Open-source Zoho Docs alternatives

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.

Collabora Online is an open-source, web-based office suite built on LibreOffice technology. It lets users open and edit documents in the browser, and the project's topics also reference mobile apps for iOS and Android. It is aimed at organizations that want document editing they can control, often integrated into other collaboration or file-sharing platforms.

This GitHub repository has a narrower role than the product as a whole. Active development and code review have moved to the project's own Gerrit instance, and the GitHub repository is kept for issue tracking and for release artifacts, including the nightly container image, the Helm chart and build assets. Pull requests are welcome only for the Helm chart and the Docker image build, and a read-only source mirror is available elsewhere.

Because the container image and Helm chart are published from here, the software is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, including Kubernetes. The code is a mix of C++, JavaScript and shell scripts. Contributors should follow the contributing guide and push source changes to Gerrit rather than GitHub.

ONLYOFFICE Docs, published in this repository as the document server, is an online office suite that bundles viewers and editors for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms and PDF files. It is built around Office Open XML formats such as docx, xlsx and pptx, and it supports collaborative editing in real time. The server component runs on Node.js and is licensed under AGPL-3.0.

The vendor's site describes several ways to use it. Docs can be connected to other platforms for in-place editing, with ready integrations for products such as Box, Moodle, Nextcloud, Odoo and WordPress. It can be embedded in your own service under your own brand, and it powers the vendor's DocSpace, where you create rooms and invite people to work on documents. A demo lets you try editing and form filling without registration.

Free desktop apps for Windows, Linux and macOS and mobile apps for iOS and Android are offered for working with documents offline or on the go. The site also offers templates for forms, text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and converters between formats. Commercial plans and pricing are published by the vendor.

Teedy is an open-source, lightweight document management system for individuals and businesses, developed by Sismics. It is meant to offer the features of larger commercial document systems in a simpler package that you host yourself, with a responsive web interface and a fully featured Android client.

Features include optical character recognition, support for images, PDFs, ODT, DOCX, PPTX and video files, full-text search with suggestions and highlighting, Dublin Core and custom metadata, nested tags, file versioning, 256-bit AES encryption of stored files, a workflow system, LDAP authentication, two-factor authentication, user and group permissions, an audit log, comments, quotas, sharing by URL, email import and inbox scanning, a REST API and webhooks. The project says it has been tested with up to one million documents.

Teedy is built with Java and JavaScript and licensed under GPL-2.0. A preconfigured Docker image includes OCR and media conversion tools and listens on port 8080, using an embedded database for testing and PostgreSQL for production. It suits small organizations and individuals who want to digitize and search paperwork on their own server.