The Best Office Suites for 2025
Here at PCMag, we started testing word processors in 1986, and we’re still at it. Today, office suites generally refer to software packages with presentation, spreadsheet, and word processing apps at the very least. Microsoft Office is indisputably the leader in the category, and the subscription-based Microsoft 365, corporate-ready Microsoft 365 Business, and standalone Office 2024 suites give you access to the same set of class-leading apps. All three are Editors’ Choice winners alongside Google Workspace, which best suits corporate users thanks to its excellent collaboration features and ease of use. But one of the other office suites we included here might fit your needs better. Scroll down to see all of our favorite apps and links to our in-depth reviews of each, followed by buying advice to help you make an informed decision.
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
- Powerful and feature-rich
- Smooth collaboration features
- Distraction-free view in Word
- Convenient Copilot features in Excel
- Regular updates with new features
- Desktop, mobile, and web versions of apps
- Outlook loses some capabilities
- Copilot features in Word are intrusive
- Some formatting options in Word could be easier to access
Microsoft’s productivity apps are the best at what they do, bar none. Mobile and web apps make them accessible anywhere, and the cloud storage you get as part of a subscription is highly convenient. If you need to get serious work done in documents or worksheets, Microsoft’s suite is not merely worth the money, but it’s an amazing bargain.
Home users and very small businesses will find Microsoft 365 Personal an excellent deal. A subscription gives you access to all its latest features and capabilities, too.
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Microsoft 365 Review
- Top-notch office productivity programs
- Includes a custom email address and many business-focused apps
- Smooth collaboration and generous storage allotments
- Regular feature and security updates
- Works on all major platforms
- Pricey add-ons
- Copilot AI can be intrusive
Microsoft 365 Business is the corporate-ready version of the company’s office suite. You need to spring for the Business Standard tier ($12.50 per user per month, billed annually) to get the desktop versions of the core Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Word apps, but the price is extremely reasonable because these programs are the best at what they do. A subscription also unlocks 1TB of OneDrive storage, communication via Microsoft Teams, a custom business email address, video editing via Clipchamp, and many more apps for each user. Just prepare to pay extra for additional Copilot and Teams functionality.
If your business wants to settle on a single office suite that suits both workers who prefer to work online and offline, Microsoft 365 Business is the one to get. It’s the clear market leader, thanks to its flexibility, reliability, and value.
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Microsoft 365 Business Review
- Includes updated versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more
- One-time purchase
- Volume licensing available
- Apps will get security updates
- A license covers a single computer
Microsoft Office 2024 is the latest standalone version of Microsoft’s office suite. The Home tier gets you the desktop versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word for a single Mac or PC, while the Home & Business plan adds Outlook for commercial users. Microsoft won’t provide any feature updates for these apps, but it does plan to maintain them with security patches. As such, you can count on a consistent, stable experience for as long as you use them.
Microsoft Office 2024 is ideal for anyone who wants to use the best overall office apps without continually paying for a subscription. If you don’t care about having the most up-to-date version of the Office apps or cloud storage, there’s no reason to opt for the subscription-based Microsoft 365.
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Microsoft Office 2024 Review
- Elegant office tools
- Works the same on any browser
- Fine-tuned collaboration and revision-tracking features
- Corporate-friendly user management
- Less powerful than comparable desktop apps
- Offline editing requires advance planning
Google Workspace has plenty to offer any organization that needs collaboration-ready office apps, mail services, shared calendars, and websites. Google Workspace is cloud-only, unlike Microsoft’s apps. Whether this is an advantage or disadvantage depends on your needs. Cloud-only apps are better if you want to assure that everything your organization produces is always available in the cloud. For its ease of use, elegance, depth, and speed, Google Workspace is a powerful choice.
The Workspace version of Google’s productivity suite is for businesses. It’s only for organizations that are willing to host all of their apps and files in the cloud.
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Google Workspace Review
- Unique control over formatting and other features
- Powerful support for long documents
- Builds complex documents from the wizard interface
- Specialized legal features and ebook publishing
- Imports and exports Microsoft and legacy formats
- Outdated interface
- No mobile or Mac versions, only Windows
- Can’t easily replace formats like underline and italic
- Spreadsheet and presentation apps lag behind the competition
- No real-time collaboration support
What sets the WordPerfect Office suite apart from others is the fact that its namesake word processor, WordPerfect, is the only office app that gives you total control over every detail of the documents you produce. The suite comprises two more apps, Presentations and Quattro Pro (a spreadsheet app).
