LibreOffice is hailed as the best open source office suite available right now, and we keep hearing about the amazing adoption rate, but we hardly get any real numbers. That changed today after Collabora released some statistics about LibreOffice usage and it’s more than impressive.

There is an interesting trend in the software world, and it looks like the proprietary software is being dropped for open source alternatives, especially LibreOffice. With virtually no licensing fees and only maintenance costs, LibreOffice is now a really powerful solution.

Governments and city administrations are looking for ways to cut costs and one of the easiest methods is to drop proprietary software. As you can imagine, there is a fierce battle going on, but some cities are winning. It’s not going to happen overnight, but the overall trend is pretty clear.

Some interesting LibreOffice numbers

Until now, we only had a disparate image of how widely used LibreOffice is. There is no centralized statistic, or at least not one that’s public. That changed today after Collabora presented some proper number of LibreOffice and they are more than impressive.

Collabora Productivity is a software company that adapts LibreOffice for the use in enterprise environments. Also, Collabora is one of the biggest contributors to the LibreOffice project, and it has the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers.

A new updated infographic has been made public by Collabora, and this is how things stand right now: there are now about 100 million active users, 18 governments are using it, the office suite supports 189 file types, and the top three contributors are Red Hat, Collabora, and the users community.

Also, the commercial support for LibreOffice is available in 21 countries, 15,000 PCs are using LibreOffice in Munich, 500,000 in France, and 1 million in Brazil. These are some pretty rough numbers, but they show a clear evolution from last year, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down.