This is a list of all known competitors, and some brief description and opinions about them, along with hyperlinks so you can make up your mind for yourself. If you have any additions, please let me know and I will add them. Similarly, if you want to revise my characterizations. Also, keep in mind, my comments are generally NOT well researched. If you really want to know about these particular products, contact the vendors themselves.

• Microsoft word

Obviously vastly much more functionality. Also, requires much more disk space and system resources. More expensive. Very heavy, busy, wasteful of screen real-estate user interface (if you could all the ribbon bars, and title bars, and icons, and pallets that come up by default, on a 13 inch screen, less than half is dedicated to actually seeing the text!). Word is ... not parsimonious. But it is cross-platform, and the reference against which all others are compared.
• WordPerfect

Embarrassingly, I know very little about this. Probably most of what I said about Microsoft Word also applies here (but hopefully not the icon mania).
• AbiWord

I tried version 0.7.7 (991222). It looked very interesting. But it was EXTREMELY buggy. I only tried the Win32 build. But it crashed so often that I was hard pressed to evaluate it. It maybe that alot of the problem had to do with RTF. I was testing it reading RTF docs. Reading the native format docs they provided seemed to work OK. But most menu commands brought up "Not Yet Implemented" dialogs. Keep an eye out for future releases.
I have since been told that the release 1.0.3 is out, and is much less buggy. I've not had the chance to look at it myself.
• Ted

According to Scott Nesbitt (scottnesbitt@operamail.com): Ted, like LedIt, is a small, easy to use RTF word processor
Ted is only available for UNIX/Linux.

Another site which maintains an excellent list of multilingual word processors is Fontboard.

Updating this document

If you have any additions, or clarifications, or modifications you think appropriate here, please send me your comments, suggestions, and reviews.