Consider Corel WordPerfect Office if you want an alternative to Microsoft’s apps with granular formatting capabilities. It’s also only available for Windows users.
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Corel WordPerfect Office Review
- Powerful, elegant alternative to Microsoft 365
- Speedy, reliable performance for most tasks
- Highly customizable ribbon or menu-based interface
- Opens legacy documents that Microsoft Office apps can’t
- Optional version backup
- Apps for Windows, macOS, Linux (plus full-featured mobile apps)
- Lacks web apps and collaboration features
- Limited document-viewing options
- Slow performance with huge worksheets
- Grammar-checking only for German text
- No recorded macros, and scripted macros available only for Windows version
Softmaker’s productivity suite is the best desktop-based alternative to Microsoft 365. It has more of a presence in Europe than in the US, but SoftMaker should be at the top of your list if you don’t want to use Microsoft’s apps. You get excellent compatibility with Microsoft documents; fast performance; and a mostly clean and efficient interface. It’s available for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows systems, with slightly different feature sets on each platform.
Since Softmaker doesn’t have online apps or support collaboration, it’s best if you work solo.
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SoftMaker Office Review
- Simple, elegant interface
- Unique canvas-style format for worksheets
- Tight integration with Apple’s mobile platforms
- Powerful graphics features
- Free
- Native file formats won’t open in any other apps
- No multi-chapter support in Pages
- No user-created functions in Numbers
We admire Apple’s office apps for their sheer beauty and ingenuity. Keynote, Numbers, and Pages all take a unique graphic-centric approach.
Apple’s apps come up short on some features, but if they are sufficient for your needs, they’re a pleasure to use. Some of the apps have unique features that you won’t find elsewhere—although you are unlikely to need them. If you live and work in Apple’s ecosystem and like the convenience of, for example, taking a photo on your phone and inserting it into a document or worksheet on your Mac, then you should use the iWork apps.
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Apple iWork Review
- Free
- Simple, elegant interface
- Web-based features like voting-by-emoji and dropdown lists
- Easy-to-use revision history
- Complex preparation needed before working offline
- Limited feature set compared to desktop suites
- Awkward track-changes feature
- Slow operation with most and can’t open some large files
Docs, Sheets, and Slides, among a few other apps, make up Google’s suite of productivity apps for home users (also known as Google Docs Editors). We love their best-in-class collaboration and revision-tracking features. While Docs, Sheets, and Slides are available only as web apps, they are highly convenient to use.
This version of Google’s productivity apps is for home users and students. It’s a wonderful group of apps to use if you are able to work almost exclusively online.
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Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Review
- Full-featured office apps with clear interface
- Google-style revision history and collaboration features
- Easy access to advanced features like document fields
- Elegant graphics
- Proprietary file format and mostly online-only access
- Inconsistencies between desktop and web-based apps
- Performance glitches in synchronization app
Zoho Office is a flexible, high-powered, and inexpensive office suite. It comprises the office apps from within Zoho Workplace, a larger business package of products and services, including email and storage. Zoho Office is an appealing alternative to the office suite it most closely resembles (the Google Docs Editors and the corporate-level Google Workspace). Like Google, Zoho stores your data almost entirely online and provides limited offline work capabilities.
Zoho Office squarely targets corporate users who need its collaboration and workflow features at a low price. Since its apps are largely cloud-based, you just need to be comfortable putting your data into the hands of a big corporation.
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Zoho Office Review
- Free and open-source
- Offers desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux
- Can import and convert almost any legacy document
- Less stable on Macs than rival suites
- No online collaboration features
- Confusing and overstuffed interface
LibreOffice is an impressive achievement that keeps improving with each incremental release. It still suffers from a clunky interface, despite some improvements, and it crashes more than it should. But it’s your best choice for free, open-source office apps.
LibreOffice is for people who want open-source software. In particular, open-source software tends to appeal to financial firms, government offices, and other privacy-conscious users, because they can examine the source code for vulnerabilities. It’s also an excellent choice for anyone with older documents in outdated formats, as LibreOffice can usually open them.
Learn More
LibreOffice Review
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The Best Office Suites for 2025
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Buying Guide: The Best Office Suites for 2025
How Much Do Office Suites Cost?
