NeoOffice Performance Comparison

From NeoWiki

This page attempts to provide a balanced, but by no means complete, comparison of NeoOffice's performance with two comparable office suites, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Microsoft, to help you make a more informed decision when evaluating office software. Some other software developers have similar comparison pages; those we are aware of are linked below.

NeoOffice 2.2.4 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 /StarOffice 9 Beta vs. Microsoft Office 2004

Performance Test	NeoOffice	OpenOffice.org StarOffice	MS Office 2004
General:
Price	$0.00, donation requested	$0.00	$149.95 Home & Student Edition
Launch time to active cursor in Writer document by double-clicking on application in Finder after reboot (cold start)	26 seconds	27 seconds	27 seconds
Launch time to active cursor in Writer document by double-clicking on application in Finder after quitting application (warm start)	9 seconds	8 seconds	7 seconds
Word Processor:
... with a 500,000 character document (about 130 pages long)
Open in Print Layout view, drag from Finder to closed application.	8 seconds	8 seconds	5 seconds
Open in Print Layout view, drag from Finder to open application	1 second	1 second	1 second
Save	3 seconds	3 seconds	3 seconds
Page Preview	4 seconds	3 seconds	2 seconds
Print ...	24 seconds	20 seconds	64 seconds
Export as PDF	13 seconds	15 seconds	n/a
Presentation:
... with a 11 slide document
Open by dragging from Finder to closed application.	8 seconds	6 seconds	9 seconds
Time to complete slide show with No Transition set, using space bar to advance slide	18 seconds	32 seconds	11 seconds
Time to complete slide show with transition set to Fade Smoothly, using space bar to advance slide	35 seconds	60 seconds	23 seconds
Time to complete slide show with transition set to Wedge, using space bar to advance slide	35 seconds	63 seconds	20 seconds
Print ...	13 seconds	18 seconds	13 seconds
Export as PDF	9 seconds	9 seconds	n/a

Notes:

• Tested under Mac OS 10.4.11 on an Mac Book Pro 2 GHz Intel Core Duo with 1 GB of RAM
• Tests were run as a newly created user with default setup
• NeoOffice version is 2.2.4 with Patch 4
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 was used which is the same product as StarOffice9 Beta
• No other applications were running
• Spell checking and automatic hyphenation were disabled
• Microsoft Office pricing is for Office 2008 which has replaced Microsoft Office 2004
• Sample 500,000 word processing document was obtained from ApfelWiki Word-Alternativen Der Test and modified to open in Print Layout view
• Sample presentation document was obtained from NeoOffice Bugzilla and saved as a .odp file
• Both documents above were saved in Microsoft 97/2000/XP formats (.doc and .ppt) for MS Office testing
• Print was tested using Preview. On NeoOffice the print icon on the toolbar was used, on OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office the menu item File::Print was used due to differences in dialogs in NeoOffice and lack of a Print Preview option when using the OpenOffice.org toolbar

Other Comparisons

Additional performance (and feature) comparisons between selected office suites and word processors are available at Mellel: Competitive Comparison (redlers.com; compares Mellel 2.0 with Microsoft Office 2004, OpenOffice.org 2.0.x, and Nisus Writer Express 2.7, but not NeoOffice) and Word-Alternativen: Der Test (apfelwiki.de; compares AbiWord 2.4.5, Mellel 2.2.7, NeoOffice 2.2.1, Nisus Writer Pro 1.0, and Apple's Pages 3.0 [de]).