This list of Best Free Home & Office Software for Mac OS:

Office Suite for Mac OS

LibreOffice

“A prime choice when it comes to freeware office suites. For both the average and the more advanced user the writer is easy to use and very productive, and it offers all the tools they will ever need. The spreadsheet editor, just like the writer, is very easy to understand. All modules of LibreOffice are spectacular alternatives for those who don’t wish to fork out the big bucks.”

OpenOffice

“An open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages.”

NeoOffice

“A full-featured set of office applications adapted to the unique needs of Mac users. While OpenOffice and LibreOffice now have their own Mac OS X versions, Patrick and Ed continually add improvements to NeoOffice that the Mac OS X users will not find in OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Word Processor for Mac OS

Bean

“A small, easy-to-use word processor that is designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is lean, fast and uncluttered. It starts up quickly, has a live word count, and is easy on the eyes.”

Text Editor for Mac OS

Aquamacs

“Aquamacs is an Aqua-native build of the powerful Emacs text editor. By “Aqua-native,” we mean more than just the fact that this version of Emacs runs as a standard OS X application.  Aquamacs features extensive customization: it will feel and behave mostly like an Aqua program – while still being a real GNU Emacs with all the ergonomy and extensibility you’ve come to expect from this world-class editor.”

TextWrangler

“A free notepad/text editor which is programmer friendly and can also be used as a Unix Admin Service Editor. It has a built-in “plugins” section – meaning that programmers can write source code additions to the program. It also has a function browser so that you can quickly find and jump to the function you’re looking for.”

PDF Writer for Mac OS

PDFwriter for Mac

“PDFwriter is a printer driver for Mac OS X, which will let you generate PDF files by simply printing. PDFwriter is heavily based on CUPS-PDF. It doesn’t use ghostscript to generate PDF files, instead it uses the Mac OS X internal pdf capabilities.”

PDF Reader for Mac OS

Skim

“A PDF reader and note-taker for OS X, designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.”

Adobe Reader

“A PDF file viewer that can open and interact with all PDF documents. You can use it to view, search, digitally sign, verify, print, and collaborate on PDF files.”

eBook Reader for Mac OS

Calibre

“An open source eBook library management application supports extensive file conversions, with the ability to convert over thirteen document formats into EPUB, PDF and MOBI formats for use on popular eBook-readers like the SONY PRS 500/505/700, Cybook Gen 3, Amazon Kindle (1 and 2) and the iPhone (with the stanza reader software).

You can also set up Calibre to fetch news from websites and RSS feeds and convert it into a compatible format, so you can load up your eBook-reader with information from your favorite sites. There’s even a built-in web server so you can access your eBook collection remotely. It even has a cover-flow browsing feature for your books.”

Comic Book Reader for Mac OS

iStrip

“An application to view and archive comic strips available online, with support for over 600 strips built in. You can download comic strip and cache them for offline viewing as well”

Sequential

“Sequential was originally designed for opening a folder of images and displaying them in order. It works well for viewing comics and manga, and can display folders and archives (ZIP, RAR, CBZ and CBR) of images (including JPEG, PNG, and GIF) and PDF files.”

Simple Comic

“An intuitive comic reader on the Mac with a clean interface gives you full control of your viewing experience. Features include archive handling, page ordering and scaling, text notes, page capture, full screen thumbnail view and more.”

PDF Tools for Mac OS

PDFsam

“PDFsam (PDF Split and Merger) is well worth trying if you need to visually re-order or recompose multiple pages of PDF files.

You can mix, merge or extract, split and rotate pages by specifying the page numbers. However, PDFsam also lets you re-organize PDF pages in a thumbnail view. In this mode, you can easily work with thumbnails to merge, delete, rotate or re-order PDF pages and save the results as another PDF file.” 

PDF Converter Free

“An easy-to-use tool that allows a PDF document to be converted to a fully editable PowerPoint Mac 2008/2011 pptx presentation—preserving the original layout of the presentation complete with original fonts and embedded images, graphs/charts.”

DigiSigner

“A useful tool to digitally sign PDF files and verify signatures. This process allows you to ensure that important PDF documents such as invoices and contracts are not tampered with. The free version of DigiSigner supports smartcards and USB tokens, certificates and standard PFX (Personal Information Exchange) files.”

Personal Finance for Mac OS

GnuCash

“If you are looking for a quick education in double entry accounting, look no further than GnuCash. It will ease you into the “Assets = Liabilities + Equity” accounting equation and help you keep tabs of your budget without using the categories commonly used in commercial personal finance applications.

It also allows you to create various accounts in each category and a full suite of standard and customizable reports.”

Project Manager for Mac OS

GanttProject

“It is a very good project management tool and very usable for small to medium size projects, with a surprisingly good depth of features and accessories for a free product.

As its name suggest, it’s excellent for making Gantt charts, great for making logical and easy-to-understand development plans. One of the features I particularly liked was the ability to put in a percentage complete bar inside the timeline of that particular stage.”

Notes Organizer for Mac OS

Evernote

“An outstanding product provides you with an excellent solution to manage notes and snippets of information. You can create notes on the page, drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste them with material including text and images.

This application supports multiple notebooks. To help organize your notes, the program allows for attaching multiple tags to a note. You can then choose to enter your tags, in addition to any keywords, to search for the stored information, while you can also sort your notes easily by a column title in a list view.” 

Tomboy

“If you want to have a useful tool to relate notes and ideas together with a wiki-like linking system then Tomboy could be the answer.

Left-click Tomboy’s tray icon and select “Create New Note”, you can then start describing your new note to which a link is automatically created. Right-click on selected words in a note and choose “Link to New Note”, the selected words will then become an anchor text with a hyperlink to a new note, in which you can add more descriptions.”

Desktop Publishing Program for Mac OS

Scribus

“It’s the real thing; a professional quality page layout program capable of producing press-ready output. The feature list is impressive; basically everything you want is there including “CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Graphics manipulation is handled via an interface to Gimp. Scribus can also import from and export to programs in the OpenOffice suite. The user interface is highly functional and the documentation is excellent, with lots of support from the user community.”

Via techsupportalert