Open-source Dropbox Paper alternatives

AppFlowy is an open-source workspace that brings documents, wikis, project and task management and team collaboration into one app. It is presented as an alternative to Notion, and its topics also tag it as a Confluence alternative, with the emphasis on keeping control of your own data.

The client is built with Flutter and a Rust core, giving apps for macOS, Windows and Linux plus iOS and Android versions. Desktop builds can be downloaded directly or from channels such as Flathub and Snapcraft. AI features are part of the workspace, and a public roadmap and active forum let users propose features. Translations are contributed through JSON files and tools such as inlang.

The project is AGPL-3.0 licensed and has documentation for self-hosting the server side, so organizations can keep content on their own infrastructure. A hosted version is available through appflowy.com for people who do not want to run servers. It suits teams looking for a Notion-style workspace with a privacy-first stance.

Docmost is a collaborative wiki and documentation tool, open source and presented as an alternative to Confluence and Notion with a focus on secure, on-premise use. Teams write and organize knowledge together in real time, and the project emphasizes that its self-hosted deployment fits organizations with strict compliance requirements.

Its feature list covers real-time collaboration, diagrams through Draw.io, Excalidraw and Mermaid, spaces for organizing content, permission management with groups, comments, page history, search, file attachments and embeds for tools such as Airtable, Loom and Miro. The interface is translated into more than ten languages. Topics mention an AI feature, real-time collaboration and drop-in migration from other wikis.

The Docmost core is licensed under AGPL-3.0, while enterprise features sit in specific directories under a separate enterprise license. You can follow the documentation to self-host it or try the cloud version. It suits teams looking for an internal knowledge base or documentation hub with a lighter footprint than Confluence.

Etherpad is a collaborative editor in which several people write in the same document at the same moment. It attributes every keystroke to its author using color highlighting, preserves every revision, and provides a timeslider that lets you replay a document's whole history character by character.

It is built to run on your own server under your own governance, with no telemetry and no upsells, and the project documents the two optional network calls its own code makes and how to turn them off. AI is treated as a plugin that you install and point at a model you choose, running on infrastructure you control. The project says it scales to thousands of simultaneous editors on a single pad, is translated into 105 languages and is extended by hundreds of plugins. Topics mention PDF generation and rich-text editing.

Etherpad is written in TypeScript and licensed under Apache-2.0, and its data format is open. It is used by governments, public institutions, newsrooms and communities that need a simple, trustworthy shared writing space, from meeting notes to collaborative drafting.

Docs, from the La Suite initiative, is an open-source collaborative text editor presented as an alternative to Notion and Google Docs. It is built for real-time collaboration, cleanly structured documents with sub-documents, knowledge organization and full ownership of your data, and it targets public organizations, companies and open communities.

Writing features include rich-text and Markdown editing, slash commands and a block system, offline editing, and optional AI helpers to rewrite, summarize, translate or fix typos. Collaboration covers live cursors and presence, comments and sharing with granular access control. Knowledge management relies on subpages, hierarchy and search. Documents can also be turned into presentations using simple delimiters, with a full-screen mode, PDF export and keyboard navigation. Import and export options are provided.

The back end is built with Django and the front end with React, using collaborative-editing tooling such as Yjs and BlockNote according to its topics. Docs is MIT licensed, can be self-hosted, and has a hosted instance you can try. It suits teams in government and enterprises that need sovereign, self-controlled documentation tools.

CryptPad is an open-source collaboration suite with end-to-end encryption. Documents are synchronized between collaborators in real time, and because user data is encrypted, an attacker who breaches the server cannot read the stored content. Administrators who run unmodified code and the service itself also cannot see what users store.

The encryption happens in the browser before data is sent to the server or to collaborators. The README is candid about a limit of this model: the code that does the encrypting is delivered by the host server, as on any website, so users must trust the administrator to keep the server secure. Repository topics mention collaborative editing, real-time work and the ChainPad algorithm.

CryptPad is written in JavaScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0. A developer guide covers setting up a local instance, and an admin guide covers production deployments. Official Docker images for AMD64 and ARM64 are published with every release, and a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml are included in the repository.

With HedgeDoc you write markdown notes together in real time. Several people can edit a document together in the browser, which makes it useful for meeting notes, drafts, documentation and brainstorming, and its tagline is that ideas grow better together.

Repository topics mention markdown, diagrams, collaboration and real-time editing, and the project grew out of the CodiMD and HackMD lineage. The README explains where the project stands: HedgeDoc 1.x is stable and widely used but in maintenance mode, while HedgeDoc 2 is a complete rewrite, split into backend and frontend, that is still in alpha and does not yet implement every feature. A demo instance and features page let you try it first.

HedgeDoc is written in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0. You install it yourself by following the install guide, and support is available through a Matrix chat and community forums. Translations are handled through POEditor.