Free Productivity & Office Software

LibreOffice is the gold standard of free office software. A complete suite including Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (diagramming), Base (database), and Math (formula editor). LibreOffice reads and writes Microsoft Office formats with excellent compatibility and is actively maintained by The Document Foundation with regular feature releases.

OnlyOffice provides a polished, modern interface that many users find more familiar if they're coming from Microsoft Office. The desktop editors handle DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats natively with very high fidelity. The free desktop version is fully functional for individual use. Particularly strong for collaborative environments when paired with a self-hosted OnlyOffice server.

Joplin is an open-source note-taking and to-do application that supports Markdown, end-to-end encryption, and synchronization with Dropbox, Nextcloud, WebDAV, or a local folder. It organizes notes into notebooks and supports tags, a powerful search function, and optional plugins for extended functionality. Ideal for users who want a Notion or Evernote alternative with full control over their data.

Obsidian is a note-taking application built around the idea of a local, interconnected graph of Markdown files. Its visual graph view lets you see the relationships between your notes, making it excellent for research, writing projects, and personal knowledge management. The core application is free for personal use and stores all data locally — no mandatory cloud account required.

Zotero is the reference management tool of choice for researchers, academics, and students worldwide. It automatically captures bibliographic data from websites, library catalogs, databases, and PDFs; organizes sources into collections; generates citations and bibliographies in thousands of citation styles; and syncs your library across devices. The browser extension captures metadata from research databases with a single click.

PDF24 Creator is a comprehensive free PDF toolkit for Windows that handles virtually every common PDF task: creating PDFs from any printable document, merging and splitting files, compressing PDFs, adding password protection, converting to and from other formats, and annotating. No watermarks, no page limits, no subscription required.

Okular is KDE's universal document viewer — it handles PDF, EPUB, DjVu, CHM, XPS, Markdown, and many more formats in a single application. It supports annotations, form filling, text-to-speech, and accessibility features. A versatile choice for anyone who works with multiple document types and wants a single viewer that handles them all well.

Focalboard is an open-source project management tool that offers kanban boards, table views, gallery views, and calendar views — similar in concept to Trello and Notion. It can be run as a standalone desktop application or self-hosted as a server for team use. Free from data lock-in: your boards are stored in a local database that you control.

GanttProject is a free, cross-platform project scheduling tool built around Gantt charts. It handles task dependencies, resource allocation, and project milestones, and can export to CSV, HTML, and PDF. A reliable free option for small teams who need structured project planning without a SaaS subscription or per-seat pricing.

Calibre is the definitive free e-book management application. It organizes your digital library, converts between virtually every e-book format (EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, LIT, and dozens more), edits e-book metadata, and provides a built-in e-book viewer. It can even function as a personal e-book server, serving your library to any device on your network.