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How fast Rutba Office is closing the gap on the established office suites

Editorial

By TrustList Editorial

Rutba Office, from our parent company, shipped 31 releases in 14 days. What the record shows it now covers, where Microsoft 365, LibreOffice and others still lead, and how to trial a free suite.

About How fast Rutba Office is closing the gap on the established office suites

How fast Rutba Office is closing the gap on the established office suites

We counted the public release record of Rutba Office, the free desktop office suite made by Rutba, which is TrustList's parent company. Between 8 and 21 September 2026 it published 31 releases, from 1.0.0 to 1.25.0. It went from seven applications to nine, and the download page now lists 29 file formats that it reads or writes. The engine test count Rutba quotes rose from 688 at version 1.8 to 794 on the download page today, and the public source code now states 922.

Those releases were not spread evenly. They came on six days out of fourteen: nine on the first day, then two, four, three, six and seven. There has been no new release in the four days since 21 September, although the public source code already says 1.26.0. On GitHub, where the code and installers are published, the repository had no stars and no open issues when we looked on 25 September. That is the plainest sign we could find of how early this still is.

Because Rutba owns TrustList, this is an article about our own sister product. Everything below is counted from Rutba's public record: its changelog, blog, download site and GitHub repository. It is not an independent review. We have not run our own file-fidelity or mail-migration tests. Competitors' facts come from their own pages, checked today. The question we set out to answer is narrow: how quickly is the gap closing, and who could already use it?

What we counted, and how

We read the release timeline at office.rutba.io, the 31 releases on GitHub, the rutba.io blog series and the rutba.io changelog on 25 September 2026. The timeline gives dates in Rutba's own time zone. GitHub stamps releases in UTC, so a few evening releases show a day earlier there. We used the timeline's dates.

Date (2026) Releases Versions What led
8 September 9 1.0.0 to 1.6.1 First download; working ribbons in Word, Worksheets and Presentation; self-updating installer
9 September 2 1.7.0, 1.7.1 "Beta" said plainly; mail set up from an address and a password; OpenDocument written back
10 September 4 1.8.0 to 1.10.0 Calendar and Contacts added; testing against files Microsoft Office wrote; pages laid out on screen
14 September 3 1.11.0 to 1.13.0 Floating pictures; a ruler that moves indents and tab stops; update notices in every window
20 September 6 1.14.0 to 1.18.0 A faster picture viewer; printing that matches the screen; footnotes at the foot of the page
21 September 7 1.19.0 to 1.25.0 Tables, sorting and page setup in Worksheets; watermarks and page borders in Word; find and replace across a deck

Other things we counted:

  • Applications: seven at launch (mail, documents, spreadsheets, slides, pictures, image editing, video), nine from 1.8.0 when Calendar and Contacts arrived.
  • Formats: the formats page lists 21 formats that are read and written, including .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .odt, .ods, .odp, .rtf, .ics and .vcf. It lists 8 that are read only: the old binary .doc, .xls and .ppt, and the mail archive formats .pst, .ost, .olm, .msg and .emlx. PDF is exported, not edited.
  • Tests: Rutba's post on the 1.8 release cites 688 engine tests and 165 checks run against the application. The download page says 794 engine tests today. The public README, which is ahead of the latest installer, says 922 engine tests and 434 application checks.
  • Writing about it: the Rutba Office series on the rutba.io blog has 12 posts, published between 9 and 25 September.
  • Installers: every one of the 31 releases is marked as a pre-release, and every one ships Windows files only: an installer and a portable build.

Some of the record does not match the releases, and a buyer should know. Rutba's own changelog entry for the launch on 8 September said the suite was for "Windows, macOS and Linux". The repository README still lists Mac and Linux file names. No release so far carries a Mac or Linux file, and the download page now says, correctly, that macOS and Linux users must build it from source. The README also says the Windows binaries published so far are not yet code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen warns on first run. The download site's formats page says that "a new release has arrived most days since the first". By our count, releases came on six of the eighteen days from 8 to 25 September.

What the thirty-one releases added

The release notes are unusually candid about where the suite started. Version 1.2.0 is described as "the release where every button was pressed", because 1.1.0 had shipped ribbons whose buttons did nothing. Version 1.7.0 declared the suite a beta after the owner used it on their own files and found problems that none of the automated checks had caught. That candour helps: a buyer can see which gaps were found and when they were closed.

