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’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.
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-Iffice 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