Uninstalled Qwen Office and Trae Work After Two Weeks with WorkBuddy

Just saw that article comparing the three tools. It said Qwen Office launched on August 3rd, while WorkBuddy came out in early March. My first reaction was: that time gap pretty much reflects the difference in product maturity. That might sound a bit absolute, but as a user who actually installed all three and fed them real files, I have to say a few honest things.

Let me start with my use case. I'm a psychological counselor, and my desktop files are incredibly messy: individual session notes, corporate group counseling assessment forms, reimbursement receipts, and various draft contracts in different formats. This week I took on a school collaboration project and needed to organize over a dozen interview summaries. The formats were all over the place—some sorted by time, some scattered by topic, and two were raw transcripts from audio recordings that hadn't been cleaned up. This kind of task used to take me an entire afternoon of manual sorting. This time, I decided to put all three tools through their paces.

I tried Qwen Office first. It integrates three Agents and focuses on cross-system approvals. Honestly, the concept is good, but it felt off right away. I threw in an interview transcript PDF and asked it to extract key info into a table. After churning for a while, it produced a table of contents, and completely missed the last third of the content. I thought maybe the file was too big, so I split it into three parts and tried again, but each part had omissions. Later I checked the supported models—it only supports Qwen3.8 Max—and then I understood. This product is still in its early stages; having a single model option is a major flaw.

I had high expectations for Trae Work because the permanent free tier is super friendly for individual users. But its positioning leans towards development scenarios. For my pure document processing needs, the results always felt just slightly off. For example, when I asked it to organize reimbursement receipts, it could extract invoice numbers and amounts, but often missed the remarks column. Also, the format was rigid and couldn't be adjusted to my habits. Maybe it's better suited for programmers; as a counselor, using it feels like there's a layer of separation.

Finally, it was WorkBuddy's turn. I wrote a post before saying it has three modes, and advised not to jump straight into Craft mode to avoid files getting messed up. This time I learned my lesson and started with Plan mode, breaking down the requirements into steps: first categorize files, then extract key information, and finally generate a summary table. The result was smoother than expected: it processed over a dozen interview records in about forty minutes, with all key info present and the formatting correct. I specifically checked those two raw audio transcripts, and it actually identified emotional turning points in the dialogue, which I definitely didn't expect.

However, regarding drawbacks, WorkBuddy still has a hard limit on long documents. I have a group counseling plan that's over fifty pages; if I throw it in directly, it gets stuck and only processes the first two-thirds. I mentioned this in another post—the workaround is to feed it in segments, but manually splitting it every time is annoying. Additionally, although its model selection is open (supporting Hunyuan, GLM, etc.), the results aren't stable after switching models. Sometimes the same task yields vastly different quality outputs depending on the model. I think this is its biggest weakness.

Comparing them, my judgment is: Qwen Office is suitable for enterprise-level cross-system approvals; individual users shouldn't expect it to handle specific documents well. Trae Work is for developers; being free is great, but its universality isn't enough. In the vertical scenario of document processing, WorkBuddy is currently the only tool where I feel comfortable throwing real work files at it.

But there's one thing I've never figured out. WorkBuddy topping daily active users surely isn't just about features. I read that Tencent analysis article stating it reached this point in four months due to product design rather than the model. I agree, but there's an issue in its product design: it tries too hard to make you feel effortless. For instance, the auto-organize folder feature—I tried it. It sorts all files by type, but afterwards you can't find anything because its classification logic doesn't match your own habits. Eventually, I turned off auto-classification and created folders myself before letting it process them.

WorkBuddy's current situation is a bit awkward: it wants to be your all-around assistant while also wanting you to trust it completely. But in real office scenarios, controllability is far more important than ease. I'd prefer it to ask for confirmation a few extra times rather than making unilateral decisions and filing things somewhere I don't know about.

In the post I wrote last week about whether WorkBuddy has limits on organizing files, someone replied saying I was using it wrong. I tried again later, and indeed it relates to the precision of the description, but you can't blame the user entirely. Product design should provide better prompts for these edge cases instead of leaving you to guess. As a counselor, I diagnosed myself: my usage habits are part of the problem, but the product isn't innocent either.

Qwen Office just launched, so immature features are normal. But if its direction of cross-system approvals truly succeeds, it will be a threat to WorkBuddy. WorkBuddy's current advantage is that it polishes the document processing aspect quite finely. But once Qwen connects the approval workflows, enterprise users might really switch over. Trae Work being free is good, but its positioning is too narrow; if you're not a developer, installing it just means it gathers dust.

Based on my testing, WorkBuddy is best suited for people like me who need to process large volumes of unstructured documents: interview records, meeting minutes, case summaries. It's quite friendly for consultants, researchers, and managers. But if your main work involves approval workflows or cross-departmental collaboration, Qwen Office's direction might be worth paying attention to. As for Trae Work, programmer friends can try it; others should probably skip it.

Leaving a question for everyone: What types of documents do you currently process most with WorkBuddy? Have you encountered any particularly dumb moments?