It’s a well-known fact that the office suites’ software category is dominated at this time by the one developed by Microsoft, but there are a few other solutions, most of them free, that might fight for the same leading position as well.

IBM Lotus Symphony is not even close to becoming a powerful Microsoft Office rival, but taking into account that it adopts the same market strategy as OpenOffice, it has some chances to impress.

In essence, IBM Lotus Symphony provides almost the same features as all the other freeware office suites, so it might be hard to notice some differences between this one and the rest of the market. But there are differences, that’s for sure, and they reside in design and some of the features belonging to the tools included in the pack.

As expected, installation takes some time but only because we’re dealing with an office suite and there are a lot of files to be copied on the computer. Not to mention that you’ll have to spend some time picking the tools you need, but that’s almost a common thing when talking about this kind of software.

IBM Lotus Symphony includes three different utilities, Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations, each with its very own purpose.

Of course, it has the most common features such as spell checkers, calculator, drawings, graphics and many, many others tools that you can also find in other freeware similar tools.

The only issue that we found during our test was the fact that sometimes IBM Lotus Symphony doesn’t run quite smooth and that might be a serious problem on older computers. It needs more RAM and CPU than its freeware rivals, and again, that could be a setback for older machines.

All in all, IBM Lotus Symphony is quite a decent tool and in case you’re still looking for a freeware replacement for Microsoft Office, be sure to give this one a try.