What to use on OS X Lion (10.7): OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice or NeoOffice?

OpenOffice is effectively dead after Oracle bought Sun—all the developers moved to LibreOffice. And assuming you care about future enhancements and compatibility, LibreOffice is the way to go now. I used to use NeoOffice when it was the only native port of OpenOffice for OS X, but since LibreOffice has a maintained OS X port I just moved to LibreOffice.

I am on OS X 10.7.4, LibreOffice 3.5.4 and all works fine for me.

Here is NeoOffice's list of features that it offers that are not found in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org:

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/features.php#newnewfeatures

NeoOffice supports Mac OS X 10.7 Lion's Versions, Media Browser, Full Screen Mode, Apple Core Text for font rendering, and many user-interface elements that use Mac OS X's API code (implemented by the NeoOffice development team) to replace the ported code found in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org.

With the beta of the forthcoming version, they have announced that they have removed the use of Java and have replaced all those Java functions with their own NeoOffice code written in Cocoa.

You'll have to decide whether NeoOffice provides a better experience on the Mac for you compared to LibreOffice for Mac.

(I used NeoOffice and supported them with annual donations for the past decade. This year I finally broke down and purchased Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac to use instead, because I decided I could no longer live without some Microsoft Word features that will never be made available in OpenOffice, LibreOffice or NeoOffice. But I feel the latter three suites are the best choice for most users.)

OpenOffice is far from dead, it's just been passed over to Apache for stewardship. I would recommend OpenOffice any day, I've used all Libre Office and Open office with Lion on my wife's macbook air and have found that libre seems to be prone to crashing, whereas we've never had a single problem with open office. I also find the database program to be really easy to use and the ease of opening and editing files that I've created in MS Office 2011 on my pro seals the deal.

Just make sure you download the stable release of 3.4 on this page and you shouldn't have any issues.