Comparing Microsoft Office Interop and IronXL: A Complete C# Guide
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel has been the default way to manipulate Excel spreadsheets from C# for over two decades. It ships with every Office installation, Microsoft documents it extensively, and millions of lines of production code depend on it. It works, until you need to deploy to a server, run in a container, target .NET 8, or support Linux.
// Interop: Create a workbook and write one cellvar excelApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Application();var workbook = excelApp.Workbooks.Add();var sheet = (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Worksheet)workbook.Sheets[1];sheet.Cells[1, 1] = "Hello, Excel";workbook.SaveAs(@"C:\Reports\hello.xlsx");workbook.Close();excelApp.Quit();// Plus: Marshal.ReleaseComObject for every object above// IronXL: Same resultvar wb = IronXL.WorkBook.Create();wb.DefaultWorkSheet["A1"].Value = "Hello, Excel";wb.SaveAs("hello.xlsx");
IronXL Example Output
Full disclosure: we are the engineering team behind IronXL, one of the libraries compared in this article. We use IronXL as the primary alternative because we know its architecture best, but we cover Interop thoroughly and honestly — including the scenarios where it remains a valid choice.
We have maintained .NET libraries...
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