Whether you're on Windows or macOS, Microsoft's Office suite is generally the gold standard when it comes to editing your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But with Microsoft 365 recently increasing in price due to the addition of Copilot, on top of not being that cheap in the first place, we wouldn't blame you for wanting a cheaper solution.

In fact, I even wrote a few months ago about how I was ditching Microsoft 365. And while software on macOS tends to be more expensive, you'll be happy to hear that there are still a good few completely free alternatives to Microsoft Office. If you're looking for some apps that let you save that extra bit of money, look no further; we have some great options for you.

5 LibreOffice

The go-to open-source Office suite

If you know me, you probably know I'm not a big fan of LibreOffice on a personal level, but it's hard to deny that it does the job it sets out to do fairly well. In fact, in some ways, it goes above and beyond other free suites of this kind. Yes, it includes replacements for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (with the names Writer, Calc, and Impress), but it even includes a database management tool, essentially a replacement for Microsoft Access, which no other suite does. On top of that, it includes a drawing tool and an app for writing out complex math formulas.

Getting all of that for free is no small feat, and LibreOffice mostly nails it. I had some issues with importing some of the CSV files I use for work, with some stray characters showing up that made sorting and filtering far more difficult than it needed to be. But I also admit that the CSV files I'm dealing with here are very complex and weirdly formatted, and they've caused issues with some of the other apps on this list, too. It was just worse on this one.

One of my major gripes with LibreOffice is that the UI seems to be more inspired by old-school Office apps than the more modern ones, and it just feels like a mess. There are far too many icons on screen and they're not very clearly labeled, so it takes some time to get used to. The good news is LibreOffice is very customizable, though, so you can make it look more to your liking.

4 OnlyOffice

A great tool to get started

Right off the bat, we have OnlyOffice, which is a great Office suite if you want something a bit simpler. OnlyOffice's interface is completely tab-based, meaning you don't open each of the available apps separately. Editing documents, spreadsheets, or presentations is all done in the same window, so you can keep all your work files together and not have to juggle a bunch of open apps.

OnlyOffice is entirely free to use offline, and you can also create a free OnlyOffice Cloud account with 2GB of storage, and this allows you to collaborate on shared documents in real-time, much like Microsoft's own suite. Online documents use a web-based editor, but the interface is identical to the standard offline UI, so there's no learning curve you need to adapt to.

In addition to the standard Office apps, OnlyOffice also includes some capabilities for marking up PDF files, which is nice to see. OnlyOffice is more geared towards teams, but you can use it perfectly fine as an individual user. The only major issue I've noticed is that it has some trouble with some CSV files I need to handle for work, which makes it less than ideal for that.

3 SoftMaker FreeOffice

A great option, but the free version has a big limitation

SoftMaker FreeOffice is another excellent alternative to Microsoft Office that's also available for Mac, and it's great for a lot of the same reasons that OnlyOffice is. It has a UI that tries to mimic that of Microsoft's own Office suite, and it looks pretty good and very clean. In terms of features, it also does pretty much everything you could want, with separate apps for Word (called TextMaker here), Excel (PlanMaker) and PowerPoint (Presentations).

I find the UI of FreeOffice to be slightly more pleasant than OnlyOffice's, and it also handles CSV files much better, so I didn't have as many of the issues that OnlyOffice gave me. However, if we're looking at spreadsheets, FreeOffice has another limitation that might be a problem: you can't create tables within spreadsheets. This feature is reserved for the paid version of these apps.

That being said, depending on your use case, FreeOffice is still an excellent choice that nails almost all the features you'd need in an Office suite.

2 MobiOffice

Now we're getting serious

MobiOffice is the first app in this suite that I truly have no problem recommending. This is yet another great suite of tools focused on the basics of an Office suite: Documents (with MobiDocs), SpreahSheets (MobiSheets), and presentations (MobiSlides). All of these apps offer great alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite on Mac, with a bespoke UI that lives somewhere in-between the classic Office apps and the designs after 2010. There are no tabs in these apps, but all the options available in the toolbar are more clearly labeled and have pleasant icons that make it easier to get to grips with. Even the menu options available in the menu bar are unusually well presented. I'd typically expect a basic dropdown menu, but these actually have images to represent each feature, so it's all very easy to use.

I've been focusing on CSV files quite a bit so far, so it's worth noting that this is the first app on this list that handled importing CSV files gracefully for me. Despite these files including numbers with commas and other separators, plus dollar signs, MobiSheets was able to recognize these cells as numbers and properly sort them, which is a big deal for me. The only noticeable drawback is that if I wanted to create a table that spans entire columns, sorting wasn't possible. This means you have to manually set the limit of the tables, which isn't the most convenient. Other suites were smart enough to not count cells that were completely empty.

There are still some drawbacks, though. For one, MobiOffice really likes to remind you to buy the full version of the suite, with constant pop-ups while you're trying to work. Then there's the fact that some relatively basic features are actually not free. In MobiSlides, you can't use slide transitions or object animations in the free version, which makes the app a lot less useful. Still, depending on your main focus, this may not be a problem, and MobiOffice excels at many other things.

1 WPS Office

You can't do much better than this

As far as free alternatives to Office go, WPS Office is hard to beat. It's another tool that focuses on the basics of the Office suite, with the ability to edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all in the same app. It can also edit and mark up PDF files, and I always like seeing an app that's tab-based rather than offering separate apps for everything. That being said, WPS Office actually offers the best of both worlds, since you can create separate workspaces (windows), and that way you can group together files for the same project, but you can also have separate windows if you want different projects to be completely separated.

In terms of the UI, WPS Office is very similar to Microsoft's own Office suite, which I see as a plus. The tabs make it easy to find what you're looking for, and the iconography is also visually appealing on Mac. While there is a paid tier of WPS Office, the free version includes all the essential features across the three apps, so you're not being locked out of things like transitions and animations. You even get 1GB of cloud storage for free, so you can work across devices and collaborate in real-time.

The cherry on top is that I had none of the issues I mentioned before when it came to managing my CSV files, so all the data was properly parsed and I could sort numbers correctly without having to tweak certain cell values. This is going to be my go-to Office suite going forward, so I highly recommend it.

Apple's Office suit isn't very good

When I first started using the Mac Mini, I did give Apple's software suite a try. After all, it's included for free in macOS. However, I didn't really like the UI and some of the issues it gave me, so I highly recommend using one of the options above. I'm personally sticking with WPS Office, but I think all the suites I listed above have their own merits and are worth trying. Of course, I could also have mentioned Google Docs here, but that's a web-based tool, and I wanted to focus on tools that run locally.

For someone who's a relatively light user of these apps, spending money on an annual subscription, or even an upfront payment of over $100, is a little much for what I do, so these options are all solid.