
When you say “office suite” and “productivity software,” most people think about Microsoft Office and that is understandable. After all, Office is internationally renowned and it’s used by lots of individuals, companies, and organizations around the world.
The thing is that Microsoft Office isn’t the only productivity suite on the market. There are lots of other office suites out there and if you want to jump ship, you can. Here are 10 paid and free alternatives to Microsoft Office.
1. Simple Office
Developer Algorithms In Motion has multiple productivity tools to offer, tools that match the functionality you would get from the Microsoft Office suite of applications. Especially the functionality you would get from Word and Excel.
2. BinaryNow Office
BinaryNow’s productivity suite will help you work with text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow presentations. The suite is made up of three main programs:
3. Bell Office
This office suite is made up of six components:
4. WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office)
Mid-2014, all Kingsoft Office products were rebranded as WPS Office. The three components that were part Kingsoft Office – that’s Writer, Spreadsheets, and Presentation – made the jump to WPS office and were rebranded as:
5. SoftMaker FreeOffice and the paid SoftMaker Office
SoftMaker’s free office suite, the aptly named FreeOffice, comes with a Word-compatible text processor, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet application, and a PowerPoint-compatible program to create presentations:
SoftMaker’s paid office suite, which is called SoftMaker Office, comes with the three tools mentioned above and with a couple more:
Learn more about SoftMaker FreeOffice here and about SoftMaker Office here.
6. Corel Office
The Corel Office productivity suite can open most files created with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. It comes with 3 tools that are reminiscent of Word, Excel and PowerPoint:
Corel Office is free to use for a trial period of 30 days. You must know that alongside Corel Office, the Corel Corporation has another interesting productivity suite to offer: WordPerfect Office. Learn about both productivity suites here.
7. Ashampoo Office
Get Ashampoo’s cost-efficient Office productivity suite and you won’t have any problems working with text, spreadsheets, and presentations. While Office comes with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Ashampoo has these three:
Ashampoo Office is free to use for a trial period of 30 days. Visit the official Ashampoo website if you want to purchase it.
No more paid office suites!
So far, we’ve seen a mix of paid and free office suites. From here on, everything is free!
8. Apache OpenOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org)
There’s tons to like about Apache OpenOffice: it is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; it is compatible with other major office productivity suites; it is available in many languages; it can do everything that Microsoft Office can.
You see, Apache OpenOffice comes with components that nicely match Office’s functionality:
Apache OpenOffice is free and open source software. You can use it for free, for as long as you want. Learn more about it here.
9. LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice.org)
In case you don’t know the story, here’s the short version. Once upon a time, there was a free office suite called OpenOffice.org that belonged to Sun Microsystems. In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, prompting several members of the OpenOffice.org project to leave, form a group called The Document Foundation, and create an OpenOffice.org fork called LibreOffice. In 2011, Oracle decided to donate OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation, who renamed it as Apache OpenOffice.
The Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, and Math modules that I’ve mentioned in my brief description of Apache OpenOffice, you’ll find them in LibreOffice as well. It must be mentioned here that LibreOffice comes with an extra module called Charts. It can be used to create and embed charts.
Learn more about the free and open source LibreOffice here.
10. Google Docs
Google Docs can be used online, in your favorite browser. It’s free, and it comes with several modules:
Learn more about Google Docs here.
The documents, spreadsheets, and slides you create with Google Docs will be saved to Google Drive, a cloud service that offers 15GB of free storage space. I invite you to uncover a few other cloud services; in all, they offer more than 100GB of free online storage space.
But Wait! You can use Microsoft Office for free too!
All this talk about using Google Docs online reminded me that you can do the same with Microsoft Office. Go to Office.com and you’ll see an invitation to use multiple Office apps online. After you sign in with your Microsoft account, you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps online, for free.
There’s one more way to enjoy Office functionality for free: get the Office apps for Android or the Office apps for iOS.
The story behind this list of alternative productivity suites
I decided to publish this list of productivity suites that aren’t Microsoft Office because Microsoft recently rolled out Office 2016.
The worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows occurred on September 22, 2015. It was accompanied by the release of several new and enhanced Office 365 services and by Office 2016 for Mac as a one-time purchase option. Microsoft had previously released Office 2016 for Mac to Office 365 customers, in July 2015.
The thing is that Microsoft Office isn’t the only productivity suite on the market. There are lots of other office suites out there and if you want to jump ship, you can. Here are 10 paid and free alternatives to Microsoft Office.
1. Simple Office
Developer Algorithms In Motion has multiple productivity tools to offer, tools that match the functionality you would get from the Microsoft Office suite of applications. Especially the functionality you would get from Word and Excel.
- Simple Words – a good looking text processor and word editor that can handle Word and Open documents, simple or rich text files, PDF documents, and even eBooks.
- Simple Sheets – view, edit, create, and print out spreadsheets with this good looking application.
- Simple PDFs – an easy to use tool for reviewing PDF documents.
2. BinaryNow Office
BinaryNow’s productivity suite will help you work with text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow presentations. The suite is made up of three main programs:
- TextMaker – a word processor that natively supports PDF documents. Use it to open, view, and edit Word documents and templates; use it to open and view PDF documents.
- PlanMaker – create graphs and charts, analyze data, open and edit Excel spreadsheets.
- Presentations – create presentations that are just as good looking as the ones created with PowerPoint.
3. Bell Office
This office suite is made up of six components:
- Bell Word – word processor for opening, viewing, and editing text documents.
