Microsoft Office Alternatives: GridCraft, WordCraft, and AI-Powered Custom Software

After remaking Photoshop, Illustrator, and the rest of the Adobe suite, the ArtCraft team turned its attention to the office: GridCraft imitates Excel, WordCraft imitates Word, DeckCraft It imitates PowerPoint. Free, open source, written with the help of AI. The temptation is to read it as the usual challenge to Microsoft, but the alternatives to Microsoft Office Free software has been around for over twenty years. The real news is something else, and it directly concerns the software your company pays for each month.

What are GridCraft, WordCraft, and DeckCraft?

GridCraft, WordCraft, and DeckCraft are three free, open-source Excel, Word, and PowerPoint programs written from scratch in Rust by the ArtCraft team. They work on macOS, Windows, Linux and in the browser, open and save Microsoft formats (.xlsx, .docx, .pptx) and are distributed under the MIT or Apache 2.0 license.

I am the second wave of Crafting Apps, the family of software born at the end of September 2026 with clones of the Adobe suite, which we talked about in the article on ArtCraft and Free Alternatives to Adobe. The catalog on the official website has already expanded to include other titles: SoundCraft for audio recording and CADCraft for technical drawing. The stated ambition is to cover all productivity software.

Where are they at with Excel, Word, and PowerPoint?

They are still alpha or development versions, and their authors themselves estimate a real coverage of between 50 and 62% of the functions of the originals. The data are those declared in the official repositories on GitHub:

GridCraft is the most mature: in a few days it has collected approximately 2,800 stars and over a thousand forks on GitHub. But for one company, the bottom line is clear: today, none of the three replaces Office in daily work, and complex files risk not opening as expected.

Nothing new: OpenOffice has been around since 2000

Free alternatives to Microsoft Office are nothing new: they have been around for over twenty years. In 2000, Sun Microsystems made the StarOffice code open source, from which OpenOffice.org; in 2010 a part of the community gave birth to LibreOffice, today the most popular free suite, adopted by several European public administrations. Google Docs and other free online suites have joined these.

Yet Office is still the standard in almost all companies. The reason isn't the price: it's file compatibility, people's habits, and the integration ecosystem. The cost of a suite has never been just the license. GridCraft and WordCraft, from this point of view, start with the same obstacles as LibreOffice, and with a delay of many years.

What's really changing: software designed for AI agents

The difference compared to OpenOffice is not the price, but two things: the speed with which they were written and the fact that they are designed to be used by AI. A suite that would have taken a traditional team years to set up was set up in a few weeks by experienced developers with Claude Opus 5.5, an example of what we call vibe coding done methodically.

The second point is even more interesting. Every button, menu, and formula in GridCraft is a command callable by an AI agent Through an MCP server: the assistant can read a range of cells, insert a chart, or create a pivot table without going through the interface. The same goes for WordCraft, with about 390 commands, and for DeckCraft. This is not an isolated case: Anthropic is also bringing documents, presentations, and even animated videos with Claude Motion directly into the assistant. Software is no longer used just with the mouse, it is also used by asking.

The real novelty: the customized software

If a few AI developers can rewrite Excel, a company can have the tool it really needs built for it, rather than having to settle for what it gets on subscription. This is the paradigm shift that the ArtCraft case makes evident: the cost of software development has collapsed, and with it the automatic convenience of the Generic SaaS.

Think about how many business processes live in a shared Excel sheet, in a management software purchased because "it does that too" or in three different subscriptions kept together by hand. With AI it becomes sustainable to create a custom software, whether it is a customized management or a custom SaaS: a’web application built around your workflow, with your data, your rules, and an AI assistant that knows how to use it.

• An estimator that applies your price lists and discounts, instead of an Excel file that only one person knows how to update.
• A customer portal for orders, documents, and assistance, connected to the management software you already use.
• A operational dashboard that reads data from multiple systems and answers questions in natural language.
• A document generator that produces contracts, reports and offers in your company's format.

When it is better to build instead of subscribing

It's worth building when the process is specific to your company; it's worth sticking with SaaS when the process is the same for everyone. Email, basic accounting, or video conferencing don't need to be reinvented. Sales flow, production, and customer management often do, as we discuss when talking about Custom CRM.

The last line is the one that matters. Crafting Apps proves that writing software has become faster, but also that hundreds of bugs appear in a week when testing is lacking. A custom SaaS works if there's someone behind it who designs it well, tests it, and maintains it over time. This is the work we do with Artificial intelligence consulting for companies: understand which processes deserve a dedicated tool and build it with AI, without sacrificing safety and quality.

Conclusion

GridCraft, WordCraft, and DeckCraft won't put Microsoft Office out of business, just as OpenOffice and LibreOffice failed to do so in twenty years. But they speak to a more profound change: when building software is cheap, it no longer makes sense to adapt your company to a tool designed for everyone.

The right question today is not which subscription to choose, but which tool is worth building.