Apple Numbers vs Microsoft Excel

The short answer: Numbers is a layout tool that can calculate. Excel is a calculation tool that can lay things out. Almost every difference below follows from that one distinction, and it is usually enough to decide.

Choose Numbers if your spreadsheets are read by people — invoices, budgets, one-page reports, anything you would be happy to print. Choose Excel if your spreadsheets are read by other spreadsheets — models, pivot analysis, anything that will be handed to a colleague on Windows.

The difference that actually matters: canvas versus grid

Most comparisons start with feature counts. Start here instead, because it is the difference you will feel within ten minutes.

Excel gives you one grid per sheet. The grid is the document. Every cell has an address, everything lines up with everything else, and a formula anywhere can reach anything.

Numbers gives you a blank canvas. Tables are objects you place on it, like images or text boxes, and you can put several independent tables on one sheet, each with its own headers and its own size. A quarterly summary and its three supporting tables can sit side by side without a single merged cell.

This is why Numbers documents look better with no effort, and why they become awkward as models grow. Once you have twelve tables scattered across four canvases, “where does this number come from?” is a harder question than it would be in a single grid.

Where Numbers genuinely wins

• It is free, on every Mac, iPad, and iPhone, with no subscription and no upsell. Nothing below changes that.
• Documents look finished by default. The templates are genuinely good, and typography, spacing, and chart styling are handled for you.
• Multiple tables per sheet, which for invoices and reports is the correct model and something Excel simulates badly with merged cells.
• It is pleasant on iPad and iPhone. Numbers was designed for touch, not adapted to it. If you edit on an iPad, this is not a small thing.
• Charts look better out of the box. Excel’s are more configurable; Numbers’ need less work to be presentable.

Where Excel genuinely wins

• Function library. Excel has roughly 400–500 built-in functions depending on version; Numbers has around 250. For most people the gap never comes up — until it does, and then it is a wall.
• Pivot tables. Numbers has had them since version 12.1 in 2022, so the common claim that it lacks them is out of date — but Excel’s are substantially more capable, and the gap widens fast with calculated fields and slicers.
• Power Query, Power Pivot, and Solver. Numbers has no equivalent to any of them. If you clean and merge data from several sources regularly, this alone decides it.
• Macros. Excel has VBA. Numbers has AppleScript and Shortcuts on Mac, which are useful but are not the same thing and cannot travel inside a file.
• Editing chart data ranges. In Excel a chart’s source range is a value you can edit directly. In Numbers you adjust it by dragging the highlighted region on the table — fine for a small chart, tedious when a range grows every month, and a long-standing complaint with no clean workaround.
• It runs everywhere. Windows, Mac, web, iPad, Android. Numbers runs on Apple hardware and at iCloud.com in a browser.
• It is what everyone else uses. Which brings us to the real problem.

File compatibility is the actual pain point

Numbers opens .xlsx files and exports to .xlsx. That sentence hides a lot of trouble.

Round-tripping a file — Excel to Numbers and back — is where things break. Formatting drifts. Conditional formatting rules can be dropped. Formulas using functions Numbers doesn’t implement come back as static values or errors, and a formula silently replaced by its last-computed value is the worst failure mode a spreadsheet has, because nothing looks wrong.

CSV is its own small minefield. Exports that look fine in a text editor can be rejected by tax software, payroll portals, and school information systems, which tend to expect one exact dialect and refuse everything else. Numbers also follows your locale when reading and writing CSV, so in much of Europe the delimiter is a semicolon rather than a comma — which makes Numbers a genuinely handy tool for opening a semicolon-delimited file and re-emitting it comma-delimited, and a genuinely confusing one when you did not expect the switch.

A practical rule: if a file will be edited by more than one person and any of them uses Excel, author it in Excel. Use Numbers for documents that begin and end with you.

Collaboration

Both do real-time collaboration, and both do it well within their own ecosystem — Numbers through iCloud, Excel through OneDrive and Microsoft 365.

The difference is who you can invite. Numbers collaboration works through iCloud.com in a browser, so a Windows colleague can join, but they will be using a web app that is less capable than the native one. Excel’s co-authoring assumes a Microsoft account and works the same way for everyone. For a mixed team, Excel is less friction; for an all-Apple team, Numbers is genuinely fine.

What they cost

Numbers is free. It comes with the device, there is no paid tier, and no feature is held back.

