I Replaced Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook With Free Apps, and I Don’t Miss Microsoft 365
It works, with caveats worth knowing before you cancel. No single free suite replaces all four apps well, so I use a stack: OnlyOffice for anything going back to a colleague, LibreOffice for my own documents, Thunderbird for mail, and a separate service for the terabyte of cloud storage I gave up. Four things genuinely broke, and I have listed them rather than pretending they did not. There is also a Microsoft discount most people never see, which is worth knowing even if you decide to stay.
Key takeaways
- Microsoft 365 in 2026: Personal is $99.99 a year, Family $129.99 for up to six users, Premium $199.99. All consumer plans include 1TB of OneDrive per user.
- Copilot access is now limited to the plan owner. People sharing a Family plan do not get it.
- There is a “Classic” tier at the old pricing, Personal $69.99 and Family $99.99, offered to customers who try to cancel.
- OnlyOffice uses OOXML as its native format, which makes it the most reliable choice for files that go back and forth with Microsoft 365 users.
- The four real breakages: complex Excel work, PowerPoint animation fidelity, Exchange calendar integration, and cloud storage.
What I was actually paying
Worth laying out, because the number is bigger than it feels at £8 or $11 a month.
| Plan | Annual (USD) | Users | Notes |
| Microsoft 365 Personal | $99.99 | 1 | 60 AI credits/month |
| Microsoft 365 Family | $129.99 | Up to 6 | Owner only gets the 60 AI credits |
| Microsoft 365 Premium | $199.99 | Up to 6 | Owner gets much larger Copilot access |
| Classic Personal | $69.99 | 1 | Retention offer, pre-2025 pricing |
| Classic Family | $99.99 | Up to 6 | Retention offer |
All consumer plans give 1TB of OneDrive per user and allow up to five simultaneous devices per person.
Family at $129.99 over five years is $650. That is a real amount of money for software most households use to write letters and keep a budget spreadsheet.
The Copilot change is what pushed me to look. Copilot Pro launched as a consumer add-on in 2025, lasted less than a year, and was replaced by Microsoft 365 Premium in October 2025. Copilot access is now the plan owner’s alone. So on a Family plan, five of the six people paid for a price rise and received nothing from it.
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The discount Microsoft does not advertise
Before anything else, this is the single most useful thing here and it applies whether you switch or not.
There is a Classic tier at pre-2025 pricing: $69.99 for Personal and $99.99 for Family. It is not on the pricing page. It is offered as a retention deal when you go through the cancellation flow.
That is 30% off Personal and roughly 23% off Family, for going through a cancellation screen and declining to complete it.
If Microsoft 365 works for you and the price is the only complaint, start there. Go to your subscription settings, begin cancelling, and see what you are offered. It costs ten minutes and no software has to change.
The stack I replaced it with
There is no free suite that beats Microsoft 365 across all four apps. Anyone telling you otherwise has not tried to open a colleague’s macro-heavy workbook. What works is picking a different tool per job.
| Microsoft app | What I use | Why |
| Word | LibreOffice Writer, or OnlyOffice Document for shared files | Writer for my own work, OnlyOffice when the file goes back to a 365 user |
| Excel | OnlyOffice Spreadsheet, LibreOffice Calc for local analysis | Best formula and formatting fidelity of the free options |
| PowerPoint | OnlyOffice Presentation | Closest OOXML rendering; LibreOffice Impress mangles animations |
| Outlook | Thunderbird | Mature, extensible, handles IMAP well |
| OneDrive 1TB | Separate paid storage or self-hosted sync | The one part with no free equivalent |
Both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice run on Windows, macOS and Linux and cost nothing. OnlyOffice’s Community Edition is free for up to 20 connections, which is more than a household needs.
Also worth knowing about, depending on your priorities: FreeOffice, which looks the most like Microsoft Office and is the easiest transition for anyone who does not want to learn a new interface, though it slows down on large worksheets. WPS Office has the broadest feature set on a free tier and useful PDF conversion, with an interface that can drag. Google Workspace remains the best browser-based collaboration, and it is worst at opening files created elsewhere without formatting damage.
Why OnlyOffice for anything shared
This is the technical detail that changed my results, and most guides skip it.
LibreOffice’s native format is ODF, the OpenDocument standard. When you open a .docx, it converts to its internal model, and when you save, it converts back. Two conversions, both lossy in small ways. For your own documents that never leave your machine, this is completely fine.
