Apple iWork

Apple's productivity suite is Pages for documents, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations. Apple no longer markets these under the iWork name, but anyone searching for iWork is looking for these three applications.

They are free on every Apple device and available through iCloud on the web, including for Windows users, which means the entire suite carries no cost for anyone already in the ecosystem. That changes the evaluation considerably, since the comparison is not against a subscription but against whether the apps do what you need.

Their distinguishing characteristic is design rather than feature count. Keynote's animation and transition quality remains ahead of the alternatives, and Pages and Numbers both start from a layout canvas rather than a page of text or an infinite grid, which suits documents where appearance matters and suits dense data work less well. Numbers in particular treats a sheet as a canvas holding multiple tables rather than one enormous grid, which is either exactly right or exactly wrong depending on the task.

All three collaborate in real time across Mac, iPad, iPhone and the web, with changes synced through iCloud, and each imports and exports Microsoft Office formats. Apple Pencil support on iPad allows annotation and drawing directly in documents. The applications are free with no subscription.