Brandon Thomas, the developer behind a recent project that recreated several Adobe applications with artificial intelligence, has released three open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office. WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are designed to replicate Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint while running offline and across major operating systems.
According to Decrypt, the applications were published on GitHub under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses. Those licenses allow users and developers to inspect, copy, modify and reuse the code, including for commercial purposes. The programs were written in Rust with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude.
The release places a rapidly developed, free software suite alongside Microsoft 365 Personal, which costs $99.99 a year for one user. Microsoft’s family plan costs $129.99 annually. Unlike a subscription to Microsoft’s productivity suite, the new applications are intended to be available at no charge and can operate fully offline.
What the three applications can do
WordCraft is the most advanced of the three products. Its developers say it supports 88% of the features in Word’s ribbon, the interface containing the application’s tabs and commands. It can read and write .docx files and already includes features such as track changes, footnotes, citations and mail merge.
Despite that breadth, the team estimates that WordCraft is only about 60% ready for real-world work when file fidelity and stability are taken into account. The application remains in an alpha phase, meaning users should expect bugs and unfinished capabilities.
GridCraft, the spreadsheet application, supports 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions. These include formulas used for calculations and data analysis. It also covers 89% of Excel’s ribbon commands. However, the team rates it at roughly 50% readiness for real work, and compatibility testing with real-world .xlsx files remains on its development roadmap.
DeckCraft, the presentation tool, covers about 79% of PowerPoint’s overall features and 93% of its core features, according to its GitHub information. It can open and save .pptx files, run transitions and animations, and export presentations to PDF. The application had not yet reached its first alpha release at the time of the report.
A clean-room approach and AI controls
Thomas describes the projects as clean-room rebuilds. That means the applications were created using public file-format specifications and observations of how Microsoft’s programs behave, rather than by copying Microsoft’s source code. The source material compares the method with Compaq’s recreation of IBM’s PC BIOS in the 1980s.
All three applications use a shared Rust codebase. They are designed to run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD, as well as inside a web browser. Rust is commonly associated with performance and protections against certain memory-related software errors.
The programs also connect to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. Anthropic created MCP as a standard for allowing AI models to interact with external tools. In these applications, each button can also function as a command an AI agent can trigger. That could allow a user to ask Claude to create a spreadsheet chart or reformat a report through natural-language instructions.
The project follows Thomas’ ArtCraft release, which recreated free alternatives to Adobe applications including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Lightroom. That earlier effort was also built with Claude. The source material says Claude Opus 5.5 launched on September 22 at prices of $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens.
Microsoft subscription pressure and remaining gaps
Free office software is not new. OpenOffice.org emerged after Sun Microsystems released the code for its StarOffice suite in October 2000, while LibreOffice separated from that project in 2010. Those projects were developed over many years by large communities. Thomas’ three applications appeared less than two weeks after the Adobe clones, highlighting the speed possible when generative AI is used to produce software.
The familiar design of the new programs may reduce the adjustment required for people who already use Microsoft Office. However, substantial technical gaps remain before the applications can be considered dependable replacements for professional workloads.
WordCraft’s roadmap includes testing with real-world .docx documents, ensuring charts and SmartArt remain intact after saving, improving page layout, completing a stability review and adding native printing. GridCraft still needs broader testing with existing spreadsheets, while DeckCraft has not reached its first alpha stage.
Thomas has previously moderated a promise to match Adobe’s full feature set within a month. Even so, the projects have attracted attention from developers: WordCraft had collected more than 12,000 GitHub stars as of Wednesday, according to the source material.
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The Office clones do not yet match the maturity or compatibility of Microsoft’s established products, but their release shows how AI-assisted development is lowering the time and cost required to create software that resembles widely used commercial tools.
