When comparing LibreOffice vs SoftMaker Office/FreeOffice, the Slant community recommends LibreOffice for most people. In the question“What are the best office suites for UNIX-like systems?” LibreOffice is ranked 1st while SoftMaker Office/FreeOffice is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose LibreOffice is:
LibreOffice includes applications for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database management.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Comprehensive suite of applications
LibreOffice includes applications for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database management.
Pro Free and open source
LibreOffice is available for free with code available here. It's licensed under LGPL v3 with new contributions dual-licensed under MPL.
Pro Cross-platform
All major operating systems are supported, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux (Arch, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse).
Pro Multilingual
It is available in more than 110 languages.
Pro High compatibility with MS Office
Possible to use in corporations.
Pro Font embedding support
Font embedding ensures that the document will display correctly whether or not the target machine has that specific font installed.
Pro Portable version
LibreOffice offers a version of the suite that does not require installation. It can be kept on a thumb stick to ensure that you have an office suite on whichever machine you choose to use.
Pro The de-facto standard
Being able to tell new people that the FOSS community has an actual default office suite matters. It shows that, despite the bewildering number of options, there can be a clear winner.
Pro LibreOffice can take from OpenOffice, but not the other way around
Due to licensing each office suite uses, only a one-way transfer of code is possible, offering more long-term potential for LibreOffice over OpenOffice.
Pro The most user-friendly option
To attract new people to FOSS, having an office suite that is as user-friendly as LibreOffice is a must.
Pro Encryption support
LibreOffice allows encrypting and password-locking files.
Pro Presentations can have 3D models embeded within them
Impress supports 3D models in gITF format.
Pro Lots of extensions and dictionaries
Has many extensions that can add additional features to LibreOffice.
Pro Ribbon design
Since 5.3, LibreOffice offers a Ribbon design view (similar to Microsoft Office) (check here).
Pro Multiple themes
Many icon themes available to customise the look and get consistent look with the OS.
Pro Continued development and maintenance
Pro Good Zotero integration
LibreOffice works very well with Zotero. The integration of the Zotero plugin in LibreOffice is a breeze, citing while writing and generating the bibliography is just a click. Also good since you need to coop in an (MS) world: Libreoffice and Zotero cooperate very well to make sure your refs survive a "Save as" from one file format to another (e.g. docx to odt or the other way around). Basic (open and free!) tools is your in the market for this...
Pro Great interoperability with Microsoft Office
SoftMaker office can open doc(x), xls(x), and ppt(x) files without messing up formatting.
Pro Multi-platform
Works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
Pro Low on dependencies
On Linux it avoids the common widget toolkits which makes it really lightweight compared to other office suites.
Pro Configurable user interface
Includes the possibility to use Ribbons or classical Menus.
Pro EU based company
Follows the the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU.
Pro Has a free version
A free version, called SoftMaker FreeOffice, is available.
FreeOffice is a stripped down version of SoftMaker Office, with less features, templates and interface polish, but it still is feature-packed and with the same excellent import and export filters that enable opening/saving Microsoft Office formats faithfully.
Pro Free technical support
If you face any issues, you can always use the technical support by developer SoftMaker, it's free.
Pro Documentation
Even the FreeOffice version includes a Handbook in PDF.
Pro EPUB export included
You can create high-quality e-books in EPUB format easily.
Pro Integration of Zotero
Especially important for academic use: SM Office has a great working connector to Zotero for the direct insertion of citations.
Pro Free for teachers
The regular paid version is free for teachers.
Pro Great amount of advanced features
Compared to alternatives like OnlyOffice and WPS, really important advanced features especially for compatibility with Excel.
Cons
Con Not fully compatible to MSOffice
It's not fully compatible with MSOffice and often breaks documents.
Con LibreOffice Base requires Java
If you need to use Base, it requires Java.
Con Needs a lot of system resources
It's a large office package that needs a lot of drive space and system memory.
Con Documentation is out of date
Good luck turning off autocorrect, because the place where the documentation says that option is doesn't exist.
Con No good video editing for presentations
Con Track Changes needs to be improved
Collaborating on a single document is difficult. Track Changes makes the document hard to read as both edited and deleted text is displayed, it's not possible to print comments, tracked differences between document versions are sub-optimal and there's no system for accepting/rejecting changes.
Con Poor stability
Consistently crashes while editing. Absolutely unreliable.
Con Poor desktop integration
Since it is written in Java it does not integrate nicely with the operation systems theme, icons or dialogs.
Con Ugly interface
Ungly interface compared to others office solutions, like WPS office.
Con Won't work with themes
It does not work with custom themes due to all the different wrappers involved.
Con Ribbon is experimental
Con No Quickstart
Quickstart was removed from the Linux application. Now every time you open a file it will take at least 2,5 seconds to open.
Con Does not run as stable as OnlyOffice
It runs fine until it crashes. Users have experienced multiple crashes when using the cursor to select text in the writer, running in Kubuntu 18.04.
Con Restricted license
LibreOffice uses a more restrictive license than OpenOffice, which makes it almost impossible to backport features to OpenOffice.
Con Not a very well non-English languages spell check support
Con Many user annoyances and malfunctions which lead to loss of work and time, often not intuitive
Con No ability to access online brokerage accounts for trading
No ability to access trading and brokerage accounts via Calc to conduct automatic buying/selling like you can in MS Excel.
Con Master slide management in Impress not up to mark
As of version 6, the master slide management is not as good as PowerPoint in Windows.
Con Steady update
Con The regular paid version is not free for students as it is for teachers
For students to use it, there needs to be a free student license for the regular (with . docx support) version.
Con Proprietary software
Although some versions/programs are free to download, they're all proprietary licenses utilizing a freeware model.
Con Free version needs registration
The free version needs to be registered with a valid email adress.
Con Installs a lot of crap and does not clean up
On Linux it installs over 40 MB of templates, images and other crap people will never need.
De-install does not clean up usr/share/freeoffice.
Con Breaks icon themes
On Linux it breaks all icon themes by modifying them.
Con No VBA support
As Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is proprietary software used in MS Office.
Con It's not Microsoft Office and it never will be
Use SoftMaker Office only if you want basic MS Office-like features. Once you delve deeper into the software the omissions become glaringly obvious.