SoftMaker

SoftMaker

Company type	GmbH
Industry	Software
Founded	1989 (1989)
Founder	Martin Kotulla
Headquarters	Nuremberg , Germany
Website	SoftMaker's home page in English

SoftMaker Software GmbH is a German software company based in Nuremberg that produces office software. SoftMaker was founded in 1989 by Martin Kotulla. In 1991, it also added digital fonts to its offerings. Best known in Germany and the EU, SoftMaker is slowly pursuing the North American market.

Students, teachers, schools, and universities can purchase SoftMaker Office for a lower price, part of SoftMaker's academic sales program. Additionally, a free version named FreeOffice is available.

SoftMaker Office

SoftMaker Office is SoftMaker's flagship product, an office suite marketed to home, small business and educational users. It consists of the word processor TextMaker (compatible with Microsoft Word), the spreadsheet PlanMaker (compatible with Microsoft Excel) the presentation software application SoftMaker Presentations (compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint) and the scripting language BasicMaker (compatible with Visual Basic for Applications).

SoftMaker Office is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android. Its predecessor was available for Windows CE, and Pocket PCs (Windows Mobile handheld devices). The 2006 version was also available for FreeBSD and Handheld PCs. SoftMaker began support for MacOS in their 2018 family of office suites.

Currently, SoftMaker Office supports all popular Microsoft Office file formats. SoftMaker claims to be working on ODF compliant formats, but currently supports OpenDocument only in its word processor.

SoftMaker Product	Equivalent MS Product	Platforms	File Formats
TextMaker	Word	Win64, MacOS, Linux, Android	.docx, .doc, .rtf, .odt, .tmd, .pwd, .txt, .sxw (import only), .pdf (export)
PlanMaker	Excel	Win64, MacOS, Linux, Android	.xlsx, .xls, .csv, .pmd, .rtf, .dbf, .txt, .slk, .dif, .pdf (export)
Presentations	PowerPoint	Win64, MacOS, Linux, Android	.pptx, .pps, .ppt, .ppsx, .prd, .rtf, Export: .png, .jpg, Video and .pdf
BasicMaker	VBA (limited)	Win	.bas, .txt

Competitive strategy

The SoftMaker Office sales strategy is based on cross-platform usability along with reasonable pricing and free post-sale customer service. However, since SoftMaker Office is not free like competitors LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice, or Calligra Suite, its greatest marketing strength is its high degree of Microsoft Office compatibility. As a major sales point, SoftMaker cites its ability to render graphs and charts within PlanMaker which are often indistinguishable from those created within Microsoft's Excel. Significantly, this level of compatibility extends to non-Windows platforms. Even on Windows platforms, SoftMaker Office competes with native Windows office suites based on its Microsoft Office compatibility.

SoftMaker also claims its Office suite is faster, with smaller memory and hard drive footprints than Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org.

The most significant areas of incompatibility, as with all non-Microsoft office suites, are in documents that use VBA scripts. While BasicMaker is a step forward, it still does not offer seamless VBA compatibility.

FlexiPDF

The application FlexiPDF edits PDF files quite effortless.

digital fonts

SoftMaker offers font packages for the home user (MegaFont NOW) and professional user (infiniType).

To promote its digital font sales, SoftMaker publishes one font each month free for download from its FreeFont web site.