SoftMaker Office NX Universal may be the best office suite you’ve never heard of—it has more of a presence in Europe than in the US. Even so, SoftMaker should be at the top of your list if you don't want to use Microsoft’s Office apps. Why? Because it’s powerful, quick, reliable, and flexible, and it opens just about any file. The most eye-catching enhancement in SoftMaker’s latest version is its integrated AI, via ChatGPT 3.5, which is a mixed blessing. SoftMaker Office is the best desktop-based alternative to Microsoft 365.
How Much Does SoftMaker Office Cost?
You can buy the SoftMaker Office suite as a one-time purchase or opt for a subscription-based model. Either option costs less than Microsoft’s alternatives. SoftMaker also offers a less-capable, no-cost version called FreeOffice if you don't want to pay anything.
The highest-end subscription version is SoftMaker Office NX Universal ($49.90 per year), which I’ve reviewed here. A reduced version is SoftMaker Office NX Home ($29.90 per year). These subscriptions are for licenses for five home computers or one corporate computer. These rates are less expensive than Microsoft 365, which costs $69.99 for a one-person, five-device license. Like Microsoft 365, Softmaker’s apps phone home on launch to check whether your license is valid. The mobile versions are free, but if you want to print and use features like PDF export, you’ll need to log in with your NX subscription or pay a $13.49 annual fee for the mobile version alone.
A permanent-license version called SoftMaker Office Professional 2024 costs $129.95. (Upgrades from older versions are $59.95.) The slightly less powerful Standard version costs $99.95 (upgrades from older versions are $49.95). These prices are lower than Microsoft’s or Corel’s but in the same ballpark. SoftMaker regularly pushes updates to both the subscription and permanent-license versions, but the permanent-license version won’t get upgraded automatically to the 2025 version when it arrives. Also, the permanent-license versions don’t include licenses for the advanced features in the iOS and Android versions.
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Microsoft Office Professional 2021
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LibreOffice
Compared with other suites that ship with components and add-ons you may not need or want (I’m looking at you, LibreOffice), SoftMaker Office is refreshingly straightforward. It consists only of the TextMaker NX word processor, the PlanMaker NX spreadsheet app, and—you guessed it—Presentations NX. The Windows version of the suite also includes BasicMaker NX, a separate app for creating scripts that can automate operations in TextMaker and PlanMaker.
As mentioned, you can download SoftMaker’s apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android devices. This makes SoftMaker Office the only full-featured office suite we’ve found that offers both desktop apps for Linux systems and mobile versions. LibreOffice offers desktop versions for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but no mobile apps. Microsoft 365 currently offers mobile versions of its Windows and macOS Office suites, but no Linux version.
This office suite lets you use Microsoft’s DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX as its default file formats instead of SoftMaker’s unique native format, so you use the suite as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft 365. As a bonus, you get fast performance, a mostly clean and efficient interface, and most of the Microsoft 365 features you’ll likely use, plus a few that Microsoft doesn’t offer. SoftMaker Office runs on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android systems with slightly different feature sets on each platform. Unlike Microsoft 365, it also runs on Linux.
SoftMaker Office's Interface
SoftMaker’s interface is clean and elegant. The File/Open dialog includes a Preview window that opens even if you don’t have Preview enabled in your operating system’s file explorer. Optional sidebars on the left and right of the main window let you manage formatting features without opening a separate menu.
You can also choose between a classic toolbar interface and a Microsoft-style ribbon interface. The classic interface may be frustrating because some features are only on the toolbar. If, for example, you can’t figure out which icon opens the Research menu, you may not even realize that this feature exists. I’m more convinced than ever that Microsoft got it right by using only a ribbon-style interface to reduce confusion when you switch among and navigate various menus and toolbars.
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, LibreOffice, and Corel WordPerfect Office include a search field that lets you type in a few letters of the feature you’re looking for and instantly takes you to the menu item you want. SoftMaker lacks this essential interface convenience.
After experimenting with its interface options, I chose to run SoftMaker Office with a traditional menu-and-toolbar interface, reminiscent of 1990s versions of Microsoft’s apps, but with a notably clean and low-key look.
An Overview of SoftMaker Office's Apps
SoftMaker strikes a near-perfect balance for most ordinary office and personal work in a Word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation app. Like Google Docs, it includes a Versions menu that lets you quickly look back at “snapshots” that it takes of your work at irregular intervals—typically every 20 minutes when you’re actively at work on a document. Security-minded corporate users will appreciate that SoftMaker Office complies with the security and privacy protections specified in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Microsoft 365 is GDPR-compliant in Europe but not fully compliant in the US.
Impressive as it is, SoftMaker’s suite has one notable shortcoming: it lacks the online collaboration features and browser-based editing available with Microsoft 365, Google Docs, and Apple’s iWork apps, and this may rule it out for many corporate users. Advanced users will be disappointed that SoftMaker Office still can’t record repetitive actions in macros, although the Windows version lets you write and play back BASIC-like scripts.
TextMaker
When you first run the TextMaker word processor, it displays a cluttered interface with two sidebars, one resembling Microsoft’s Navigator pane and the other with a clear outline-style view of the various paragraph styles available in your document. You’ll probably want to close both these panes, but it’s good to know they’re there. The feature set resembles that of Microsoft Word, and many of Word’s keystroke shortcuts work in TextMaker. If you use the ribbon-style interface, you can’t use keyboard shortcuts to access the ribbon, as you can in Word.
