LibreOffice continues to enjoy strong demand following the release of version 26.8 in August. According to new figures from The Document Foundation, the open-source office suite recorded 9.4 million downloads over eight weeks, from August 24 to October 18, averaging more than one million downloads per week.
Even more impressive, LibreOffice’s total downloads for 2026 have already surpassed the entire 2025 figure, with ten weeks still remaining in the year.
The latest numbers follow the record-breaking first week of LibreOffice 26.8, which saw 1,031,162 downloads shortly after release. Before the announcement, weekly downloads were slightly below one million but have remained above since.
And those 9.4 million downloads don’t tell the whole story. TDF explains that Windows updates are counted separately, as are downloads of older LibreOffice versions, which also continue to attract considerable interest.
To provide a broader picture, the foundation shared website traffic statistics for the same period. The main download website recorded 11.4 million visits, the Windows update website received about 90 million visits, and the site serving older LibreOffice releases registered nearly 39.7 million visits.
Of course, these figures represent website visits rather than actual downloads or installations, so they shouldn’t be added to the reported 9.4 million total.
As for what’s driving the growth, TDF acknowledges that it cannot provide a definitive answer. Since LibreOffice downloads are anonymous, the organization has no reliable way to determine exactly why more people are choosing the software.
“We like to think that the consistency of the LibreOffice project – which has been championing the concept of digital sovereignty and standard document formats for years – and the robustness of the software, which has never sought to be a clone of the most widely used office suite on the market but has always strived to forge its own path, are two very important factors that, in the long term, represent a significant advantage over all other products.”
Whatever the reasons, the numbers are impressive. This suggests interest in LibreOffice remains strong well after the initial excitement around version 26.8. And with more than two months left in 2026, the project is on track to finish the year with substantially more downloads than in 2025.
I think the reasons are obvious. People are moving away from monopolistic big tech to something that has way less baggage and is reasonable.
I’m sick of all these liberal offices causing all these problems
Been using LibreOffice for at least a decade now, OpenOffice before that and I’ve always been satisfied. I’m not a power user but for the 2 spreadsheets I make a month it works great.
Started with OpenOffice and then LibreOffice. Not a power user but I’ve been using it for close to 20 years, and no complains. For the vast majority of the users, it will do the job. No need to waste money on other stuff.
It only lacks a full on dive in Python programming to blow VBA out of the water and a Power BI equivalent, which could be KNIME.
I’ve been using OnlyOffice for a while now but I don’t really trust them because of their AI integration and awful plugins. How good is LibreOffice compared to OnlyOffice? Is the UI still awful? Did the devs said anything about AI?
If you’d like a more MS-Office-like UI, you can enable the “tabbed interface”: https://books.libreoffice.org/en/WG72/WG7221-UserInterfaceVariants.html#toc8
LibreOffice has more advanced tools than OnlyOffice.
The UI appreciation is a matter of taste but this last release made some progress about it.
The devs have an anti-AI stance.
You convinced me with the last line. This is so rare nowadays. Switching today for sure. Thanks.
Honestly, I think the UI is worse in OlnyOffice than in LibreOffice. It’s sluggish even on powerful hardware, incredibly slow onnolder stuff, eats up ram etc. LibreOffice isn’t perfect, but it runs much better, and actually integrates with my KDE desktop. Using the tabbed interface, I find it quite intuitive for my basic office work.
In all seriousness, I used to recommend OnlyOffice as the best option. I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole now. LibreOffice has improved greatly, I think.
onlyofficd also uses a lot more cpu on idle
I give it a try every now and then. Their excel app always ran laggy for me. I’ll give it another try.
The word processor is probably fine, but the last time I checked it was using more ram than word was, which surprised me.
I guess the current situation with Ai driven recompilation / decompilation of certain other proprietary software made headlines, where people compare it to or recommend complete Open Source projects instead. Maybe that brought up LibreOffice a lot and is the reason for the current spike of interest. It could be unrelated to that, but I don’t see anything else that could possible explain it.
Well, there is also the thing about the US becoming an increasingly unreliable trading partner for the EU. There have been frequent news about military organizations and city administrations switching away from Microsoft Office over the past months.
In particular, the International Criminal Court was hit directly with sanctions last year, where Microsoft was required to block their chief prosecutor from accessing his e-mail account: https://cybernews.com/tech/icc-replacing-microsoft-workplace-software-opendesk/
The ICC has since started switching away from Microsoft Office. And just two weeks ago, they were hit again but with much worse sanctions: https://apnews.com/article/us-icc-trump-rubio-4ea3555403e3c695d8f81dc473515d9b
I could imagine that this brought a lot of attention back to the Microsoft Office dependency of other organizations, too.
If only there was some way we could know what TDF think is the reason. It would be amazing to see what they said, word for word, because of course they’re best placed to understand their market. What a shame that seems unknowable.
I just install libreoffice last week! So far work great!
