Best European Alternatives to Microsoft Office

Why people leave Microsoft Office

Start with what this page is not going to claim. Microsoft Office installed on your own computer does not send your documents to Redmond, and any comparison that reaches for the CLOUD Act here is arguing about a product it has confused with a different one. Word opens a file on your disk. That is the whole transaction.

The reason to look elsewhere is the expiry date nobody mentions at the till. A perpetual licence buys the software forever and the security updates for a fixed period, and that period keeps shrinking.

Office 2019 stopped receiving updates on 14 October 2025. Office 2021, bought outright in 2021, stops on 13 October 2026. Office 2024 was released on 1 October 2024 and is already scheduled to end on 9 October 2029 — five years, where earlier Office releases were given ten.

So the one-off purchase is a five-year rental that does not describe itself as one, and at the end of it the offer on the table is a subscription. The tools on this page are the ones that break that cycle rather than restarting it.

• The perpetual licence is a five-year clock Office 2024 runs from 1 October 2024 to 9 October 2029. That is half the support window Office 2016 was given, for a product sold on the promise that buying is better than renting. When the clock runs out the software keeps opening files and stops receiving security fixes, which is exactly the position an organisation cannot leave a word processor in if it opens attachments from outside.
• What you can actually buy has shrunk The consumer perpetual line is down to two editions: Office Home 2024 and Office Home & Business 2024, for Windows and Mac, at £119.99 and £159.99 respectively. There is no Professional in that list and no Outlook in the cheaper one. Everything else Microsoft would like to sell you is a subscription, and the pricing is arranged so that the comparison keeps coming out that way.
• The offline product has the weaker data commitment, not the stronger one This is the detail that surprises people. Microsoft's EU Data Boundary documentation states that on-premises software and client applications are outside the boundary, and so is the diagnostic data those applications generate — while telemetry from Microsoft 365 Apps, the subscription version, is inside it. The boxed copy on your laptop therefore carries less of a European commitment about its diagnostics than the subscription does.
• Your archive is in a format one company defines DOCX, XLSX and PPTX are published standards and also, in practice, whatever Microsoft Word does with them. That is survivable while you keep buying Office and becomes a question the first time you do not. Two of the suites here treat those formats as native rather than as an import, and two treat ODF as native, which is the only document format in this market that no single vendor controls.

What you have to replace, not just match

Decide which of the three things a Microsoft Office licence buys you actually matters, because the tools here divide along exactly those lines.

The first is file fidelity: opening a document somebody else made in Word and having it look right, and handing one back that does not embarrass you.

The second is the installed application itself — something on the machine that works with no connection, no account and no browser. The third is the surrounding apparatus: Outlook, macros written in VBA in 2009, the Excel add-in the finance team depends on, the citation manager a researcher has been using since their PhD.

The first two are solved on this page. OnlyOffice is strongest on fidelity because Microsoft formats are its own; LibreOffice and SoftMaker are unambiguously installed applications with no service behind them. The third is where migrations fail, and it fails specifically at VBA macros and Outlook, neither of which anything here reproduces properly. Audit those before you commit, not afterwards.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Microsoft Office

What actually breaks when you switch

The template is what people actually notice on day one. Every organisation has a letterhead, a report layout and a proposal deck built in Word over a decade, and those files carry styles, section breaks and content controls that survive a conversion unevenly. Rebuild the three templates that matter in the new suite before anyone migrates, rather than converting them and letting each person fix their own copy differently.

The second is the one spreadsheet that runs something. Somewhere in the finance or operations team there is a workbook with pivot tables, cross-sheet formulas and a macro that produces the monthly report, and it has never been documented. Find it first. If it will not move cleanly, the sane answer is to keep one licensed Excel for that workbook and migrate everything else, not to cancel the project.

