GridCraft: Use ArtCraft's Free Excel Alternative Online

GridCraft is a spreadsheet application from the team behind ArtCraft, the group that released free, open-source counterparts to Photoshop, Word, Acrobat and other Adobe and Microsoft apps in October 2026. The GitHub description calls it a clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Excel, rebuilt in pure Rust. Clean-room means it was built from public specifications and observed behaviour, not from Microsoft code, and the README says GridCraft is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.

The goal is familiarity. GridCraft copies Excel’s ribbon tabs, formula bar, Name Box, sheet tabs, keyboard shortcuts and fill handle, so an Excel user can start typing right away. One Rust codebase runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and BSD and compiles to WebAssembly for the browser, with no Electron wrapper and no subscription or licence server.

Under the hood it is a calculation engine, not a UI demo. The README describes a dependency-graph engine with dynamic arrays and spilling, incremental recalculation and copy-on-write workbooks that make undo snapshots nearly free. Every ribbon button, menu item, dialog and keystroke is a command, and the same commands drive the interface, a CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server for AI agents.

GridCraft vs Excel is the comparison most readers want, and the honest answer is: the core grid is real, the enterprise edges are not there yet. The table below turns the GridCraft README and its published gap list into simple marks. Excel gets a yes on rows where GridCraft is still catching up, and GridCraft wins the last two rows outright.

Read the rows as documentation, not marketing. The project publishes its own beta blockers, and the biggest one is file trust: round-trip tests currently cover GridCraft’s own files, so a workbook you receive from an Excel user is the first real test your file has seen.

Calculation is the strong suit. GridCraft ships a dependency-graph calculation engine with more than 500 functions, dynamic arrays that spill, and incremental recalculation that only re-evaluates what changed. Workbooks are copy-on-write, so undo snapshots are cheap even on large sheets. In our test of the official web build, typing =SUM(1,2,3)*10 into a cell evaluated to 60 instantly.

The format layer is more capable than the alpha badge suggests. XLSX is the native format: styles, themes and formulas survive a save, and CSV/TSV import and export are built in. Old .xls files can be imported, with some legacy formatting and embedded objects not preserved. Conditional formatting, tables, charts and pivot tables are all present in the ribbon.

The workflow around the grid is Excel-shaped too: Name Box jumps, sheet tabs, freeze panes, sort and filter, and keyboard shortcuts where you would expect them. If you came from the Adobe clone story, GridCraft is the same clean-room idea applied to spreadsheets, and the DeckCraft guide covers its Office sibling for slides.

The quickest way is our hosted copy of the official web build — a free Excel alternative online with no account. Click the button at the top of this page or open GridCraft online. The first visit downloads about 7 MB, then the editor opens in a new tab with a blank workbook. GridCraft online works best in desktop Chrome or Edge.

Step 1: click a cell, type a number, press Tab and type another. Step 2: in the next cell type =SUM(A1:B1) and press Enter — the result appears immediately, and editing either input updates it. Step 3: type =SEQUENCE(5) in an empty column to see dynamic arrays spill five rows.

Step 4: to work on an existing file, use File, then Open, and pick an .xlsx or .csv from your computer. Saving downloads a copy of the file, because the browser cannot write over your original — keep that in mind when you edit a workbook you received by email. For heavier work, the desktop build adds autosave and recovery.

Get every GridCraft download from the GridCraft releases on GitHub or the GridCraft page on getartcraft.com. GridCraft v0.6.1 was published on Oct 12, 2026, four days after the repository was created — the project is releasing fast, so check the tag before you bookmark an installer.

On Windows there are MSI installers and portable zips for x64, ARM64 and 32-bit x86. On macOS there is one universal DMG, plus a separate command-line tool. Linux users get AppImage, Flatpak, deb, rpm and tar.gz builds for x86_64 and ARM64, and a RISC-V tarball; FreeBSD has its own build.

The web build is a static site zip; that is the file PSDraw hosts, unchanged and checksum-verified. Every release includes SHA256SUMS.txt, so compare the checksum before you install. Our ArtCraft download guide walks through the checksum step for every ArtCraft app.

The GridCraft GitHub repository is github.com/storytold/gridcraft, under the same storytold account as PhotoCraft and the other Crafting Apps. It was created on Oct 7, 2026 and passed 4,500 stars within a week. The code is offered under your choice of MIT or Apache-2.0; the ArtCraft name and logo are trademarks outside that license, and our ArtCraft open source guide explains what that means for forks.

The README points contributors and agents at an AGENTS.md with clean-room rules, an asset policy, a never-crash requirement and quality gates. Bundled assets are listed with their licences in ATTRIBUTION.md. Issues and pull requests are open, and the gap list is public — the project rates its own XLSX corpus testing as the top beta blocker.

GridCraft is also scriptable from the terminal: gridcraft-cli exposes the same commands as the ribbon, plus an MCP server so AI agents can read ranges, write formulas and insert charts. Our ArtCraft MCP guide shows how to connect it to Claude, Codex or Cursor in one line.

The project’s gap list is blunt, and the top beta blocker is file trust: round-trip tests cover GridCraft’s own workbooks, and nobody has yet confirmed at scale that Excel opens what GridCraft saves. Until that lands, treat a save as a new file and keep your original.

Performance and depth have known edges. There is no streaming read for ~100 MB XLSX files, recalculation is single-threaded, and workbooks with a huge dependency graph are slow to edit. Slicers, timelines, the Power Pivot data model and query tables are simplified on open-edit-save, and several chart kinds — stock, combo, histogram, waterfall and others — do not survive a round-trip.

Two limits are specific to GridCraft online. There is no autosave in the browser, so Save downloads a copy. And GridCraft is built for desktop: on a phone it may be slow or not open at all.

The GridCraft web build runs in any modern desktop browser. The official build targets WebAssembly with a WebGL/WebGPU-capable canvas, and the project’s hosting notes say it needs no cross-origin isolation headers, so plain static hosting is enough — that is exactly how we serve it, byte-for-byte from the official release.

Desktop Chrome and Edge are the best-tested paths and what we verified on Oct 14, 2026. Firefox and Safari can run WebAssembly builds of this kind, but the project does not claim they are tested; if a browser refuses to start the editor, try Chrome or Edge before reporting a bug.

Phones and tablets are a different story: the UI assumes a mouse, a wide viewport and a physical keyboard. The launch block on this page warns mobile visitors for that reason. If you need a spreadsheet on a phone, a full desktop-class grid is the wrong tool anyway.