OnlyOffice uses OOXML, the same family of formats as Microsoft Office, as its native format. There is no conversion step in either direction. Open a .docx, edit, save, and the file goes back essentially intact.
The practical consequence: if you are the last person who will ever touch the file, use whatever you like. If the file is going back to someone on Microsoft 365, particularly with tracked changes, comments, or specific formatting, use OnlyOffice.
That one rule eliminated most of the round-trip problems I had in the first month.
Where it actually broke
The honest list. These are not deal-breakers for me, and they might be for you.
1. Complex Excel. This is the big one. Basic and intermediate spreadsheet work moves across perfectly: formulas, formatting, charts, conditional formatting, most of what most people do.
What does not move: VBA macros, which do not run in the free alternatives regardless of what compatibility claims say. Power Query, which has no equivalent at all. Large pivot tables, which usually open but lose interactivity in ways that vary by tool. And large workbooks, where performance degrades noticeably.
If your work depends on any of those, stop reading and keep your subscription. Excel is the app Microsoft has an unassailable lead in, and nothing free is close.
2. PowerPoint animation fidelity. Static slides survive. Complex animations, transitions and slide masters can shift when a deck moves between suites. OnlyOffice handles this considerably better than LibreOffice Impress, which is why it is the one I use for decks.
If you present from your own machine, this never comes up. If you email a deck to someone who presents it from theirs, export to PDF for anything that is not going to be edited.
3. Exchange integration. Thunderbird handles IMAP mail excellently. Microsoft Exchange calendars and shared organisational calendars are a different matter, and support ranges from add-on-dependent to painful.
For personal email this is irrelevant. If your workplace runs on Exchange, Outlook is not really a choice you are making.
4. Cloud storage. Covered below, because it is the part nobody plans for.
The OneDrive problem
Here is where the money saved gets spent again.
Microsoft 365 Family includes 1TB per user, up to six users. That is 6TB of cloud storage, with sync clients on every platform, versioning, and sharing built in.
There is no free equivalent, and it is not close. The free tiers of the major providers give you a few gigabytes.
Options, honestly assessed:
Pay for storage separately. A dedicated cloud storage service typically costs somewhere between $50 and $100 a year for a few terabytes, and several offer lifetime plans. Once you add this, the saving against Microsoft 365 Family shrinks considerably.
Self-host. Nextcloud on a home server, or Syncthing for straight device-to-device sync with no server at all. Free, private, and it works well. It also means you are now the person responsible when sync breaks at 11pm.
Use less cloud storage. The uncomfortable question is whether you were using the terabyte. Most people on a Family plan are storing photos, and dedicated photo services do that job better and cheaper.
Be honest about which of these you will actually do. “I’ll set up Nextcloud” is a sentence a lot of people say and fewer complete.
Outlook is the hardest one
Not because Thunderbird is bad. Thunderbird is genuinely good, has been actively developed for over two decades, has a strong extension ecosystem, and handles multiple IMAP accounts better than Outlook does.
The difficulty is that Outlook is not really an email client. It is the front end to an organisational calendaring and scheduling system, and if your employer runs Exchange, replacing it means replacing a system you do not control.
Personal email: switch to Thunderbird without hesitation, or use your provider’s web interface, which for most people is genuinely enough.
Work email on Exchange: keep Outlook, likely through your employer’s licence, and use the free suite for documents. There is no rule that says you have to replace all four.
Should you switch?
A decision guide, based on the actual failure points rather than enthusiasm.
Switch without hesitation if: you write documents, build ordinary spreadsheets, make straightforward presentations, and use personal email. That is most people, and you will notice almost nothing except the interface.
Switch with the OnlyOffice rule if: you exchange files with Microsoft 365 users regularly. Use OnlyOffice for anything shared, export to PDF for anything final.
Do not switch if: you rely on VBA macros, Power Query, complex pivot tables, or Exchange calendaring. The gap is real and no amount of configuration closes it.
Do this first regardless: go through the cancellation flow and see whether you are offered Classic pricing. If $99.99 a year for six users solves your complaint, that is a fifteen-minute fix instead of a weekend of migration.
What I actually don’t miss
Four months in, the things I expected to miss have not come up. The document editing is fine. The spreadsheets are fine. Thunderbird is better at multiple accounts than Outlook ever was.
What I do notice is the absence of an annual charge for a set of features I was not using, on a plan where the AI credits everyone paid more for go to one person in the household.
The storage is the honest cost. Everything else was replaceable, and the replacements were free.