Some office suites—such as those from Apple, Google, and LibreOffice—are free. Others, such as Corel WordPerfect, require you to pay a one-time fee. Google Workspace is a subscription-based service (the free versions fall under the umbrella of Google Docs Editors), while Microsoft Office and SoftMaker Office both offer standalone and subscription-based versions. The cost of a subscription depends on how many devices you intend to use the software on, as well as which apps you need. Expect to pay around $10 per month at most for personal versions of office suites.
With any subscription-based office suite, your apps automatically stay up to date with all the latest features and security updates. That’s an important benefit, but if you don’t really care about getting the latest updates, you might prefer to purchase a static standalone version. Many office suites offer the latest version to existing users at a discount, so you might not need to pay full price when you decide it’s time for an upgrade.
What Do You Get in an Office Suite?
Three apps remain the core of every office suite: a presentation app, a spreadsheet editor, and a word processor. Depending on the suite, and, in some cases, depending on which version of a suite you choose, you also get a database manager, mail and calendar apps, a note-taking app, PDF editors, website creation tools, and a variety of other services that cover everything from form-building to video conferencing.
One thing that all of today’s suites have in common is that their core apps share much of their underlying code. That means, for example, that the drawing tools in the presentation app are typically also available in the word processor and spreadsheet apps. The core apps also typically share a similar interface, so you can easily move between them.
Should You Use Cloud or Local Apps?
One important decision to make before you choose an office suite is whether you want to work offline, online, or both. Both types of software have advantages. For instance, online apps allow you to collaborate with others and ensure that your files are available everywhere. Local apps are typically more powerful and reliable, however.
Corel WordPerfect, LibreOffice, and SoftMaker Office all lack web versions. Google’s commercial and consumer apps, by contrast, are web-first experiences. For instance, all the apps within those suites are available via a browser, and they save every document you work on to cloud storage. Although you can work on Google Docs files offline, that’s not as viable a solution as downloading full-featured, local-disk versions of apps.
Microsoft 365 offers the best of both worlds. By default—though it’s easy to change this—Microsoft’s apps save documents to its cloud storage service, OneDrive, which allows you to keep copies of your documents both in the cloud and offline. Microsoft also makes it easy to edit your documents either locally through top-notch desktop apps or online through a browser.
Apple’s iWork apps (Keynote, Numbers, and Page) are also available locally on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS devices as well as online. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn’t provide Android or Windows versions of its office apps.
What File Conventions Do Office Suites Use?
For better or worse—and we think it’s mostly for better—Microsoft 365 sets the standard for document formats, and all other suites let you save documents in Office’s file formats.
The only document formats that every suite we reviewed can handle are Microsoft’s Excel and Word formats. You can set up your non-Microsoft apps to save in those formats, but you typically need to swat away message boxes and other warnings when you do. If you share documents only within an organization standardized on non-Microsoft formats, this isn’t an issue. In fact, some security-conscious users or businesses might prefer to keep potentially sensitive documents exclusively in LibreOffice’s open-source formats. However, if you frequently send documents to recipients outside your organization, watch out for compatibility problems.
Recommended by Our Editors
Google’s apps have a unique way of handling file types. You can download Google’s documents in standard formats, such as those used by LibreOffice or Microsoft 365, but the originals in the cloud are editable in Google’s apps (with some special exceptions). All of the apps within Apple’s iWork suite use proprietary formats, which makes sharing difficult.
Should You Use an Alternative to Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Office?
When deciding on an office suite, consider whether you are picking one for yourself or your whole organization. If it’s the former, use whatever feels most comfortable. If you do choose anything other than Microsoft 365 or Office 2024 and plan to send your files to anyone else, just set up your suite to export files in the standard Microsoft Office formats.
If you’re choosing an office suite for a small business or a large organization, matters get more complicated. Microsoft 365 Business and Office 2024 Home & Business are the easiest to use, most effective, and most reliable of all the suites, but they have two disadvantages: First, they’re expensive. Second, you might have strong reasons to avoid proprietary software.
If you insist on open-source software, LibreOffice is your only serious choice. It suffers from a clunky interface with menus that can confuse even expert users. If you want free software and you use a Mac, Apple’s iWork apps might be a good fit. If you’re content with cloud-only software, Google’s apps are powerful and intuitive. If you’re in an industry or research field that uses WordPerfect, Corel’s suite is the only choice.
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