LibreOffice Review (2026): Free, Open Source, from a Berlin Foundation

What is LibreOffice?

Who is behind LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite developed by a community of hundreds of contributors worldwide and backed by The Document Foundation. The foundation is a charitable foundation under German law, based at Winterfeldtstraße 52 in Berlin and supervised by the foundation authority of the Berlin Senate Department for Justice. It was incorporated in 2012; LibreOffice itself grew out of OpenOffice.org. A seven-member board of directors leads the foundation.

Companies also work on the code. The UK-based Collabora, for example, says it is the single largest contributor of commits to LibreOffice and sells its own products built on it.

Where LibreOffice hosts your data

Nowhere – LibreOffice is a desktop application, and your documents stay on your own computer or wherever you save them. The Document Foundation says LibreOffice 26.8 needs no network access to work and sends no documents to remote services. Only the website and downloads run on a server, at Hetzner Online in the EU (AS24940).

Checked 25 Oct 2026. Hosting can change – report a change.

LibreOffice pricing

LibreOffice is free for everyone, at home, at school and at work, with no premium tier, no subscription and no feature limits. You download it for Windows (10 or newer), macOS (10.15 or newer, Apple Silicon and Intel) or Linux (.deb and .rpm).

Compared with Microsoft, that is the whole difference: Microsoft 365 Personal costs $99.99 a year and the one-time Office Home 2024 costs $179.99 for a single PC or Mac.

Microsoft Office compatibility

LibreOffice has six apps: Writer (documents), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (diagrams), Base (databases) and Math (formulas). Its native format is ODF – .odt, .ods and .odp – an open ISO standard.

For Microsoft files, LibreOffice’s own help says it can open and save Microsoft Office formats, including Office Open XML: Word files (.doc, .docx) open in Writer, Excel files (.xls, .xlsx) in Calc and PowerPoint files (.ppt, .pptx) in Impress. You can make DOCX, XLSX and PPTX the default under Load/Save settings, so every file you save goes back to colleagues in Microsoft’s format. LibreOffice 26.8, released on 26 August 2026, added basic round-trip support for newer Excel chart types such as waterfall, funnel and treemap, and more XLSX fixes.

The main limit is macros. LibreOffice says that with a few exceptions, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice cannot run the same macro code, because Office uses VBA and LibreOffice uses its own Basic. Recent versions can run some Excel VBA scripts if you turn that option on. Layout differences can also appear in complex documents, so test your most important files.

Version 26.8 also brought a new Paragraph Composer for better justified text, variable font support, calculated fields in pivot tables and presentation sections in Impress – and no generative AI.

What users say about LibreOffice

On Trustpilot LibreOffice has 2.9/5 from 64 reviews (checked 25 October 2026) on a profile the foundation has not claimed. Reviewers praise that it is free and opens Word and Excel files well, and some say it handles large documents better than Office. The complaints are about crashes and lost files, printing problems, a cluttered interface and slow lookups in big spreadsheets.

Pros and cons

Verdict on LibreOffice

Verdict: LibreOffice is the best European replacement for Microsoft Office on your own computer: free, complete and run by a non-profit foundation in Berlin. It opens and saves your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but it does not give you a cloud or live co-editing, and VBA-heavy spreadsheets will need work. Best for: households and small offices that want a free desktop suite. Not for: teams that need shared online documents or VBA macros.

LibreOffice is ranked #1 in Best European alternatives to Microsoft Office and in Best European office suites.

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