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Developer Brandon Thomas has released WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft—three free, open-source applications that are clones of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively. They were developed in Rust with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude.
WordCraft covers 88% of Word’s ribbon features, and GridCraft handles 513 out of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions, but the team rates their maturity at only 50% to 60% toward being practically usable.
This release follows Thomas’s previous launch of a clone of ArtCraft, which mimicked Adobe’s applications; this time, the target is Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which cost $99.99 per user annually.
You have two choices: pay $100 per year to use Microsoft Office Online, or pay nothing and use this ‘Office’ clone built with vibe coding that does essentially the same thing and runs completely offline. Which would you choose?
The developer who previously used AI to recreate a free alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud has now turned to Microsoft Office, releasing open-source clones of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint powered by Anthropic Claude.
The engineer behind the ArtCraft project, Brandon Thomas, released these applications on GitHub under the names WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft. Open source means anyone can read, copy, and modify the code, and the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses permit reuse of this code even in commercial scenarios.
Earlier this month, Thomas gained attention for ArtCraft—a free suite of applications mimicking Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Lightroom, built using Claude Opus 5.5, after Adobe once again charged him a cancellation fee. This occurred amid a wave of AI cloning trends, during which someone managed to run GTA V natively on an iPhone and inserted a Creeper from Minecraft into a boss fight from Elden Ring.
These Office clones are written in Rust, a programming language known for its speed and ability to prevent memory errors that cause software crashes. A single codebase can natively run on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD, as well as in web browsers.
Thomas referred to the project as a "clean-room" reconstruction, meaning these applications were written based on publicly documented file format specifications and by observing the behavior of the original software, without ever copying Microsoft’s code. This follows a similar legal path to the one Compaq used in the 1980s to clone the IBM PC BIOS. The BIOS is the foundational boot software for early personal computers.
However, based on file fidelity and stability, the team estimates that WordCraft is only about 60% of the way toward fully replacing Word for real-world use. It is still labeled as an alpha version—an early testing phase where bugs are expected.
We tried it. It’s only 91MB, runs smoothly, and looks almost identical to regular Microsoft Word. For everyday office tasks, it can fully replace this expensive software suite.
GridCraft, a clone of Excel, supports 513 out of 523 Excel worksheet functions—such as SUM and VLOOKUP—that enable spreadsheet calculations—and also supports 89% of ribbon commands. Its developers estimate it is about 50% mature toward practical usability, with the next priority being compatibility with real-world .xlsx files. In other words, it recognizes nearly all formulas but may still fail on corporate budget sheets.
DeckCraft, a PowerPoint alternative, claims on its GitHub page to cover approximately 79% of PowerPoint’s features and 93% of its core functionalities. It can open and save .pptx files, run transitions and animations, and export to PDF, but has not yet reached its first alpha release.
Each button in these three apps also serves as a command that AI agents can trigger. They connect via MCP, or Model Context Protocol—a standard developed by Anthropic designed to enable AI models to operate beyond tools. In practice, users can have Claude create charts in spreadsheets or reformat reports without touching the mouse.
Microsoft charges $99.99 annually for Microsoft 365 Personal and $129.99 for the Family plan—this is how most households now access Word and Excel. A similar product that can open the same files for free would clearly directly impact this revenue.
Free Office alternatives have existed for decades: OpenOffice.org was born when Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice suite code in October 2000, and LibreOffice forked from it in 2010. Both have benefited from years of effort by large developer communities, while Thomas delivered all three applications in less than two weeks after launching his Adobe clone, aided by AI models.
Its design is very similar to Microsoft Office, so heavy users should not encounter significant difficulties when switching—this is precisely the main reason people hesitate to change software providers.
The model behind ArtCraft, Claude Opus 5.5, was released on September 22, with pricing at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Tokens are segments of text that AI reads and writes, and they serve as the unit of billing for AI companies.
Thomas also seems to have a habit: so far, he has often promised more than the app can actually deliver. He has previously retracted a promise to match all of Adobe’s features within a month. Developers appear unconcerned about waiting: as of Wednesday, WordCraft had garnered over 12,000 stars on GitHub, equivalent to bookmarks on the platform.
Before entering beta, the roadmap shows that WordCraft still needs testing with real-world .docx files, charts, and SmartArt to ensure content retention after saving, along with closer alignment to Word’s page layout, a stability cleanup, and native printing functionality.