- Bell Bookmarks – create and manage bookmarks that lead to websites or locally stored files.
- Bell Calendar – a calendar that lets you add and manage events.
- Bell Reminder – create and manage to-do reminders.
- Bell Timetable – create timetables for each and any day of the week.
- Bell Photo View – view images or photos.
4. WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office)
Mid-2014, all Kingsoft Office products were rebranded as WPS Office. The three components that were part Kingsoft Office – that’s Writer, Spreadsheets, and Presentation – made the jump to WPS office and were rebranded as:
- WPS Writer – word processing and text editing tool that’s similar to Word.
- WPS Spreadsheets – just like Excel, this tool can be used to work with spreadsheets.
- WPS Presentation – create all types of presentations, just like you would with PowerPoint.
5. SoftMaker FreeOffice and the paid SoftMaker Office
SoftMaker’s free office suite, the aptly named FreeOffice, comes with a Word-compatible text processor, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet application, and a PowerPoint-compatible program to create presentations:
- FreeOffice TextMaker – create and edit text documents.
- FreeOffice PlanMaker – create and edit spreadsheets documents.
- FreeOffice Presentations – create and edit PowerPoint files.
SoftMaker’s paid office suite, which is called SoftMaker Office, comes with the three tools mentioned above and with a couple more:
- SoftMaker Office BasicMaker – programming environment that can be used to create scripts and thus control TextMaker, PlanMaker and other VBA-compatible Windows programs.
- Mozilla Thunderbird – while Office has Outlook, SoftMaker Office has Thunderbird, the properly good email and news client from Mozilla.
Learn more about SoftMaker FreeOffice here and about SoftMaker Office here.
6. Corel Office
The Corel Office productivity suite can open most files created with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. It comes with 3 tools that are reminiscent of Word, Excel and PowerPoint:
- Corel Write – view, edit, and create text documents.
- Corel Calculate – view, edit, and create spreadsheets.
- Corel Show – view, edit, and create presentations.
Corel Office is free to use for a trial period of 30 days. You must know that alongside Corel Office, the Corel Corporation has another interesting productivity suite to offer: WordPerfect Office. Learn about both productivity suites here.
7. Ashampoo Office
Get Ashampoo’s cost-efficient Office productivity suite and you won’t have any problems working with text, spreadsheets, and presentations. While Office comes with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Ashampoo has these three:
- Ashampoo TextMaker – word processor for working with text documents.
- Ashampoo PlanMaker – powerful tool for working with spreadsheets.
- Ashampoo Presentations – handy application for creating presentations.
Ashampoo Office is free to use for a trial period of 30 days. Visit the official Ashampoo website if you want to purchase it.
No more paid office suites!
So far, we’ve seen a mix of paid and free office suites. From here on, everything is free!
8. Apache OpenOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org)
There’s tons to like about Apache OpenOffice: it is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; it is compatible with other major office productivity suites; it is available in many languages; it can do everything that Microsoft Office can.
You see, Apache OpenOffice comes with components that nicely match Office’s functionality:
- Writer – word processor and text editor.
- Calc – powerful tool to work with spreadsheets.
- Impress – create multimedia presentations quickly and easily.
- Draw – create anything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations.
- Base – work with databases.
- Math – a formula editor that you can use to create math equations.
Apache OpenOffice is free and open source software. You can use it for free, for as long as you want. Learn more about it here.
9. LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice.org)
In case you don’t know the story, here’s the short version. Once upon a time, there was a free office suite called OpenOffice.org that belonged to Sun Microsystems. In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, prompting several members of the OpenOffice.org project to leave, form a group called The Document Foundation, and create an OpenOffice.org fork called LibreOffice. In 2011, Oracle decided to donate OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation, who renamed it as Apache OpenOffice.
The Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, and Math modules that I’ve mentioned in my brief description of Apache OpenOffice, you’ll find them in LibreOffice as well. It must be mentioned here that LibreOffice comes with an extra module called Charts. It can be used to create and embed charts.
Learn more about the free and open source LibreOffice here.
10. Google Docs
Google Docs can be used online, in your favorite browser. It’s free, and it comes with several modules:
- Docs – create new text documents, edit existing text documents, collaborate with others on text documents.
- Sheets – create spreadsheets, edit spreadsheets, collaborate with others on spreadsheets.
- Slides – create, edit, collaborate on presentations.
- Forms – create forms and use them to collect and organize information.
Learn more about Google Docs here.
The documents, spreadsheets, and slides you create with Google Docs will be saved to Google Drive, a cloud service that offers 15GB of free storage space. I invite you to uncover a few other cloud services; in all, they offer more than 100GB of free online storage space.
But Wait! You can use Microsoft Office for free too!
All this talk about using Google Docs online reminded me that you can do the same with Microsoft Office. Go to Office.com and you’ll see an invitation to use multiple Office apps online. After you sign in with your Microsoft account, you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps online, for free.
There’s one more way to enjoy Office functionality for free: get the Office apps for Android or the Office apps for iOS.
The story behind this list of alternative productivity suites
I decided to publish this list of productivity suites that aren’t Microsoft Office because Microsoft recently rolled out Office 2016.
The worldwide release of Office 2016 for Windows occurred on September 22, 2015. It was accompanied by the release of several new and enhanced Office 365 services and by Office 2016 for Mac as a one-time purchase option. Microsoft had previously released Office 2016 for Mac to Office 365 customers, in July 2015.
