What with the news that Microsoft’s Office 365 preview is about to expire, there’ll be a lot of worried Windows 8 users out there contemplating having to shell out a small fortune on a license for the full edition. As of March 16, all those using the preview edition of Office 365 will find that their functionality is limited to viewing and printing documents only, with the ability to edit, create and save new documents no longer available.

While most enterprises that have already made the switch to Windows 8 will likely just pay whatever price Microsoft is asking for the full version of Office 365, for home users doing so is an altogether different proposition. What with its new subscription-based pricing asking users to pay $99.99 a year or $9.99 per month for full access to Office 365’s full features, and the controversy surrounding Microsoft’s single license plan for those who buy a “perpetual license” copy, consumers are quite rightly feeling a little stiffed.

But never fear, for there are plenty of alternatives lying around that provide a more than adequate solution for home users needing a full productivity suite. Let’s take a look at the best options around at the moment.

Microsoft Office Web Apps

Funnily enough, Microsoft actually provides a decent alternative itself in the form of its Office Web Apps. Included in this free suite of web based productivity tools is MS Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint, together with up to 7GB of cloud storage on SkyDrive. To access the apps, you’ll need to make an Outlook.com account, but that’s a small price to pay to get your hands on the one alternative that most closely resembles Microsoft’s full-featured Office.

On the downside, we should note that the web apps don’t offer all of the features that Office 365 comes with, but at least the basics are there. And then again, being web apps they naturally come with one huge disadvantage – they can only be accessed when connected to the internet.

Google Docs

Increasingly the favored choice of thousands of netizens worldwide, Google Docs offers a comprehensive suite of productivity tools including word processor, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations. The biggest advantage of Google Docs is that it’s one hundred percent free to use, and collaboration-wise it’s about as good as it gets, with shared documents being updated in real-time.

It’s not all rosy though, as Google Docs lacks some of the more advanced features of other productivity sites. It’s also browser-based, which means that an internet connection is necessary to be able to use it. We should also note that while Google Docs is generally pretty secure, there have been one or two security scares in recent weeks, such as the phishing attacks that caused Oxford University to briefly block access to it for a few hours last month.

Zoho

When it comes to sheer number of applications available, Zoho wins hands down. Offering everything from an email service to ad campaign management tools and a personal wiki, in addition to its suite of productivity tools, there’s every reason to fall in love with Zoho and even ditch Google altogether.

The word processor itself is super-intuitive to use, with its circa Office 2007 design and dozens of editing and formatting tools available. Zoho’s word processor is capable of doing pretty much anything that Word can do, while its spreadsheets and presentations are similarly full-featured. By far and away the most complete web-based app package around, so long as you don’t mind your productivity being restricted to online hours only, Zoho is as good a choice as any.

LibreOffice

One of the most popular open-source office suites that’s also the first choice of the Ubuntu operating system, LibreOffice has evolved following a split from the old Apache OpenOffice back in 2010. LibreOffice was actually created in response to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, the creator of OpenOffice, due to developer’s concerns that Oracle would restrict use of its code base, and so its productivity tools are more or less the same as its predecessors. Since that time, LibreOffice has undergone a few changes courtesy of the Document Foundation, which strives to improve the program’s functionality. As a result, it offers quite a few more advanced tools, for example the Wiki Publisher, while the number of customization options and extensions makes it a lot more flexible for advanced users.

Disadvantages – well, there’s always a few. In LibreOffice’s case, the user experience falls just a little bit short of MS Office.  Some of the more advanced features are considerably less intuitive to use, while compatibility with MS Office can be an issue when it comes to tables and graphics.

Kingsoft Office

Kingsoft Office sometimes feels like a cheap Chinese hack of Microsoft’s original software, and that’s precisely because it is. But don’t let that put you off using what is actually a fairly reliable alternative – basically it’s just a stripped down version of Office’s three basic programs – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – with a design and layout that resembles its big brother down to a tee.

Kingsoft Office is fast, compact and generally has few compatibility issues, while it has enough customization options for those who need them. Nice little extras include a PDF convertor and the ability to add watermarks to documents. However, it lacks some of the more robust features offered by Office 365, LibreOffice and others, such as publishing and note taking.