Can a free and open source productivity software suite be premium software? ONLYOFFICE is.

OnlyOffice office suite (now on version 7.3) has been around for a while now, officially nine years in June this year; and in those nine years, many vital improvements have been effected to the once HTML-based document editor. Desktop applications, cloud integration, end-to-end encryption, and mobile applications for Android and iOS, are some of the most welcome additions we’ve seen over the years.

It goes without saying that as far as office suites go, Microsoft’s Office 365 suite still by far enjoys the most market share, second only to Alphabet’s Google Apps (50%). Sadly, open source productivity suites still trail behind the proprietary behemoths, with Libre Office, Open Office and OnlyOffice not even making the top 5 list.

However, looking at the features and overall benefits of OnlyOffice, one realizes that a large market share does not necessarily equate to actual objective prowess of a productivity suite.

Let’s begin.

The User Interface

OnlyOffice has long won this round. Without a doubt, a friendly and handy user interface is one you’d want for an office suite — that has been Microsoft’s forte for a long time. OnlyOffice has been sporting the famed ribbon menu bar (popularized by Microsoft Office) for years now. And it’s just as handy and polished. Plus, with the option to add plugins and extend its functionality, it can be argued that OnlyOffice is actually even more customizable compared to any of OnlyOffice’s competitors. For Google Docs and Microsoft Office users transitioning to OnlyOffice, know that you’ll be in familiar territory as far as the graphical user interface is concerned. There even is an option to change the interface theme of your OnlyOffice suite.

Fig. 1 You can extend ONLYOFFICE’s functionality by adding more plugins.

What will impress you even more is the dozens of fonts and language packs OnlyOffice comes pre-packed with; this could be associated with the fact that at the time of writing, OnlyOffice has now been translated into 23 languages, and you can help translate it into your language too. Coupled with the very functional spell-check, and the ‘on by default’ auto-save, the writing experience on OnlyOffice just keeps getting better. Granted these might sound like minor features, but they make up the bulk of reasons that can make or break a productivity suite.

Fig. 2. “Contrast Dark” interface theme on OnlyOffice

Fig. 3. “Dark” interface theme on OnlyOffice

Fig. 4. “Classic Light” interface theme on OnlyOffice

File Compatibility

OnlyOffice supports DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, PDF, HTML, EPUB, XPS, DjVu, XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPT, PPTX, ODP, DOTX, XLTX, POTX, OTT, OTS, OTP, and PDF-A file formats. For some time, compatibility issues plagued most open source productivity suites, you just couldn’t trust that a document you wrote on Open Office or Libre Office would harmlessly be opened on Microsoft Office, or be opened with its styling and formatting intact. This led to work-arounds involving executable file emulators being used on Linux system, a task some find tedious and/or overbearing, which usually ends up being a hit or miss depending on one’s distribution or platform. OnlyOffice fixed that, you don’t need to worry anymore, write your document and save it as a .docx (if it’s to be edited or read on Microsoft Office). But this of course assumes offline writing and editing, which brings me to what I believe is the biggest breakthrough for open source productivity suites so far.

Cloud Integration

Proprietary productivity suites’s move to cloud-integrated platforms didn’t go unnoticed in the open source community. OnlyOffice’s integration with ownCloud has been around for over a decade, though this seems to have flown under most tech news websites’s radar. A free cloud integration option is also available on OnlyOffice — on which I’m typing this article, which simply implies that you need not worry about open source office suites’ cloud integration capabilities anymore. You can create your document on your device, then access, update and retrieve it on a different device via the cloud. The online OnlyOffice suite can be accessed via mobile or desktop app, and through a web browser. Its additional capabilities include collaboration between multiple users, who can edit and collaborate on documents simultaneously and in real-time. It also provides full revision history for documents being collaborated on.

Surely, other proprietary cloud-based office suites offer most of the above features as well, so why not stick with them? I outline why you don’t have to, below.

Privacy and security

OnlyOffice is a fully free and open source software office suite, licensed under the GNU APGL-3.0-only license, a copyleft license specific to network server software. On its website, the GNU APGL license defines “free” as referring to freedom, not price. This refers mainly to freedom to distribute the software, freedom to get the source code and modify it if you wish. As a huge plus, and contrary to proprietary office suites, OnlyOffice neither collects nor sells the user’s information to third-parties. And as a privacy and security cherry on top, end-to-end encryption functionality across all apps was introduced in 2019. It’s through the freely accessible source code of OnlyOffice that you can verify that OnlyOffice has no telemetry in-built, and it therefore cannot sell your data to any other party.

Where to get OnlyOffice

OnlyOffice is cross-platform, this means that you can run it as an app on your Android or iOS devices, install it on your Mac, Windows or Linux desktop/laptop, or access it through its cloud server (try for 30 days then choose the best option thereafter). For Linux platforms they went all out — you can get it for free as a .deb package (for Debian-based distributions), as a .rpm package (for RHEL-based distributions), or install it as a Snap from the Snap Store, install it from Flathub as a Flatpak package, or download its AppImage file on www.onlyoffice.com to run on any Linux system. It’s also available on several Linux distributions software stores: Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Deepin App Store, and CutefishOS’s store. Manjaro, SparkyLinux and a few other distributions have it pre-installed.

Conclusion

All in all, OnlyOffice packs lots of wonderful and handy features, the functionality is exceptional, and the suite is consistently reliable. However, the user interface for the Linux desktop app definitely can do with some minor improvements. E.g. there seems to be a tiny bit issue with text overflow in some tab titles in the “Home” tab, the heading titles to be precise, as shown below; and a little more consistency of fonts between the app and the cloud pane would be welcome.

Fig. 5. Text overflow inconsistencies or resizing issues in the menu ribbon

Overall rating: 8/10