The first two days built the frame: Microsoft-style ribbons in the three editors, an installer that updates itself when you quit, mail set up from an address and a password, and OpenDocument files saved back as OpenDocument. The third added Calendar and Contacts, laid Word documents out on pages as you type, and changed the testing. The fixtures are now files written by Excel, Word and PowerPoint themselves, and the engine is held to Excel's own saved results; Rutba says the first run found four things it had wrong. The last three release days worked on the page and the grid: floating pictures, a ruler that moves indents and tab stops, footnotes, watermarks and page borders in Word; tables, frozen panes, sorting and a Page Layout tab that finally writes to the file in Worksheets; the Format Painter, slide numbers and find and replace in Presentation.

Rutba also reports speed-ups. A sixty-thousand-row sheet draws a frame in 30 milliseconds, down from about a third of a second, and a workbook that took eleven minutes to open now takes six seconds. These are Rutba's measurements on its own test files. We have not repeated them.

How it compares with the established suites

The table below sets out what each product says about itself. For Rutba Office it uses the download, formats and comparison pages. For the others it uses their own sites, read on 25 September 2026. Where we could not load a vendor's price page, we have left the figure out.

Rutba Office Microsoft 365 (business plans) Google Workspace LibreOffice Apple iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) Thunderbird
Cost Free Per-user subscription From $7 per user a month (Business Starter, US price shown to us) Free Free apps; optional Apple Creator Studio at £12.99 a month adds premium content and AI features Free
Licence AGPL v3, plus a commercial licence Proprietary Proprietary Mozilla Public License 2.0 Proprietary Open source
Desktop installers Windows only; macOS and Linux from source Windows and Mac, plus iOS and Android apps (not on Business Basic) Runs in a browser Windows, macOS, Linux Mac, iPad, iPhone Windows, Mac, Linux, plus Android
Status Beta; every release a pre-release Mature Mature Mature; 26.8.0 is the latest stable release Mature Mature
Mail, calendar, contacts in the same suite Yes Yes (Outlook) Yes No mail client among its six tools No Yes (mail, calendars and contacts; no document editors)
Real-time co-authoring No, and not offered Yes Yes Not claimed on its product page Yes, without a subscription Not applicable

Microsoft 365. Microsoft's own service description says Business Basic does not include the desktop Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook apps. Business Standard and Premium do. Microsoft's UK price pages would not load for us, so we have not quoted a figure. Rutba's own comparison page concedes that Word is the reference for .docx, and says that if your work depends on Excel macros, mail merge or co-authoring, you should stay with Microsoft.

LibreOffice is the closest like-for-like comparison: free, open source and on all three desktop systems. Rutba's comparison page calls it "for most people today the more sensible choice", being more capable and more proven. It says Rutba Office is only the better choice where you need to open Outlook archives, keep a .docx unchanged on a round trip, or have mail and documents in one program.

Apple iWork is free, and the App Store listing says creating, editing and real-time collaboration need no subscription. Pages imports and exports Word files. It does not run as a desktop app on Windows or Linux.

Mail archives are Rutba Office's clearest lead. Its mail app opens Outlook .pst and .ost files directly, without Outlook. Rutba says it indexed a real 906 MB .ost, with 12,172 messages, in under a second. Rutba's comparison page says LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE and Apache OpenOffice have no mail client and so cannot read these files. We did not test that; try it on your own archive.

Image and video. Rutba Image crops, corrects and annotates without changing the original, and exports .png, .jpg and .webp. Rutba Video trims and cuts, and exports .webm only. They cover quick jobs, not the work of a dedicated editor such as GIMP, which is free software under the GNU GPL.

Where the gap is still wide

Rutba publishes a list of what is missing in its repository (docs/GAPS.md) and on its comparison page. Few vendors write their gaps down, and it is the most useful document in the record. Taken from those pages, the gaps a business will notice first are these.

  • Platforms. There are Windows installers only, and they are not yet code-signed. There are no mobile apps.
  • Working together. There is no real-time co-authoring, no server edition and no cloud storage. Documents stay on the machine by design.
  • Old binary Office files. .doc, .xls and .ppt are read as text only, as an approximation, and cannot be saved in those formats.
  • Encrypted files. Password-protected .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files are refused with a message rather than opened.
  • OpenDocument drawings. Charts and shapes in .ods files, and pictures and shapes in .odp files, are not read.
  • Word. There is no mail merge, no equation editor and no index or bibliography. Tracked changes are shown, and the public source records them from 25 September, but that code is not yet in a published release.
  • Language. The interface is English only, and right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew is not built.
  • Checks. Spell-checking is partial, and there is no accessibility checker.
  • Spreadsheets. Macros are never run, by design, and Power Query is absent. On spreadsheet depth, Rutba's own comparison page says it is "years from" a commercial component such as SpreadJS.

