Pros & Cons
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- Simple, elegant interfaces
- Tight integrations across Apple's platforms
- Unique canvas-style format for spreadsheets
- Powerful graphics features
- Free
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- Native file formats won’t open in non-Apple apps
Apple iWork Specs
| Cloud-Based Apps | |
| Desktop Apps | |
| Free Version Available | |
| Links to Live Web Data | |
| Mac App | |
| Mail App Included | |
| Mobile Apps | |
| Online Collaboration | |
| Opens/Saves Microsoft Formats |
For creating documents, presentations, and spreadsheets across your Apple devices, the company's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote office suite apps serve as attractive and capable options. And best of all, they don't cost anything to use (unless you're interested in extra Apple Intelligence features via a Creator Studio subscription). Most Apple users will find these apps sufficient for their office productivity needs, but you should be mindful of their non-universal default file formats if you intend to share your work. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 remain our Editors' Choice winners for office suites, thanks to their similarly strong feature sets and greater compatibility.
What Office Suite Apps Does Apple Offer?
Note that Apple appears to be phasing out the iWork branding it previously used for its office apps. These include Pages (a word processor), Numbers (a spreadsheet editor), and Keynote (a presentation editor), all of which come preinstalled on macOS. Comparable versions are also available for iOS and iPadOS. Freeform (a collaborative brainstorming app) is also included in this group, though we aren't covering it in this review.
Pricing: Free, With Some Subscription-Locked Features
As mentioned, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are free on every Apple platform that supports them. A free Apple account also lets you use limited versions on the web. Subscribing to Apple Creator Studio ($12.99 per month or $129 per year) gets you extra AI features (such as Magic Fill in Numbers), premium templates, and stock content. A Creator Studio subscription also unlocks access to Apple’s high-end creative apps: Compressor, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and Pixelmator Pro.
For comparison, a free Microsoft account includes 5GB of OneDrive storage and access to browser-based and mobile versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. You have to pay at least $99.99 per year to use the desktop-based versions of those office apps. The free and open-source LibreOffice suite focuses on desktop-based apps, though a collaborative online version (called Collabora) is in the works. Whereas Microsoft's apps feel extremely polished, LibreOffice's programs are somewhat less refined.
Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are free alternatives you can use on mobile platforms and the web. They make collaboration exceptionally simple, but there are no desktop versions available. Upgrading to the more business-focused Google Workspace gets you more storage and corporate-friendly services.
If you don't care about AI features and just want standard office productivity apps for your Apple devices, you shouldn't feel the need to go beyond Apple's free offerings. It's not clear whether the company will start to restrict new features to Creator Studio subscribers, however.
What’s New in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote?
If you’ve used Apple's office apps recently, the latest versions should be familiar. Save for the optional Creator Studio features and a Liquid Glass-style interface refresh, not much is different. I'm not a fan of the visual tweaks to the apps because the new, larger buttons and icons waste screen space.
If you have the old versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on your system, they will prompt you to delete them and install the new versions. You can, of course, ignore that prompt and keep both the old and new editions, but doing so only makes sense if you intensely dislike the new interface. Older versions won't receive updates and are incompatible with Creator Studio features.
Interface and Ease of Use: Elegant and Seamless
Apple has always taken a unique approach to the design of its office apps, rather than copying Microsoft 365's ribbon-style convention like most competitors. All the apps have a toolbar at the top of a central editing pane, along with an inspector pane on the right for adjusting formats, transitions, and other settings. Pages and Keynote offer an optional left sidebar with page thumbnails, tables of contents, and other document-organization features.
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote all integrate more deeply into Apple’s ecosystem than third-party apps. For example, you can easily insert a free-form sketch, a photo, or a scanned document from your iPad or iPhone into a document on your Mac.
Pages: Visually Spectacular, But There Are Some Quirks
Apple’s Pages makes it intuitive to create elegant documents, such as letters or reports. If you want to create a document with audio clips from your microphone, images and videos from your computer or the web, and impressive typographic styles, it gets the job done quickly and impressively. Pages is also the only advanced word processor that lets you work in either a word-processing or page-based mode, sparing you the expense and trouble of finding an alternative for work on greeting cards, printed flyers, and the like.
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That said, Pages isn’t ideal for managing long multi-chapter documents. Like all word-processors, Pages (in its default mode) aims to flow text from one page to the next, but it still lacks a text-focused draft view and doesn't let you hide the potentially distracting top and bottom margins at each page break.
The iOS version of Pages lets you select a Screen View option that hides most page formatting elements so that you can scroll through the text of a document in the same way you would a web page. When the macOS version gets a similar feature, it will be a lot more usable for work on long documents.
Numbers: The Spreadsheet App That Breaks the Mold
The Numbers app won’t tempt high-powered business or scientific users away from Excel, but, for everyone else, it’s by far the easiest-to-use and most visually compelling spreadsheet software available. Its elegant, rounded boxes for column and row numbers and lucid formula-building bar are wonders to behold.
Unlike traditional spreadsheets, worksheets in Numbers don't start out with table-style grids that allow you to create multiple tables of data. Instead, a Numbers worksheet is a blank canvas on which you create charts, graphics, and tables. In a traditional spreadsheet, you can drag charts and graphics anywhere, but you can't simply drag a table of data like in Numbers.
Creator Studio subscribers can take advantage of the Magic Fill feature that populates cells or a column based on a pattern in other cells—for example, creating a First Name and Last Name column from a column with full names. Excel for Windows (but not Excel for macOS) has had a similar feature for years, so this is a welcome addition.
Keynote: Still Spectacular
Apple rightly calls Keynote the most beautiful presentation app. Compared with its only full-featured rival, Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple wins on the design front, thanks to the elegance of its templates and the sometimes exhilarating clarity of its interface. All other presentation apps seem dull and dated.
Keynote and PowerPoint both include exciting transition effects, but Apple’s are slightly wittier. I especially like Keynote’s clothesline effect, which makes the outgoing and incoming slides seem to sway in the wind as they move from right to left. But you aren't likely to choose a presentation app for its transitions.
Cloud and Sharing: Apple Matches the Competition
Like Google Docs and Microsoft 365, Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote offer smooth, powerful online collaboration features. If you store your documents on Apple’s iCloud, you and your collaborators can work on them simultaneously from your desktop apps or through a browser. Microsoft's integration with OneDrive works similarly, and Google’s apps, of course, handle everything in the cloud. If you don't trust storing your files entirely online, Apple's or Microsoft's apps are a better bet.
Note that Creator Studio subscribers can collaborate on a Numbers worksheet of up to 4GB in size. Without a subscription, the limit is 2GB.
Document Compatibility: Apple's Achilles’ Heel?
Apple’s apps use proprietary document formats that open smoothly on any Apple device and in Apple’s browser-based apps, but nowhere else. If you want to share a document from Pages, Numbers, or Keynote with someone who doesn't use those apps, you need to convert it first or collaborate entirely online. But beware that exporting a document in a different format will irreversibly alter its formatting. In other words, you can't import said document back into Apple's apps and expect it look like it did originally. For comparison, you can smoothly transfer documents in Microsoft’s and LibreOffice's default formats between almost any modern office app, including Apple's.
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can import common document formats, but not legacy formats from Microsoft apps or WordPerfect. If you need to work with a variety of older files, LibreOffice is your best choice. It can open practically any document ever created.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Apple)
Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote
Apple's sophisticated Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps are free and work seamlessly across the company's devices, though we wish their default file formats weren't proprietary.