SoftMaker Office Review: The Best Alternative to Microsoft 365

Introduction

SoftMaker Office NX Universal may be the best office suite you’ve never heard of – it has a larger presence in Europe than in the United States. However, SoftMaker should be at the top of your list if you don’t want to use Microsoft’s Office applications. Why? Because it’s powerful, fast, reliable, and flexible, and it opens almost any file. The most attractive improvement in the latest version of SoftMaker is its integrated artificial intelligence, powered by ChatGPT 3.5, which is a mixed blessing. SoftMaker Office is the best desktop alternative to Microsoft 365.

How much does SoftMaker Office cost?

You can purchase the SoftMaker Office suite as a one-time purchase or choose a subscription model. Either option costs less than Microsoft’s alternatives. SoftMaker also offers a less capable version called FreeOffice if you don’t want to pay anything.

The top subscription version is SoftMaker Office NX Universal ($49.90 per year), which I’ve reviewed here. The discounted version is SoftMaker Office NX Home ($29.90 per year). These subscriptions are for licenses for five home computers or one company computer. These prices are cheaper than Microsoft 365, which costs $69.99 for a single license for five devices. Like Microsoft 365, SoftMaker apps connect to the internet upon launch to check if your license is valid. The portable 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 an annual fee of $13.49 for the portable version only.

The perpetual license version is called SoftMaker Office Professional 2024 and costs $129.95. (Upgrades from older versions cost $59.95.) The standard version with less power costs $99.95 (upgrades from older versions cost $49.95). These prices are lower than Microsoft or Corel but in the same range. SoftMaker regularly updates both the subscription and perpetual license versions, but the perpetual license version will not automatically upgrade to version 2025 when it arrives. Also, perpetual license versions do not include licenses for advanced features in the iOS and Android versions.

Compared to other suites that come with components and add-ons you may not need or want (looking at you, LibreOffice), SoftMaker Office is straightforward and simple. It consists solely of the word processor TextMaker NX, the spreadsheet application PlanMaker NX, and the presentation software Presentations NX. The Windows version also includes BasicMaker NX, a separate application for creating scripts that can run operations in TextMaker and PlanMaker.

Overview of SoftMaker Office Applications

SoftMaker strikes a fairly good balance for most regular office and personal tasks in the word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications. Like Google Docs, it includes a version history that you can quickly check – “Snapshots” that capture your work at irregular intervals – usually every 20 minutes when you are active working on a document. Users who care about security will appreciate that SoftMaker Office complies with the security and privacy protections outlined in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Microsoft 365 is GDPR compliant in Europe but is not fully compliant in the United States.

Although the suite is impressive, it lacks the online collaboration features and browser editing available in Microsoft 365, Google Docs, and Apple’s iWork applications, which may exclude many business users. Advanced users will be disappointed that SoftMaker Office still cannot record repetitive actions in macros, although the Windows version allows you to write and run BASIC-like scripts.

TextMaker

When
Running the TextMaker word processor for the first time presents a cluttered interface with two sidebars, one resembling the navigation pane in Microsoft and the other containing a clear outline-style view of the different paragraph styles available in your document. You might want to close both panes, but it’s nice to know they are there. The feature set is similar to that of Microsoft Word, and many Word keyboard shortcuts work in TextMaker. If you use the ribbon interface, you won’t be able to use keyboard shortcuts to access the ribbon as you can in Word.

TextMaker does not include a useful view option like that offered by Microsoft, LibreOffice, and Corel, which allows you to work in a realistic page view but without showing top and bottom margins; for sentences that stretch across a page break, it ensures there is no vertical whitespace of two inches in the middle. Like all the other suites I reviewed, TextMaker has a continuous view that formats 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 the document when the field content is updated. This is a handy feature that was introduced in the early versions of Microsoft Word and is still available in modern versions of Word, but only if you know to look in Word’s quick parts menu. TextMaker’s menus make this feature easy to find and use.

