SoftMaker Office

What Is SoftMaker Office?

Martin Kotulla started SoftMaker in Nuremberg in 1987, three years before Microsoft Office even existed as a bundled product. Almost four decades later, he still owns the company outright, and SoftMaker Office is still built by the same self-funded team, with no venture capital, no acquisition, and no shareholder pressure to chase growth metrics. That history shapes almost everything about how the product behaves today.

SoftMaker Office consists of three applications: TextMaker for word processing, PlanMaker for spreadsheets, and Presentations for slide decks. All three read and write Microsoft's native DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats directly, so files pass back and forth with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint users without a conversion step. The suite runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, and a single subscription or license typically covers several devices in a household or one business machine.

SoftMaker sells the product two ways. Office NX is a subscription that stays continuously updated and adds AI and translation extras in its top tier. A perpetual license, currently Office Professional 2024, also exists for buyers who'd rather pay once and own their version outright. FreeOffice, a free edition, covers the same three apps with a trimmed feature set. The company positions the whole line as "the GDPR-compliant alternative to Microsoft Office," aimed at users who want Office-file compatibility without a forced Microsoft account or cloud dependency.

Key Features

TextMaker, PlanMaker, and Presentations

TextMaker handles everything from short letters to long academic documents, with styles, templates, and a professional font library included. PlanMaker covers spreadsheet formulas, charts, and — as of the 2026 beta — dynamic arrays, bringing it closer to modern Excel behaviour. Presentations builds slide decks with animations and transitions. None of the three apps try to match every corner of their Microsoft counterparts. Instead they cover the 90% of daily office work most people actually use, and they open noticeably faster than Microsoft 365's desktop apps.

Native Microsoft Format Support

Rather than treating DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX as import formats to be converted, SoftMaker Office reads and saves them natively as its default file types. That matters for anyone exchanging files with colleagues or clients still on Microsoft Office — there's no ".docx converted from .tmd" friction. Compatibility isn't flawless on heavily formatted files: complex documents with dense comment threads or elaborate styling can shift slightly when passed back and forth, a limitation the company itself acknowledges in its own support forum.

LanguageTool and Duden Korrektor

In April 2026, SoftMaker added LanguageTool's grammar and style engine to the NX Universal tier, covering more than 30 languages alongside the existing Duden Korrektor for German proofing. The two engines use different rule sets, so they catch different classes of error rather than duplicating each other. Combined with DeepL translation and AI writing tools also bundled into NX Universal, it's a genuinely useful language toolkit for anyone writing across German, English, French, or other European languages.

FreePDF and FlexiPDF

SoftMaker's PDF tools sit alongside the office suite rather than inside it. FreePDF 2025, released in April 2025, offers basic free PDF editing, while FlexiPDF is the paid version with full text editing across paragraphs and pages, interactive forms, and track changes. In October 2025, SoftMaker finished the transition to a native 64-bit FlexiPDF, improving performance on large files — a release that had been years in the making according to the company's own press notes.

The 2026 Refresh

SoftMaker released a public beta of Office 2026 in June 2026, and it signals where the suite is heading rather than standing still on a 1990s-era design. The beta adds a deeper dark mode, Markdown and emoji support directly inside TextMaker, and dynamic arrays in PlanMaker, closing part of the functional gap with modern Excel spreadsheet behaviour. Existing NX subscribers get these updates automatically once they ship. Perpetual-license buyers on Office Professional 2024 receive a free upgrade path to the finished 2026 release, a detail the company confirmed in its own order pages.

No Forced Cloud, No Telemetry

Unlike Microsoft 365, which nudges users toward OneDrive and cloud-first storage by default, SoftMaker Office keeps documents local unless a user explicitly connects Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. The company markets this as a deliberate design choice: no hidden tracking, no mandatory account, no forced sync. For privacy-conscious individuals and small businesses wary of cloud lock-in, that's a meaningful difference from how Microsoft ships its suite today.

