| LaTeX (TeX Live, local) | LaTeX (Overleaf, browser) | Microsoft Word | LibreOffice Writer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to you | Free | Free tier; paid plans from €7.25/month billed yearly (student) | Microsoft 365 Personal ₹6,899/year or ₹689/month; Office Home 2024 one-time ₹10,999 | Free |
| Works offline | Yes, fully | No (compiles on their servers) | Yes, desktop app | Yes |
| Mathematics | Excellent | Excellent | Workable; degrades in long documents | Workable |
| Automatic numbering and cross-references | Reliable by design | Reliable by design | Reliable if you use styles and captions; fragile if you type numbers by hand | As Word |
| Bibliography | BibTeX/BibLaTeX | BibTeX/BibLaTeX | Zotero/Mendeley plug-in, or the built-in tool | Zotero plug-in |
| Supervisor can add tracked comments | Hard | Possible in-app; hard outside it | Yes, natively | Yes |
| Departmental template exists | Common in engineering and the sciences | Same templates, hosted | Common everywhere | Rare |
| Time cost before you write a word | High — install and learn | Low — open a template | None | None |
| Where it breaks | A missing package on a lab machine at 2 a.m. | No internet; compile-timeout on a very long document on the free tier | Corrupted numbering after 200 pages of manual formatting | Layout drift when a reviewer opens it in Word |
The verdict, in one line
If your department publishes a LaTeX thesis template, use LaTeX. If it does not, use Word with a reference manager and use its styles properly. Everything else in this article is the reasoning, the prices, and the situations where that line is wrong.
The three questions that actually decide it
1. Does your department publish a template?
This overrules everything else. A departmental template encodes the front matter, the certificate pages, the margins and the numbering your research board expects, and it is what your senior scholars will help you debug. Writing against the grain of an existing template costs weeks.
Indian institutional templates are not hypothetical. Overleaf’s own thesis template gallery lists institution-specific templates from, among others, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi, IIT Patna, IIT Bhubaneswar and Anna University (checked 18 August 2026). If your institution is on that list, the argument is effectively over.
Remember what the template is not: it is not a national requirement. As we found when reading the UGC gazette for thesis formatting, the 2022 Regulations prescribe no typography at all. The binding document is your university’s ordinance, and the template is its implementation.
2. How much mathematics, and how many cross-references?
A thesis with fifty numbered equations that you cite in the text is a different document from a thesis with four tables. LaTeX handles the first case without you thinking about it; Word can, but every equation you add renumbers a chain you have to trust it to maintain.
The honest version of this argument is narrower than LaTeX partisans claim. Word’s numbering and cross-referencing are dependable if you use heading styles, insert captions through the caption tool, and never type a figure number by hand. Almost every horror story about Word at 250 pages traces back to manual formatting, not to the software.
3. Who else has to touch the file?
This is the question scholars answer last and regret first. If your guide reviews chapters by adding tracked changes and margin comments in Word — and in most Indian departments outside engineering, they do — then a LaTeX workflow means you convert to Word for every review round and reconcile the edits by hand. That is a real, recurring cost that no feature comparison shows.
The prices, verified
TeX Live is free. The TeX Users Group describes it as a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavours of Unix including GNU/Linux and macOS, and for Windows, bundling all the major TeX programs, macro packages and fonts that are free software. Many Linux distributions ship it through their own package managers, and macOS users install the MacTeX distribution. There is no licence to buy and no account to create.
Overleaf has a genuine free tier. Checked on 18 August 2026, the free plan gives unlimited projects, one collaborator per project and a basic compile timeout. Paid plans, as priced to us in euros, were: Student €7.25/month billed yearly (€87/year) or €11 monthly; Standard €15/month billed yearly (€179/year) or €21 monthly; Pro €30.75/month billed yearly (€369/year) or €41 monthly. A 40% academic discount is advertised for groups at degree-granting institutions. Our fetch returned euro pricing rather than rupee pricing, so we are not quoting an INR figure for Overleaf — check the page from your own connection, and check first whether your institute already holds a group licence.
Microsoft 365, India store, 18 August 2026: Personal ₹689/month or ₹6,899/year; Family ₹819/month or ₹8,199/year; Premium ₹1,999/month or ₹19,999/year; and Office Home 2024 as a one-time purchase for PC or Mac at ₹10,999. Before you pay any of that, check your institute’s IT page: a great many Indian universities provide Microsoft 365 to enrolled students at no cost through an institutional agreement, and Word on the web is free with any Microsoft account.
LibreOffice Writer is free and open source, and is the sensible answer for a scholar with no institutional licence and no budget who does not need LaTeX. Its one real risk is layout drift when a reviewer opens your .odt or exported .docx in Word — so exchange PDFs for review and keep the editable file to yourself.