TextMaker doesn’t include a handy view option like the one offered by Microsoft, LibreOffice, and Corel that lets you work in a realistic page view, but with the top and bottom margins not shown; for sentences that extend across a page break, this ensures that there are not two vertical inches of white space in the middle of it. Like all the other suites I've reviewed, TextMaker has a continuous view that formats the text to fit the window, not the printed page.
TextMaker supports text variables called "fields"—for example, a product name that will change everywhere in your document when you change the content of the field. This a useful feature pioneered by early versions of Microsoft Word that's still available in Word’s recent versions, but only if you know to look in Word’s Quick Parts submenu. TextMaker’s menus make this feature easy to find and use.
TextMaker's eye-catching enhancement in SoftMaker’s latest version is its integrated AI via ChatGPT 3.5. TextMaker’s ChatGPT feature is built into a menu called SmartChat, which offers to summarize text, improve style and grammar, and open a dialog with ChatGPT that will generate text you can import into the current document. If you’ve experimented with ChatGPT 3.5, you’ll know what to expect.
It generates competent high-school-level writing that can put you asleep in large doses but technically gets the job done if you only need to write a report no one will read. However, it doesn't cite sources; this greatly limits its usefulness.
TextMaker also provides traditional grammar-checking, but only for German-language text.
PlanMaker
The PlanMaker app has all the features you’d expect from a spreadsheet editor, including convenient menu items for creating and managing pivot tables. Cells can include references to external PlanMaker or Excel worksheets but, unlike Excel, can’t reference online data like stock prices. PlanMaker’s interface is mostly convenient, but its Function dialog displays existing functions in a confusing one-line style instead of the hierarchical outline display in LibreOffice and Corel WordPerfect. The latest version seems to reduce or eliminate the slow performance I experienced with earlier versions when importing a huge spreadsheet for testing.
Presentations
There isn’t much to say about Presentations, SoftMaker’s Presentations app. (Yes, its name lacks the "Maker" that marks the apps mentioned above.)
It offers dozens of templates in familiar, unexciting styles. Slide transitions range from the standard checkerboard-and-fade option to slightly weird transitions like Ferris Wheel, in which the next slide appears like a Ferris-wheel compartment rotating into view. The app gets the job done, but if you’re trying to dazzle an audience with a slick presentation, you’ll almost certainly prefer Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote.
Additional Tools and Features
SoftMaker Office offers most of the tools you would expect from a modern office suite, along with some unique capabilities. SoftMaker’s menus include links enabling you to create, access, or edit databases in SQLite or dBase formats. These database features worked smoothly in my tests. Drawing functions throughout the suite can convert its built-in Autoshape objects to curves you can manipulate.
The NX versions include Berlitz dictionaries for English, French, German, and Spanish, plus spell-checking in twenty languages. This doesn’t nearly match Microsoft’s online translation tool, but it’s a start. Academics and scientists using the open-source Zotero reference management system can insert and edit references from a menu, too.
All advanced office suites include templates that help build documents with already-created graphics and text. TextMaker expands on this feature with an option to edit the template content simply by switching from the normal page view to a Master Page view. Here, you can make edits that get applied immediately, in the same way you can modify the master slide in any presentation app. In contrast, to change the underlying template in Microsoft Word, you need to find and edit the original template file, then navigate through the Options menu to find the command to attach an existing template to your document. If you often use templates for your documents, TextMaker's capabilities are unmatched.
Some parts of SoftMaker Office seem stuck in the past, however. For example, the formula editor available in all the apps (though in Windows only) is a subset of a version of the Design Science MathType editor that dates back to 2000. It’s almost impossible to use unless you already know MathType well, and I can’t find any guide to its essential keyboard shortcuts (like Ctrl-H to superscript a number). The track-changes feature offers only an option to show or hide your changes, unlike Microsoft’s option to use lines in the margin to show where changes were made without cluttering the document.
Compatibility and Performance
SoftMaker Office’s apps have traditionally used a unique native file format that no other application can open, but you can set the default file-saving format to Microsoft, OpenDoc, or RTF formats instead. It opens documents created by Microsoft and other applications—including Windows Write and Corel WordPerfect—without issue. Microsoft 365 refuses to open ancient versions of Word and Excel files because the older formats posed security risks if they included embedded macros. Because non-Microsoft apps ignore those embedded macros, these old formats aren’t security risks for SoftMaker Office. You can use the suite to open Microsoft-created files that Microsoft no longer opens.
The suite is powerful enough for almost any purpose. TextMaker breezed through thousand-page documents without a hiccup. PlanMaker can handle any ordinary business or personal worksheets and, unlike earlier versions, opens enormous Excel spreadsheets almost as quickly as Excel itself.
A Cost-Effective Office Suite
If you’re in the market for a desktop-based office suite that doesn’t cost as much as Microsoft 365, you should strongly consider SoftMaker Office. It’s more reliable and easier to manage than LibreOffice and closer to the Microsoft standard than Corel’s powerful but quirky WordPerfect Office. It doesn’t have Microsoft’s high-tech features like online translation or worksheet links to online data, but it offers almost everything else in an elegant, speedy, economical package that works on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and (in public beta) iOS. If you haven’t tried it, you may be pleasantly surprised. Microsoft 365 wins our Editors' Choice award thanks to its general excellence and more advanced features.
SoftMaker Office NX Universal is the closest thing you can find to Microsoft 365 at a lower price. It offers an elegant interface and all the capabilities home-office and small-business users need.
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