As of 2014[update], Calligra's efforts to create touchscreen-friendly versions are centered on reusable Qt Quick components.

[12] Calligra was created after disagreements within the KOffice community in 2010 – between KWord maintainer Thomas Zander and the other core developers.

Three applications, Kexi, Krita and KPlato and the user interfaces for mobile devices have been completely moved out of KOffice and are only available within Calligra.

[31] The Calligra team was originally scheduled to release the final 2.4 version in January 2012[32] but problems in the undo/redo feature of Words and Stage required a partial rewrite and caused a delay.

Calligra Mobile's development was initiated in summer 2009 and was first shown during Akademy / Desktop Summit 2009 by KO GmbH as a simple port of KOffice to Maemo.

[15][40] On 24 March 2013, KDE developer Sebastian Sauer released Coffice, a Calligra-based document viewer, for Android.

[12] As with Krita, this Gemini release adds a touchscreen interface to Words and Stage and users can switch between desktop and touch mode at runtime.

Linux Pro Magazine Online's Bruce Byfield wrote "Calligra needed an impressive first release.

The reviewer Thomas Drilling on the other hand praised Calligra's usability, writing: "The consistent work flow, often stunningly intuitive workflows, and clear menu structure are well received."

He then concluded: "The individual modules' quality varies: While Words shows weakness, image editor Krita, spreadsheet application Sheets, and presentation program Stage completely won us over.

Szabo's major point for negative criticism was Author's and Word's handling of long documents, resulting in decreased performance and crashes.

Among the positive aspects he pointed out were better .docx file import than LibreOffice and the amount of new features gained by the new version of the suite.

Its tools fills the needs of writers, artists, content designers and office workers.”[65] In 2017, sempreupdate.com.br wrote: “[If you do not] depend on proprietary formats [...] especially .xls, .xlsx and .doc [...] and you use KDE it's worth trying.

All components of the Calligra Suite are released under free software licenses and use OpenDocument as their native file format when applicable.

The developers of Calligra plan to share as much infrastructure as possible between applications to reduce bugs and improve the user experience.

Flake provides a way to handle shapes, which can contain text, images, formulas (via KFormula), charts (via KChart) or other objects, in a consistent way across all applications.