Cost, in other words, is close to a non-issue on both sides. Anyone telling you LaTeX is the choice for scholars on a stipend is comparing paid Word against free LaTeX and ignoring free Word-compatible alternatives and campus licences.
The ranked shortlist
- Microsoft Word plus Zotero or Mendeley — the default for most Indian theses. Suits commerce, management, education, humanities, law, and any scholar whose guide comments in tracked changes. Falls short when you have heavy mathematics, and it punishes manual formatting brutally over 200 pages. Pair it with a reference manager from the start; see our reference manager shortlist.
- LaTeX on Overleaf — the default when a departmental template exists. Suits engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science and anyone at an institute whose template is already on the gallery. Falls short if your connection is unreliable, because compilation happens on their servers, and the free tier’s compile timeout can bite on a very long final document.
- LaTeX with a local TeX Live install — for offline work and full control. Suits scholars with intermittent internet, large figure sets, or a lab that standardises on a particular package set. Falls short on collaboration and on the day a lab machine is missing a package your document needs.
- LibreOffice Writer — for zero budget and no campus licence. Suits any non-mathematical thesis. Falls short on interchange fidelity with reviewers who use Word.
What actually protects a long document, whichever you choose
Most thesis formatting disasters are workflow failures, not software failures. Four habits matter more than the choice above:
- Never type a number that the software can generate. Chapter numbers, figure numbers, table numbers, equation numbers, page numbers and the table of contents should all be generated. This is the single largest difference between a thesis that survives a restructure and one that does not.
- Use one reference manager from day one and let it write the bibliography. Whether the output style is APA, IEEE, MLA or Vancouver, hand-typed references drift out of sync the moment you add a source.
- Version your files by date, and keep an off-machine copy. A single corrupted file at submission time is a more common catastrophe than any formatting problem.
- Build tables the way the style guide requires, not the way the software defaults. Our guide to APA tables in the results chapter applies identically in both tools.
Frequently asked questions
Is LaTeX required for an Indian PhD thesis?
No. The UGC Ph.D. Regulations, 2022 contain no provision on typography, fonts, margins or file format. Any requirement to use LaTeX comes from your department, and where it exists it is usually expressed as “use this template”.
Which is better for an M.Tech dissertation?
If your department circulates a LaTeX template, use it — engineering departments most often do, and your seniors will be able to help. Otherwise Word is fine; see how to structure an M.Tech dissertation for what actually gets marked.
Is Overleaf free for students?
There is a free plan with unlimited projects, one collaborator per project and a basic compile timeout, and a separately priced Student plan above it. Check whether your institute holds a group licence before paying — Overleaf advertises a 40% academic discount for groups at degree-granting institutions.
Can I write in LaTeX if my guide only uses Word?
You can, but budget for the conversion. Every review round means exporting to a format your guide can annotate and then transferring the comments back by hand. If your guide reviews chapter by chapter, that cost repeats many times.
Does the plagiarism checker care which one I used?
The department’s screening runs on the file you submit, and both routes produce the same PDF. File-type and size limits are set by the software your institution licenses, so confirm them locally rather than assuming; see what to check about your institution’s similarity software.
Can I switch from Word to LaTeX halfway through?
Technically yes, practically rarely worth it. Converting a partly written thesis means re-marking every heading, caption, table and citation. Switch only if you have hit a hard wall — usually mathematics — and you are early enough that fewer than two chapters exist.
What about Google Docs?
Good for drafting and for supervisor comments, weak for a final thesis: cross-referencing, caption numbering and long-document stability are all noticeably behind Word. Draft there if you like the commenting, but assemble the thesis elsewhere.
Do I need to buy Microsoft 365 to use Word?
Not necessarily. Word on the web is free with a Microsoft account, many Indian institutions provide Microsoft 365 to enrolled students under an institutional agreement, and LibreOffice Writer is a free desktop alternative.
Which produces a better-looking thesis?
LaTeX, with no effort, on documents with heavy mathematics. On an ordinary social-science thesis, a Word file built properly with styles is indistinguishable to an examiner. Examiners fail theses for arguments, not for kerning.
Where can I find my institute’s LaTeX template?
Ask your department office and your senior scholars first, because the authoritative copy usually circulates internally. The Overleaf template gallery is the practical second stop, and it already carries templates named for several IITs and Anna University.
The part no editor solves
Both tools will happily typeset a chapter that does not argue anything. The work that actually decides your evaluation — holding the objectives, the analysis and the literature in one consistent line from chapter one to chapter six — is not a formatting problem, and it is the part scholars run out of time for.
Tesify sits before the layout question: it keeps your chapters, objectives and references in one project, so restructuring an argument does not mean rebuilding a document. Export to whichever tool your department’s template lives in. Try the free tier before you spend a rupee on software.