Assessing performance

We like applications that are snappy in use.

All of the office suites featured in this month’s Roundup are usable on a reasonably modern computer. However, we did encounter differences in overall responsiveness, and this was particularly apparent in our ‘old laptop’ test. As expected, LibreOffice and Calligra ran at the speed of typical, native applications.

OnlyOffice is actually a JavaScript application, and when you run it locally, it’s running inside a sort of container. It should be fine on modern systems, for day-to-day use, but it was unusably laggy on the slow old laptop. FreeOffice was in the same boat: text input lagged on the laptop. Even on a more modern desktop computer, there was always a feeling that those two suites weren’t lightning fast and suffered from a bit of lag, but it wasn’t bad enough to cause any actual usability issues. On the other hand, WPS Office looks similar to those two, but the word processor ran perfectly well on the old laptop.

Calligra and LibreOffice were very quick when scrolling around a large spreadsheet. In contrast, the WPS Office and FreeOffice spreadsheets were a bit on the slow side doing the same thing, even on our desktop computer. On the same test, the OnlyOffice spreadsheet fared better, but still wasn’t quite as smooth as we would have liked.

In conclusion, LibreOffice and Calligra have a fair bit of potential for dusting down older machines and setting them up as office workstations, as does the WPS Office word processor. The other suites were less well-suited to this, but it shouldn’t count too heavily against them because they make no claims to be usable on legacy hardware.