What is the best app to use for opening Word documents on a Mac?

My coworkers often send me forms or documents that they created in Word. While I am able to open them in Pages, the format always comes out messed up. I don't want to spend a large amount of money to buy Word for Mac because the only thing I will ever use it for is opening documents. There must be an app out there that will enable me to open documents in the form they were created in. Everything that I've found seems very outdated. Any suggestions?