Top 5 open source spreadsheets

2024-08-05
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Quadratic, Team

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Technical teams want tools that are open and transparent. As the world's most popular interface for data, the spreadsheet has surprisingly few options for open source and open access software. Here is a list of some of the top open source spreadsheets.

Top open source spreadsheets

LibreOffice Calc

LibreOffice user image.

  • Introduced in 2010
  • License: Mozilla Public License Version 2.0

LibreOffice is one of the most used open source office suites. Calc is Libre Office's spreadsheet product. Well-known throughout the open source community, LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, which was a fork of StarOffice. When Sun Microsystems acquired StarOffice, OpenOffice was the open source fork that continued as StarOffice became closed source and internally maintained by Sun. LibreOffice's fork from OpenOffice was initiated in 2010.

Apache OpenOffice

OpenOffice user image.

  • Introduced in 2002
  • License: Apache 2.0

As mentioned above, OpenOffice was a successor project to StarOffice. Eventually, however, OpenOffice was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and has been Apache OpenOffice ever since. Like most of the products in this list, you can freely download OpenOffice to your machine without limitation.

Apache OpenOffice is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

Gnumeric

Gnumeric user image.

  • Introduced in 2001
  • License: GNU General Public License v2.0 or v3.0

Gnumeric was first released all the way back in 2001! Boasting free, fast, and accurate software, Gnumeric is a favorite of many old-school Linux users.

OnlyOffice

OnlyOffice user image.

  • Introduced in 2012
  • License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

OnlyOffice Spreadsheet is an open-source spreadsheet that originated as an open-source office suite alternative. One of its more interesting claims to fame is being the first HTML-5-based document editor on the market, proudly announced back in 2012, two years before HTML-5 was marked as recommended software by W3C.

Quadratic

  • Introduced in 2022
  • License: Quadratic Source Available License

Quadratic is a modern open access/source available spreadsheet where you:

  • Ingest data with SQL, APIs, and raw data sources
  • Analyze that data with various programming languages like Python and JavaScript, while also using spreadsheet Formulas
  • Share your results in a real-time multiplayer environment with your team

Alongside these core features listed above, Quadratic is self-hostable, browser-based, and highly performant. Quadratic is the modern spreadsheet that bridges the analytics experience between technical and non-technical users.

Quadratic user image.

You can learn about the Quadratic source available license here.

Quadratic is built using Rust, WASM, and WebGL for a high performance browser-based spreadsheet. As we're open access, you can view our codebase and start contributing or get started with a free account.

Quadratic logo

The spreadsheet with code.

Use Quadratic for free