It is very easy to get confused in the pros and cons of Libre Office and Open Office. As both of them are the free software suites, and both have striking resemblance in interface, often it seems tough to decide which one to opt? Well to be honest, yes they are very similar but have minimal difference, as they are both free and based on similar development code. Both are available for desktop installation on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
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OpenOffice Vs LibreOffice Comparison for Windows PC
There is too much similarities in both suites that, which one you select totally depends on your personal needs, preferences and choices. According to these specific preferences, both suites may have very minor differences. Lets check the similarities and differences from five major perspectives.
1. DEVELOPMENT
Well technically speaking, LibreOffice has been born from the ashes of OpenOffice. If you plunge into the history of both’s development and read about drama of office suite software development news, you will totally agree.
The OpenOffice was an open source version of earlier starofffice. LibreOffice is free and open source project of The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice was first owned by Oracle but then it was relinquished to Apache. Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice stem from the original staroffice.
2. THE NAMES OF TOOLS
In this perspective, both programs are almost identical. Both have one word processor, one spreadsheet tool, one presentation program, one graphics editor, one mathematical formula manipulator and one database management program. Both have names of Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.
3. LANGUAGES
While both suites are available in almost all major world languages, if you observe carefully, you will realize that LibreOffice has worked more in development on language options. If you are looking for some language which is not offered in OpenOffice, check LibreOffice. If both does not features your mother language, you should check out Microsoft Office.
4. ANDROID APP AVAILABILITY
Neither LibreOffice nor OpenOffice officially provide any mobile version for their softwares.
5. DISPLAY
This is a tiny and may be surmountable difference. In the lower bar of the screen, LibreOffice automatically shows status updates for Word Count. In LibreOffice Firefox Personas can also be integrated. It adds personalized flair to the interface but this feature is not available in OpenOffice.
6. TEXT TOOLS
According to some perspectives, LibreOffice is more flexible than OpenOffice. For example it allows you to embed fonts. Your document has more probability of looking on some other computer which does not even have the same fonts installed. OpenOffice lacks this feature.
7. RELEASES
Lets make it clear that Apache OpenOffice is behind LibreOffice in release. Currently Apache OpenOffice is at release 4.1.1 and LibreOffice is at release 4.3.1. LibreOffice releases newer versions more rapidly and frequently as compared to OpenOffice. This can have multiple meanings. It may imply that you are getting new fixes and updates faster. On the other hand, it may open the doors and make room for new bugs. The updates of LibreOffice seems to have slightly changed, but the updates of OpenOffice may look totally alien from previous version as they show up after a long time.
8. SOFTWARE LICENSE
OpenOffice comes with permissive license, whereas LibreOffice comes with copyleft license. There is a slight difference between the. Both allow users to freely copy, distribute and change the software that use them. Difference lies in the conditions under which users are allowed to do so.
If you have copyleft license, you must do these things under the same license as original software. On the other hand permissive licenses does not restrict the licenses under which these acts can be done. You can even add your own copyright statement to your modifications.
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