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.
Can confirm after nearly 2 decades the user interface still sucks.
How does LibreOffice Calc compare to Google Sheets?
If you are a power user, much better.
Pretty much all of the functions are available, but less automatic (one click) graphing.
But you can directly integrate python scripts so the sky in the limit, you can use Pandas, numpy, matplotlib to make much better figures and do in-sheet data analysis that sheets could only dream of.
You’d have to use it and tell us. No one probably uses all of a suite’s features; some users won’t notice a difference whilst others will. If you’re using Google products though… one is made by a titan of surveillance-capitalism and the other is a project with morality. Google works with America’s government to kill and they’re enabling the genocidal Isrealis. In my mind Google and libre-software are diametric opposites. “How does it compare?” in that context makes the question absurd. Using Google software is never ok.
It’s pretty good, generally don’t find anything I can’t do on it.
The only annoyance is performance really, it can get some odd lag at times.
Been using Libre and open office before that since the first open source release. Kind of a power user, calc did things I needed before Excel did in many cases.
As of today my only issue is that Libre Office uses its own drawing and rendering (as I understand it) and I have issues with multi monitor resolution. Works fine on main screen, move it to another and rendering all huge and useless.
Probably the only application i have issues with using multi monitor multi resolution on Wayland.
Yes, LibreOffice uses its own custom rendering engine and that’s not the most performant…
But you have to understand that before LibreOffice there was OpenOffice.org, which itself comes from an old German application called StarOffice.
And oh boy, StarOffice! It was quite peculiar: it used to render its own desktop environment that took over Windows Explorer, with its own Start menu!
So, let’s all remember that LibreOffice still has that legacy to carry on.
I’ve been impressed with how it handles multimonitors at different resolutions. It scales it dynamically so that (for side by side) the top of the one screen lines up with the top of the other and same with the bottom, plus windows look like they are the same size (relative to screen size) smoothly even as they overlap both monitors.
The only thing I don’t like is that the cursor can get “stuck” at the edge of one monitor, though I think that behaviour might be gone now after a recent update because I haven’t had to fight it as much lately.
As someone who assumed that it wasn’t done like that because the scaling would look bad because pixels would need to be scaled to subpixels, I’m pretty impressed that that doesn’t seem to be the case (either that or they figured out how to handle that scaling so that it didn’t look like shit, though this might be the very thing that the custom renderer is failing to do properly in your case).
Does this count include people running Linux whose copy of Libre Office comes from their distro repository?
Because if not, then there’s those too in addition to these downloads.
I think the reasons are obvious. People are moving away from monopolistic big tech to something that has way less baggage and is reasonable.
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 thought they went all in on Python.
Nah, Scriptforge is awkward.
That’s great. Can we please have a normal static scroll bar in Writer now?
I’m sick of all these liberal offices causing all these problems
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’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?
UI pic
And that pic is with the classic (Office 97-style) interface.
You can also switch to a more modern style, called “Notebook bar”, which is similar to the Ribbon interface you can find on Office 2007+.
(Honestly? In my opinion, the classic interface is the best)
Oh I haven’t used microsoft office so I don’t know what it looks like. I just use what LibreOffice gives by default.
Same, by the time I switched to LibreOffice I hadn’t been using anything other than ribbon for over a decade, and yet switching felt like a relief, coming back to the familiar. The 97-style probably got baked into my brain back when I was a kid writing nonsensical fantasy tales in Word.
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.
I have high hopes for Euro-Office. It’s a pretty young fork of OnlyOffice backed by Nextcloud, Proton, Ionos, OpenProject, XWiki and others. I’m currently testing the Nextcloud implementation and the even younger desktop client and so far it’s a great experience.
It’s kinda racist not gonna lie. Imagine if I forked Linux, did not change a thing, name it something else and then say “the old Linux was made by dirty Europeans this is our alternative”.
EuroOffice is a disrespect but apart from that I don’t think it’s gonna be anything more than a clone.
OnlyOffice has a long history of ignoring pull requests, incorrect documentation and usage of obscure internal references in commits.
That’s no reliable base for a FOSS project. The work on Euro-Office is highly active and it’s already way more than a renamed fork.
Calling people of a certain origin dirty is indeed racist. Considering the potential influence of a government that has caused a devastating amount of harm over the last decade is not.
Considering the potential influence of a government that has caused a devastating amount of harm over the last decade is not.
I’m confused. Are you talking about the US or about Western European powers, including Israel?
All of them. That’s why, among other reasons, OSS like LibreOffice and Euro-Office is important and I’m glad I have these options.
Euro-Office was created making a pitch for NATO.
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
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 just install libreoffice last week! So far work great!
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.
Does the number 9.4 million have some sort of special relevance?
Uhh…big number?
It’s written as it was some sort of landmark number and they reached it in record time.
