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.
How does LibreOffice Calc compare to Google Sheets?
Depends what you want to do with it, for the most part there is feature parity, there are exceptions to that though; it has more features in some respects, less in others. The layout of tool bars and menus are different but that’s just habit stuff. Having shared spreadsheets is a bit less seamless but entirely functional, and you’re not gambling on Google enshitifying the software on a whim.
What brothers me very much in loffice calc is that you can’t scroll half-cell, only full cells. So with a table with a lot of wide columns it’s basically unusable.
If you are a power user, much better.
Pretty much all of the functions are available, but less automatic (one click) graphing.
But you can directly integrate python scripts so the sky in the limit, you can use Pandas, numpy, matplotlib to make much better figures and do in-sheet data analysis that sheets could only dream of.
And Google sheets let’s you use JavaScript (alright google script, but the fuck is the difference?), if you’re a hobbyist you won’t hit your limit.
If you’re living in Calc/Sheets, then I can see some money saved by switching and rewriting to Python
You’d have to use it and tell us. No one probably uses all of a suite’s features; some users won’t notice a difference whilst others will. If you’re using Google products though… one is made by a titan of surveillance-capitalism and the other is a project with morality. Google works with America’s government to kill and they’re enabling the genocidal Isrealis. In my mind Google and libre-software are diametric opposites. “How does it compare?” in that context makes the question absurd. Using Google software is never ok.
It’s pretty good, generally don’t find anything I can’t do on it.
The only annoyance is performance really, it can get some odd lag at times.