Pricing

FreeOffice costs nothing and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a reduced feature set relative to the paid tiers. It's a reasonable way to test whether the format compatibility works for your files before paying anything. NX Home runs €29.90 per year (or €2.99 monthly) and covers the core apps across all five supported platforms. NX Universal costs €39.90 for the first year, rising to €49.90 afterward, or €4.99 monthly, and adds LanguageTool, DeepL, Duden Korrektor, and AI writing and image tools.

Office Professional 2024 suits buyers who dislike subscriptions outright: a one-time €139.95 purchase covering Windows, macOS, and Linux, with Duden Korrektor included and a free upgrade to the 2026 version. Even NX Universal at full price undercuts a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription by a wide margin. The perpetual option removes ongoing fees entirely, a rare choice in a market that has mostly moved to subscription-only pricing.

EU Compliance & Privacy

SoftMaker Software GmbH has been headquartered in Nuremberg since 1987, and its imprint lists the standard German commercial-register details, with Martin Kotulla as managing director. The company's core privacy pitch — no forced cloud connection and no built-in tracking — puts data control largely in the user's hands rather than requiring trust in a remote server by default.

That said, SoftMaker doesn't publish a formal SOC 2 or ISO certification the way some larger EU SaaS vendors do; its GDPR positioning rests on architecture (local-first, opt-in cloud) rather than third-party audit. For solo users and small teams that's often enough. Larger organisations with formal vendor-security questionnaires should expect to ask SoftMaker directly for documentation beyond what's published on the website.

The company being founder-owned rather than externally financed also changes the compliance calculus in one subtle way: there's no investor pressure to monetise usage data or bolt on tracking to justify a growth story. Kotulla has kept the business self-funded for close to four decades, and the product's opt-in-only cloud connection reflects that independence directly rather than being a marketing claim layered on top of a different underlying architecture.

Who It's Best For

Buyers who want Microsoft-format compatibility without paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription get the core need covered by NX Home or Universal at a fraction of the price. German-language writers who need serious proofing will find the combined Duden Korrektor and LanguageTool checking a genuine differentiator few competitors match. If you refuse subscriptions on principle, the perpetual Office Professional 2024 license is one of the few remaining non-subscription options in mainstream office software. Households juggling several devices benefit from the NX licensing model, since a single Universal subscription covers five household computers or mobile devices rather than charging per seat. Anyone whose work depends on VBA macros in Excel spreadsheets should stick with Microsoft Excel — PlanMaker opens those files but won't run the macros inside them.

The Verdict

SoftMaker Office is what a stable, founder-owned software business looks like after 39 years: unglamorous, dependable, and priced for value rather than growth targets. It won't replace Excel for macro-heavy finance teams, and its interface still carries some visual DNA from an earlier era of office software. But for individuals, families, and small businesses that want genuine Microsoft-format compatibility, no forced cloud account, and control over where their documents live, it's a credible and notably affordable alternative to Microsoft 365.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SoftMaker Office GDPR compliant?

Yes. SoftMaker Software GmbH is headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany, and the applications do not force a cloud connection or collect telemetry by default, so documents can stay entirely on local devices under the user's own control.

What's the difference between SoftMaker Office NX and the perpetual license?

NX Home and NX Universal are subscriptions billed monthly or annually that always include the latest version plus mobile apps. The perpetual license, currently Office Professional 2024, is a one-time purchase for Windows, macOS, and Linux only, without the NX-exclusive AI and translation extras.

Can PlanMaker run Excel macros?

No. PlanMaker can open and save Excel files that contain VBA macros, but it cannot execute them. Teams that rely on macro-driven Excel workflows will need to keep those specific files in Microsoft Excel.

Is FreeOffice really free?

Yes. FreeOffice is a genuinely free version of TextMaker, PlanMaker, and Presentations for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a reduced feature set compared to the paid NX and perpetual editions.

How does SoftMaker Office compare to Microsoft 365?

SoftMaker Office costs a fraction of a Microsoft 365 subscription and reads Microsoft's file formats natively, but it lacks Excel's macro execution, Word's full References tooling, and Microsoft's cloud collaboration depth. Buyers who want a European, subscription-free alternative can also compare it against LibreOffice or ONLYOFFICE, both open-source options in the same category.