A lightweight, native alternative to LibreOffice Calc on the Mac
LibreOffice is one of the great free-software projects: a complete office suite, free for everyone, with a spreadsheet (Calc) that has pivot tables, macros, a huge function library and support for almost every file format. If you want a free Excel replacement, it is the obvious first suggestion.
On a Mac, though, it shows its cross-platform roots. The Apple silicon disk image is about 300 MB, it installs a whole suite even if you only want spreadsheets, and its interface, dialogs and shortcuts do not quite feel like the rest of macOS. Foglio is a different trade-off: much smaller, native, and focused only on spreadsheets.
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Two free, open-source apps with different goals
Both apps are free and open source, and both work completely offline with no account and no telemetry. The difference is scope. LibreOffice aims to be a complete alternative to Microsoft Office on every desktop platform. Foglio aims to be the fastest, lightest way to open and edit everyday Excel spreadsheets on a Mac, and nothing else.
- Foglio: Swift/AppKit interface, Rust engine, Mac only, MIT / Apache-2.0, 7.5 MB download, about 19 MB installed.
- LibreOffice: C++ suite with its own UI toolkit, Windows, macOS and Linux, MPL-2.0, about 300 MB download, up to 800 MB on disk according to its system requirements.
Where Foglio is better
- Size and startup. Foglio opens to a usable window in 0.24 s and uses about 58 MB of memory with an empty sheet, with 0 % CPU when idle.
- A native Mac app. Real macOS documents, window tabs, dark mode, standard Open and Save panels, pinch to zoom, smooth scrolling on a custom grid, and Excel for Mac keyboard shortcuts.
- Excel's way of doing things.
.xlsxis Foglio's own format, not an import filter. Function names follow Excel in your language (CERCA.VERT,SVERWEIS,BUSCARV). - Modern Excel functions. Foglio supports LAMBDA as well as XLOOKUP, FILTER, SORT and LET. LibreOffice added XLOOKUP, FILTER and LET in 2024 but, at the time of writing, does not implement LAMBDA.
- Speed on big workbooks. Thanks to incremental recalculation and indexed lookups, an edit in a 100,000-row workbook with 300,000 formulas recalculates in 16 ms on our test Mac.
Where LibreOffice Calc is better
LibreOffice has decades of development behind it, and for many tasks it is simply more capable:
- Pivot tables (with calculated fields in recent versions). Foglio offers only Summarize by.
- Macros in LibreOffice Basic and Python, with partial support for Excel VBA. Foglio runs no macros.
- More chart types, shapes, drawing tools and text boxes.
- Saving in more formats, including
.ods,.xlsand many others. Foglio opens.xlsand.ods(values, formulas and dates) but saves only.xlsx, CSV and PDF. - Password-protected files, data bars, icon sets and sparklines, which Foglio does not support yet.
- A whole suite: Writer, Impress, Draw and Base come in the same download.
- Windows and Linux versions, if you work across platforms.
When you should keep LibreOffice
Keep LibreOffice if you need pivot tables or macros, work with OpenDocument as your main format, need a word processor and presentations too, or use the same suite on Windows or Linux. It is a mature, trustworthy project, and it costs nothing to keep it installed.
Choose Foglio if what you actually do is open spreadsheets people send you, fix a few numbers and send them back, and you want an app that starts instantly, feels like the rest of your Mac and does not use 800 MB of disk to do it. The two can live side by side: make Foglio the default for .xlsx and .csv, and open LibreOffice for the jobs that need it.
Switching is easy because the files are the same
There is no migration. Both apps read and write .xlsx, so a file edited in one opens in the other. If you have .ods files, Foglio opens their values, formulas and dates and saves them as .xlsx; formatting from .ods files is not carried over yet, so keep the originals. The same applies to old .xls files; see how to open .xls files on a Mac.
Download Foglio, try it on a few real files, and check the comparison table for the details. If you are curious why it is so small, read how Foglio is built.