Licence and installation
We’re concentrating on what’s available for free in the five suites.
All of the office suites that we’ve looked at here are available free of cost when it comes to the core suite itself. LibreOffice, Calligra and OnlyOffice are free in every sense because there’s no cost to download the fully working suite and the source code is also available for download.
All of the suites are available for Windows and Mac, too. This is an important consideration if you want to pass them on to people who don’t run Linux, although, Calligra appears to have only basic support on those environments.
WPS Office and FreeOffice are examples of the commonplace ‘freemium’ model, in that the core product is free, but there are costs associated with extra features such as mobile applications and services like cloud hosting. That said, the developer of OnlyOffice also offers paid cloud hosting, but you can implement that yourself using your own server.
However, here, we’re primarily interested in looking at the free core suites, rather than the paid-for add-ons that are available. Thankfully, each of them offer .deb and RPM format archives for installation, and OnlyOffice also offers Snap, Flatpak and AppImage downloads.
FreeOffice will nag you until you request the free licence key. It’s free to use, in all fairness, but it feels like a strange hoop to have to jump through compared to other Linux software.
LibreOffice and Calligra are both available in the repository of most major distributions. As always, it might be worth checking the official website to see if a newer version is available.