Reply to post: That is exactly what community edition is for

That is exactly what community edition is for

It is a stable, free version of the software which does not get many, many years of long-term support for each major release. However, when compared to Office 365, even the community version of LibreOffice looks like long term support. Most people really don't need to pay for it, ever.

However, if you choose to buy Collabora Office (one of many LibreOffice Enterprise suites) you get the benefit of tech support and many, many years of LTS patch support like the good old days for something like £15/user/year, which is cheaper than both Microsoft Office 365 and old perpetual volume licensed versions of Microsoft Office 2013/2016. When combined with a simple IMAP server and a decent e-mail software like eM Client, one can have a much cheaper and more productive time for a fraction of the cost.

Thanks in a large part to the UK Government, Microsoft has committed to maintaining full compatibility with OpenDocument formats, meaning people can use LibreOffice with confidence these days and abuse an old Office 2013 license for conversions in the rare cases that LO can't handle it.