Which Free Word Processor Is Best?

All Macs come with a free word processor app called Pages. As good as it is, if you want something that plays a little more nicely with Microsoft Word, you might be tempted to try the free, open-source LibreOffice Writer instead. So how do they compare?

Pages Looks More Modern and Is Built for Macs

There’s no escaping the fact that LibreOffice Writer is not a great-looking app. It clearly wasn’t designed for Mac. In fact, it barely looks like it was designed for any modern system.

With the default setup, it uses old-fashioned toolbars packed with chunky icons that are a throwback to an earlier time. The app does support themes and icon packs which help to improve it, although the quality varies. While you’re changing those, you’ll probably also want to spend some time customizing the toolbars to prevent icon overload.

Alternatively, you can activate the “tabbed interface” to make Writer look more like Microsoft Word. However, it still feels cluttered and lacks polish.

By contrast, Apple Pages is very much a macOS app. It’s slick and streamlined, and features you don’t need just stay out of the way.

Instead of multiple icon-heavy toolbars or a ribbon interface, you get one simplified toolbar and access most of the formatting and other tools in a context-sensitive sidebar. It takes a little while to get used to if you’re coming from something like Word, but it’s a very accessible approach once you’re familiar with it.

Writer Is Packed With Features, but They Make it Harder to Use

The clean design of Apple Pages makes it very easy to use once you’ve gotten used to it. That stripped-back toolbar makes it simple to add common features to your documents, like page numbers, line breaks, footnotes, and so on. It also makes more advanced formatting like tables, charts, and images more accessible.

Pages makes heavy use of templates to give you a head start when creating various types of documents. Whether you’re writing a book, designing a party invite, need to do a mail merge on some envelopes, or many other things, the nearly 100 templates are right there as soon as you open the app.

LibreOffice just throws you straight onto a blank page. It does offer 10 templates for text-based documents, but they’re all pretty basic and pale in comparison to what you get from Pages.

Like so many open-source programs, LibreOffice Writer is not short of features, but finding them when you need them isn’t as easy as it could be. If you’re willing to spend time customizing the toolbars and working through the endless preference options, then you could set it up to perfectly match your workflow.

If you’ve got better things to do, the way Pages focuses on providing the features that most people use might suit you more.

Writer Has Better Compatibility With Word—and Other Apps

One area where LibreOffice Writer definitely wins out is in its compatibility with Word. By default, Writer saves in the ODT format (which itself now has better support in Word) but you can change it to use DOCX primarily if you need to.

Obviously, the more complex the document is, the more chance you’ll encounter some errors when opening it. But for the most part, Writer works well with Word files. Things like comments and footnotes remain in place, along with images, charts, and the like. You can even save directly in the DOCX format, which is something Pages cannot do.

And Writer’s compatibility doesn’t end there. Not only does it support several other formats, but it can even open Pages documents. The performance there is a little hit-and-miss, and you can’t save in the Pages format, but it’s still nice to have.

Pages falls well short in its Word compatibility. It’s probably best to think of it as a replacement for Word, not an alternative. If you need to work with Word documents regularly, especially shared with others, it isn’t going to cut it.

For example, I opened a test DOCX file containing a chart, a table, an image, a footnote, and a comment. While much of it was okay, Pages was slower to open the file, and served up a lot of warnings, mostly about font differences, but also about an incompatible chart. Where Writer showed a fully editable chart, Pages left a big empty space.

To make things worse, once you open and edit a Word document, you can’t save your changes to the same file. Pages saves everything in the Pages format. If you want to save a DOCX file or anything else, you have to export it as a new file every time.

Basic Features Are Similar, Unless You Need Apple Intelligence

In general use, both apps work largely as expected. You can create all types of word-processed documents, and interface differences aside, it’s easy to add the basic formatting you need. If you simply need a decent writing app, either will suffice.

There are two things that stand out in Pages, though. The first is that after you save a document for the first time, the app then auto-saves as you type. There’s little or no chance of losing any of your work, unlike with Writer, which will have you hitting Command+S constantly.

Second, Writer doesn’t support the new Apple Intelligence writing tools. If you’ve become used to using the handy Proofread option to quickly check over your work before you send it to someone, you’re out of luck. Needless to say, Pages offers it all.

Cloud and Collaboration Are Missing From Writer

When it comes to more advanced features, LibreOffice has almost everything you need, but falls down in a couple of key areas.

You can create extremely rich documents in both apps, with a few negligible differences. Writer, for instance, offers more fine-tuned control over what you want to do; Pages has slightly better media options.

Pages also doubles up as a desktop publishing tool via the Layout Mode. LibreOffice has something similar called Draw, but it’s a separate app within the LibreOffice suite. Where Pages pulls ahead is in the more modern features.

First is cloud support. Simply put, LibreOffice has none. Instead, you need to set up and store your documents in a third-party cloud service like OneDrive or Google Drive. Pages is fully integrated with iCloud. Your files are saved there automatically, where they become available on your other Apple devices or through a web browser, and can be shared with others.

And then there’s collaboration. In Writer, you can add comments and send your file to someone else, but that’s about the extent of it. With Pages, up to 100 people can work on a document at the same time (and they don’t even need Apple accounts).

Which Mac Word Processor Is Best?

Comparing Apple Pages and LibreOffice Writer boils down to one question: do you need your word processor to be compatible with Microsoft Word? If you do, and you use complex files, and you share them with other people, then Writer is the way to go. Pages is okay for occasional DOCX use, but you wouldn’t want to do it constantly.

Otherwise, it’s hard to think of a reason not to use Pages. It’s much nicer, it’s faster, more streamlined, and it feels like a proper Mac app. And its collaboration, cloud, and Apple Intelligence features make Writer seem rather dated.

Although Pages isn’t a widely supported format, you can overcome any compatibility issues by exporting your files in the DOCX or PDF formats, either in the app or in iCloud on the web. If you haven’t used Apple Pages recently, it’s time to take another look.