Compare that with the list of gaps closed in September: printing, autosave and recovery, calendar and contacts, OpenDocument writing, page setup, floating layout, tables, hyperlinks and notes. Tracked-change recording is in the public source, dated 25 September, but not yet in an installer. Most of the "must have before anyone can switch" list Rutba wrote on 9 September is now crossed off. What is left is mostly depth, plus the platform and collaboration choices that Rutba has decided not to make at all.

Who it is already enough for

On the record as it stands, Rutba Office is a reasonable choice for:

  • Someone who needs to open old Outlook mail without Outlook: a leaver's .pst, an .ost from a laptop that has been retired, or an archive kept for a legal hold. This is the strongest use case, and it costs nothing to try.
  • Windows machines that have no Office licence and need to open, lightly edit and print everyday .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files. Examples are a shared reception PC, a warehouse terminal or a contractor's laptop.
  • Machines where an account is not acceptable. It needs no sign-in and has no telemetry, and it makes just two network calls: an update check and a daily announcement check. Both can be switched off.
  • Organisations that must keep files in open formats and want an .odt to be saved back as an .odt.

It is not yet enough for teams that write documents together, for Mac or Linux fleets without someone to build from source, for finance teams whose workbooks depend on macros or Power Query, for right-to-left languages, or for any organisation that needs signed binaries and a mature vendor before it will install anything. Rutba's own comparison pages say the same about most of these.

Why a free suite can exist at all

People distrust free software they cannot see paying for itself. Rutba answers this in public: the money is meant to come from licensing the document engine to companies that want to embed it in closed products, and from paid priority support and work to order. Neither has a published price. The suite also shows buyers of Rutba's business software what the company can build. Rutba's wider argument is that almost no office suite is sold on its own any more; each is carried by storage, identity, devices or a server product. Our piece on how software products make money in 2026 looks at that pattern.

Rutba has also written up the journey in its own words, with the gaps it still has, at Rutba Office after its first thirty-one releases. TrustList lists the product at Rutba Office, alongside LibreOffice.

How to trial a free office suite in your business

The method below works for Rutba Office, LibreOffice or any other free suite. Give it two weeks and a small pilot group.

  1. Collect 20 real files. Use your own, not the vendor's samples. Include your longest contract, a workbook with cross-sheet formulas and charts, a deck from your brand template, a document with tracked changes, and one password-protected file.
  2. Run a round-trip test. Open each file, make one small edit, save it, then reopen it in the program your clients use. Check headers, footers, page breaks, tables, charts and fonts. Count the files that come back unchanged apart from your edit. A suite that fails on more than two or three of your 20 is not ready for your client-facing work.
  3. Print and export. Print two documents and export them to PDF. Check that pictures and footnotes land where they did on screen.
  4. Test mail on a copy. Never point a new client at your only archive. Copy a .pst or .ost, open the copy, and compare folder and message counts with the source. Search for five messages you know exist. Send and receive from a test account, and check how the client signs in to Microsoft 365 or Gmail.
  5. Check how it installs and updates. Is the installer signed? What will SmartScreen or your endpoint security say? Does it update itself, and can IT switch that off? Watch its network traffic for a day and compare it with what the privacy page says.
  6. Decide who supports it. Find out whether there is a support contract, a named response time and a private route for a file you cannot post on a public issue tracker. If not, name the person inside your company who owns problems.
  7. Read the licence for your case. Under the AGPL, installing and using the unmodified program inside your business carries no conditions, and Rutba's licence page says so directly. Obligations start if you give modified copies to others. Under section 13, they also start if you run a modified version that people use over a network: you must then offer them the source. If you plan to embed the engine in a product you sell, you need the commercial licence.
  8. Plan your way out. Keep files in .docx, .xlsx, .pptx or OpenDocument, never in a format only one program reads.
  9. Write down the decision. Record which files passed, which failed, and which roles can switch now. Re-run the test in a month: a suite releasing this quickly may pass where it failed, or break what worked.

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