Excel is not. You can get it through a Microsoft 365 subscription, buy a perpetual Office licence outright, or use Excel for the web free with a reduced feature set. Prices change often enough that it is worth checking Microsoft’s current pricing rather than trusting any article’s number, including this one.

When your Microsoft 365 subscription expires

This deserves its own answer, because it is the moment most people go looking for a comparison in the first place.

Your files remain yours. .xlsx is a documented format, your files stay on your disk, and nothing is deleted or held hostage. What changes is that Excel itself drops to read-only — you can open and print, but not edit and save. The question is only what you edit them with next. There are four honest exits:

1. Excel for the web, free. Genuinely free with a Microsoft account, and genuinely reduced — no Power Query, limited pivot capability, and everything lives in OneDrive. For light editing of existing files it is often enough, and it costs nothing to find out.
2. Buy Office outright. A perpetual licence is a real product: one payment, no subscription, yours for that version, with no feature updates afterwards. Worth knowing that the very cheap “lifetime Office licence” offers on deal sites are a grey market of uncertain provenance — often volume or OEM keys resold outside their terms, which can stop activating without warning. That trade-off is yours to make, but it should be made knowingly.
3. Numbers, if you are on Apple hardware and the sections above suit you.
4. A free alternative — which is where most people land, and which deserves a fair hearing rather than a footnote.

The free alternative most people try first: LibreOffice

If you are leaving a subscription, LibreOffice Calc is almost certainly the first name you will hear, and it deserves an honest paragraph rather than being skipped.

What it gets right: it is free, genuinely cross-platform across Windows, Mac, and Linux, and far closer to Excel than Numbers is in structure and in habit. It is one grid per sheet, the menus are laid out roughly where an Excel user expects, and it has pivot tables, macro support, and a function library deep enough that most people never reach the bottom. If your muscle memory is Excel’s, the transfer costs less here than anywhere else.

What it gets wrong: the Mac experience is the weak point, and has been for years. Users consistently report stalls and interface jank on macOS, Apple Silicon included, and the interface itself has changed little in structure since its StarOffice ancestry — it works, but it does not feel like a Mac application, and no amount of theming fixes that. On Windows and Linux this matters far less.

The honest summary: if you want Excel’s model without Excel’s bill and you can live with how it looks and feels, LibreOffice is the answer and you can stop reading here. If the Mac experience is exactly what you were trying to escape, keep going.

A third option worth knowing about

This comparison is published by the makers of another spreadsheet, so treat this section with the scepticism it deserves and take the sections above on their own merits.

VisiGrid is a native, keyboard-driven spreadsheet with 123 built-in functions that opens .xlsx, .xls, .xlsb, and .ods files and exports back to .xlsx. It is open source, runs entirely on your own machine with no account and no telemetry, and the desktop app runs its formula engine natively rather than in a browser or a cloud round-trip. If what appeals about Numbers is that it is fast and yours, and what appeals about Excel is that it takes formulas seriously, that is the gap it aims at.

It is also the wrong choice for a lot of people, and worth saying plainly:

• No pivot tables. If pivot analysis is why you opened this page, use Excel or LibreOffice.
• No charts in the desktop app yet. Numbers wins this outright.
• No real-time collaboration. Both Numbers and Excel beat it here.
• No add-in ecosystem and no VBA — it uses sandboxed Lua scripting instead, which is better for reproducibility and worse for compatibility with whatever macro your colleague wrote in 2014.
• Maturity. macOS is in beta; Windows and Linux are in alpha. Numbers, Excel, and LibreOffice are all decades old and it shows.

Test the file that matters, before you decide anything

Whichever of these you are weighing, the advice that survives contact with reality is the same: do not switch on a feature list — switch on your own files. The spreadsheet that decides this is the one you actually depend on, and the only useful question is whether it survives the move intact.

You can do that with VisiGrid in one gesture and without committing to anything: drag your .xlsx onto app.visigrid.app/try. It opens in your browser, there is no account and no sign-up, and the file stays in your browser — nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you deliberately create an account to save it. If your formulas come through and the numbers match, that tells you more than this entire page. If they don’t, you have lost ninety seconds and learned something worth knowing before you moved anything important.

Do the same test with Numbers and with LibreOffice. Whichever one opens your real work without surprises is your answer, regardless of what any comparison says.