# Collabora Office

13 Hacker News commenters recommended Collabora Office and 16 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** LibreOffice-based office suite with a newer interface and less Java; spreadsheets usually sync well between home and work. Critics find it janky, slow and dated.

## What people warn about

- Dated, janky, ugly interface (3 comments): "the design, both of the site and the office software, looks so dated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900513)) "It is actually very, very janky and behaves like someone tried to reimplement ~15 years old Office UI in JavaScript." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900770)) "the Pivot Table UI is still the ugly non-interactive one found in LibreOffice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902621))
- Slow and laggy editing (3 comments): "It's laggy on MacBook Pro M4 Max. I have no idea what is it doing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904804)) "Now speed in editing thats a clear showstopper." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910439)) "When I tried it last, it was painfully slow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901487))
- Connects to internet unnecessarily (2 comments): "Stop hiding your shit behind hard to navigate/use/privacy invading bullshit." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901157)) "There is no reason for an office programm to connect to the internet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903321))
- Broken download and website (2 comments): "Download button takes me to windows store. That doesn't work on my machine. On Linux got as a flatpak." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901411)) "It just bugs out and redirects to a home page with a broken URL attempting to inject HTML from client side." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900686))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [LibreOffice](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libreoffice.md): 345 recommend
- [Microsoft Office](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-office.md): 256 recommend
- [Microsoft 365](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-365.md): 151 recommend
- [Google Workspace](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-workspace.md): 107 recommend
- [OnlyOffice](https://hackerapproved.com/p/onlyoffice.md): 58 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Collabora Office", https://hackerapproved.com/p/collabora-office-for-desktop/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).