Users need to install the online applications on their own servers and maintain them. With version 5.3, they released an online version that can be uploaded to a server, similar to how a company would setup a Sharepoint server. However, the Document Foundation, the organization behind the suite, has not created service-based products like Microsoft’s OneDrive or Office365, so they do not have a way to make their desktop applications collaborate in real-time. Users can sign up for free accounts at and use those versions of the applications for free. NOTE: Microsoft does not offer a free service to collaborate in real-time with its desktop applications. It has several features and capabilities that Office does not have. Over the past two decades the developers of this source code have created a product that his highly competitive to the popular office suite. Real-time collaboration is an area LibreOffice is behind Office in. Comparisons will be made with Google Drive as well since it is the office suite that is best known for real-time collaboration, and like the other two, is used by millions of people. This article will mainly compare the collaborative features of LibreOffice and three of the applications from Office 2016: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The latest versions of LibreOffice still don’t allow for real-time collaboration through its desktop applications, but they now have applications that can be installed on a server. With the 20 versions, users could work with others at the same time from the applications installed on their computers. However, with its past two versions of its office suite, Microsoft has given users the ability to collaborate in real-time, like Google Drive users can do, through its desktop applications. They allow for multiple people to collaborate on a document. Both have taken slightly different directions.

LibreOffice and Microsoft Office have made strides to catch up to the new kid on the block. This is known as real-time collaboration. A group of people work on a document, and they can see each other’s changes almost as soon as they are made. Google’s office suite made it popular and easy for students, colleagues, and others to log in to their Google accounts to work on a document. In the past 10 years, this collaboration has happened in real-time. One person would create the document and write his part before sending it to his colleagues, so she could create her part and make comments on his. People have been working together on documents generated by office suite applications for decades now.

Office for mac on linux