When comparing Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office) vs ONLYOFFICE, the Slant community recommends ONLYOFFICE for most people. In the question“What are the best office suites for UNIX-like systems?” ONLYOFFICE is ranked 3rd while Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office) is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose ONLYOFFICE is:
ONLYOFFICE offers desktop applications for Linux, Windows, and MacOS that can be connected to the web-based solution for document sharing and collaboration.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Both AbiWord & Gnumeric are designed with low resource consumption in mind. As such they are great applications for older computers.
Pro Great import/export features
Pro Free and open-source
Pro Straight forward
'Old' style menu structure is lovely to support users.
Pro Multilingual
Over 30 languages are supported.
Pro Collaborative editing
Abiword is able to edit online collaborative documents.
Pro Available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, and Android
ONLYOFFICE offers desktop applications for Linux, Windows, and MacOS that can be connected to the web-based solution for document sharing and collaboration.
Pro High MS Office compatibility
Highly compatible with .docx, .xlsx, .pptx as well as with .odf.
Pro Collaboration capabilities
Pro Can be used as a web app
ONLYOFFICE offers a web-based office suite that can be deployed on your own server using various deployment options, including Docker script and virtual machines with the software pre-installed.
Pro Has a portable version
ONLYOFFICE portable works on almost every Linux distribution.
Pro Advanced work with math equations
Pro Integration with Nextcloud
Easy integration with Nextcloud for collaborative work.
Pro Free and open source
ONLYOFFICE is distributed under AGPL v.3 license with the source code available on GitHub.
Pro Support for add-ons (plugins)
Cons
Con Almost abandoned
Very few updates and bug fixes.
Con Default format is only readable with Gnumeric
Gnumeric is able to read/write a lot of file formats including ODS, XLS, XLSX, but it's default .gnumeric format is only readable with Gnumeric.
Con AbiWord has a dated aesthetic
The interface hasn't had a facelift since it's inception in 1998.
Con File interchangability
You may like it or not, but this is an O365 dominated world. And at some time you will need to send somebody the result of your work digitally. Then not being able to share a compatible file format is a pain. Even if your application is great and light (which it is).
Con Web app
It is a text editor that is running in a browser window, how can you trust this? Not to mention that it needs a lot more system resources than native apps.