The third is the people you send files to. A migration that works perfectly inside the building can still generate weekly complaints from a client whose Word opens your document with the headings in the wrong font. Send five real documents to five real recipients during the pilot and ask them what they see, because that is the only test that measures what actually matters.

If Office runs on my own computer, why does its origin matter at all?

For most people it does not, and it is worth saying so before making any other argument. A document you write in Word and save to your own disk involves no transfer to anybody. If your reason for reading this page was a privacy concern about desktop Office specifically, the honest answer is that the concern is smaller than the internet suggests.

Two things remain. Modern Office builds send diagnostic data and offer connected experiences that reach Microsoft services, and Microsoft's own documentation places on-premises client applications and their diagnostics outside the EU Data Boundary. Those settings can be restricted by an administrator, but the default is on and the commitment is absent.

The other is simply supply. A suite maintained by a Berlin foundation or a Nuremberg company is not subject to a licensing change decided in another market, and after two decades of Office licensing changes that is a reasonable thing to value on its own.

What actually happens when Office 2021 goes out of support?

Nothing visible, which is the problem. The applications keep launching, files keep opening and no dialog appears. What stops is the monthly security update, so every vulnerability found in the parsing code after 13 October 2026 stays open on that installation permanently.

That matters more for Office than for most software because of what it opens: documents that arrive by email from people you do not know. Malicious document files have been the most reliable route into an organisation for twenty years, and an unpatched parser is the specific thing they rely on.

For a home machine this is a manageable risk for a while. For any organisation that receives attachments from outside, an unsupported Office is a finding in the next audit and the kind of thing an insurer asks about after an incident rather than before.

Will my documents actually look the same in a different suite?

Ordinary ones will, and it is worth being specific about what ordinary means: text, headings, styles, tables, images, page numbering and footnotes move between all four of these and Word without anybody noticing.

What moves badly is the same short list every time. Documents built around a heavily customised corporate template, spreadsheets with pivot tables and array formulas, presentations with animations and SmartArt, and anything containing a macro. Test those four categories with real files rather than samples, and open the result in Word rather than in the new suite, because the destination you care about is the recipient's screen.

OnlyOffice is the strongest on that exam because DOCX, XLSX and PPTX are its working formats rather than an import filter. SoftMaker is close behind and also defaults to the Microsoft formats. LibreOffice and Collabora descend from the same engine and are excellent at ODF with the occasional surprise in complex OOXML layouts.

What about the macros?

This is where Office migrations genuinely die, so treat it as the first question rather than a detail. VBA is not a standard and none of these suites runs it faithfully. LibreOffice has Basic and a partial VBA compatibility mode that handles simple recorded macros and struggles with anything that touches the Office object model seriously. SoftMaker has its own BasicMaker. OnlyOffice uses JavaScript-based macros, which is a different language entirely.

The practical method is to find out how many macros exist and what they do, which is usually a smaller and stranger list than anybody expects: three that format a report, one that has not worked since 2019, and one that the entire finance close depends on.

Rewrite the ones that matter, delete the ones that do not, and if a single macro is genuinely load-bearing, keep one licensed Excel on one machine for that job rather than abandoning the whole migration because of it.

Which one to pick

If your objection is that a permanent licence turned out to have an expiry date, LibreOffice is the direct answer: no clock, no licence, no vendor whose commercial calendar decides when your suite stops being safe to open attachments with.

If you need the documents to keep landing correctly on other people's screens, OnlyOffice is the stronger choice, and its free desktop editors make it a like-for-like swap for a boxed licence rather than a compromise.

If you are replacing Office across a team rather than on one machine, and you want a supplier with an obligation, Collabora Online is the route — provided a UK-registered company passes your rules and browser editing is acceptable.

And if what you want is the same experience with a German company behind it, SoftMaker is that, as long as you read the NX price as the annual licence it is and ask about the perpetual Professional edition before you take it. Whichever you pick, count the VBA macros and settle Outlook first, because those two decide whether this is a migration or an argument.