Microsoft Office - one of the most popular office suite gripping its hold from a long period of time. Since I started using computers, I remember Microsoft office productivity suite is the only software when it comes to word processing. But, history speaks that any product in the world never last longs.

This is same in the case of Microsoft Office suite – no no I am not saying that Microsoft has taken this product from the market and you will no longer use that. What I am trying to say is that Microsoft Office suite is losing its grounds in the market these days.

The reason behind the downfall of one of the most powerful office productivity software is its cost that sometimes more than people’s utility bills. It takes damn lot of space in your hard drive and eats up your RAM like hell. In simple words, its heavy on resources that sometimes a normal configuration can’t handle and hangs up easily.

That’s the reason, you can see lot of web-based and open-source alternatives of Microsoft Office suite are emerging from last 2 or 3 years. These software or web-based apps doesn’t come with any price tag, fast, easy to use, decent graphics and much more powerful.

As a user you can easily create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, excel sheets and even image processing is also possible in some of these alternatives. And all these alternatives works great with Microsoft office documents that means you don’t have to create your important documents once again if you thinking to dump Microsoft office.

So, if you too finding an Microsoft word alternative from a long time and couldn’t come to an conclusion, hit a jump and try one of the software listed below for all your word processing needs.

Here are the 13 best free word processing suites other than Microsoft Word. Don’t forget to tell us your favorite in the comments section below.

Online Free Office Suites

1. Google Docs : Create basic documents from scratch or start from a template.You can easily do all the basics, including making bulleted lists, sorting by columns, adding tables, images, comments, formulas, changing fonts and more. And it’s free.

Upload your existing files. Google Docs accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc. So go ahead and upload your existing files. Just click the toolbar buttons to bold, underline, indent, change font or number format, change cell background color and so on.

2. Zoho : Zoho.com offers a comprehensive suite of on-line business, productivity & collaboration applications. Zoho.com has more than 22 free online applications — from CRM to Mail, Office Suite, Project Management, Invoicing, Web conferencing and more.

You can link your Zoho account to your Google and Yahoo accounts as well. Zoho automatically saves your documents so that there is no threat of losing data due to lost network connection. It also allows you to insert images from your computer or internet. You can also invite someone to see and edit the document you are working in.

2) Adobe Buzzword : Adobe® Buzzword® is a proven and robust online word processor — perfect for writing reports, proposals, and anything else you need to access online or work on with others. Everyone can access the latest version of a document, share feedback, and respond to one another’s comments from any computer. Built on the Adobe Flash® Platform, Buzzword looks and behaves like a desktop application, but it operates inside a web browser. There’s no installation required, so getting started is easy — and free. It includes 3 subscription options including a free option which you can check by clicking this link.

3) Peepel : Peepel is the browser-based word processor that allows you to do text formatting, image insertion from web and you can share your documents online with others. It is not the prettiest of the web interface but surely useful when comes to online word processing. The most important feature of Peepel that you can open multiple applications in the same browser window at the same time.

4) Etherpad : EtherPad is the first web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time. All editing of the document is instantly visible on the screens of all participating users, enabling new and productive ways to collaborate on text documents. Etherpad is useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.

5. ThinkFree : ThinkFree online services provide a free web office suites with 1GB of online storage. You can also use variety of devices with different OS such as Android, Windows Phone, iOS to view and edit your documents.

Offline Free Downloadable Office Suites

6. Open Office (Win, Max, Linux) : OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

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7. KOffice (Win, Mac, Linux) : KOffice is free Office suite software, meaning it’s open for anyone to improve and does not cost anything. It’s a open source software which is breezing fast and includes eight packages in the suite such as spreadsheet, presentation software, image editing and others.

8. IBM Lotus Symphony (Win) : IBM Lotus Symphony documents is a great alternative to Microsoft Office Suite that allows its users to create, edit, share and save word documents and others too such as presentations, spreadsheet etc.

9. SSuite Office Software (Win) : SSuite Office is all about you… the first time computer-user as well as the more experienced or general computer-user, who needs more functional applications and office software than just the basic ones that are shipped as standard with current operating systems. You will notice that all of the interfaces are much more user-friendly and colourful than other office software, making it much more visually intuitive and pleasing to the senses.

10. NeoOffice (Mac) : NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs) for Mac OS X. They have created an office suite that is adapted to the unique needs of Mac users by taking the features in Oracle’s OpenOffice.org office suite and adding improvements such as: Extremely stable Mac OS X code that has been in daily use by hundreds of thousands of NeoOffice users since 2003, Significant speed improvements to the OpenOffice.org code and many more.

11. SoftMaker Office Suite (Win) : The Microsoft Word-compatible word processor that is so easy to use that you will wonder why you bothered with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org for so long.

12. Jarte (Win) : A free word processor based on the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine built into Windows.  A fast starting, easy to use word processor that expands well beyond the WordPad feature set.  A small, portable word processor whose documents are fully compatible with Word and WordPad.

13. Bean (Mac) : Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is available free of charge. MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.

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