The most attractive enhancement in the latest version of SoftMaker is its integrated artificial intelligence through ChatGPT 3.5. The ChatGPT feature in TextMaker is embedded in a menu called SmartChat, which provides you with a text summary, style and grammar improvement, and opens a dialogue with ChatGPT that will generate text you can import into the current document. If you’ve tried ChatGPT 3.5, you know what to expect.

It generates high-level writing that can drop you to sleep in large doses but does the job artistically if you only need to write a report that no one will read. However, it does not cite sources, which greatly limits its usefulness.

TextMaker also provides traditional grammar checking, but only for German text.

PlanMaker

The PlanMaker application has all the features you’d expect from a spreadsheet editor, including convenient menu items for creating and managing pivot tables. Cells can include reviews of external PlanMaker or Excel tables, but it cannot, like Excel, reference online data such as stock prices. The PlanMaker interface is generally user-friendly, but its function box presents functions in a confusing single-row style rather than the detailed hierarchical view found in LibreOffice and Corel WordPerfect. The latest version appears to reduce or eliminate the slow performance I encountered in previous versions when importing a massive spreadsheet for testing.

Presentations

There isn’t much to say about SoftMaker’s Presentations application. It offers several templates with familiar and unexciting styles. Slide transitions range from the standard option of chessboard and fade to somewhat quirky transitions like Ferris Wheel, where the next slide appears as a Ferris wheel cabin spinning into view. The application does the required work, but if you’re trying to impress an audience with an impressive presentation, you’ll surely prefer Microsoft’s PowerPoint application or Apple’s Keynote. SoftMaker’s Presentations application has all the transitions you can imagine, but it only specifies them by name, without visual hints about how they will look.

Tools

Additional Features

SoftMaker Office offers most of the tools you would expect from a modern office suite, along with some unique capabilities. The SoftMaker menus include links that allow you to create and access databases or edit them in SQLite or dBase formats. These database features worked seamlessly in my tests. The drawing functions throughout the suite can convert built-in Autoshape objects into curves that you can manipulate.

The NX versions include Berlitz dictionaries for English, French, German, and Spanish, as well as spell checking in twenty languages. This is almost nothing compared to Microsoft’s online translation tool, but it’s a start. Academics and researchers using the open-source Zotero reference management system can insert and edit references from a list as well. TextMaker’s formatting tools include the traditional dialog box and an optional multifunction sidebar.

All advanced office suites include templates that help build documents with pre-created graphics and text. TextMaker expands this feature with an option to edit the template content simply by switching from the normal page view to the master page view. Here, you can make changes that are applied immediately, in the same way that you can edit the master slide in any presentation application. In contrast, to change the base template in Microsoft Word, you need to find the original template file and edit it, then navigate through the menu options to find the command that allows you to attach an already existing template to your document. If you regularly use templates in your documents, TextMaker’s capabilities are unparalleled.

Compatibility and Performance

SoftMaker Office applications traditionally use a unique file format that no other application can open, but you can set the default save 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 older versions of Word and Excel files because the old formats pose security risks if they contain embedded macros. Since non-Microsoft applications ignore those embedded macros, these old formats are not security risks for SoftMaker Office. You can use the suite to open files created by Microsoft that Microsoft no longer opens.

The suite is powerful enough for almost any purpose. TextMaker easily handles documents with thousands of pages without any issues. PlanMaker can manage any routine personal or business spreadsheets, and unlike previous versions, it opens massive Excel spreadsheets almost as quickly as Excel itself.

Cost-effective Office Suite

If you are looking for a desktop-based office suite that doesn’t cost as much as Microsoft 365, you should seriously consider SoftMaker Office. It is more reliable and easier to manage than LibreOffice and is closer to the standard set by Microsoft than the robust but quirky WordPerfect Office. It doesn’t have advanced features like Microsoft’s online translation or spreadsheet links to online data, but it offers almost everything else in a sleek, fast, and economical package that works on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and (in the general public version) iOS. If you haven’t tried it yet, it could be a pleasant surprise. Microsoft 365 wins our Editors’ Choice award for overall excellence and advanced features.

Specifications