Document Collaboration
Most online office suites do not support E2EE, meaning the cloud provider has access to everything you do. The provider's privacy policy may legally protect your rights, but it does not provide technical access constraints.
Collaboration Platforms¶
Nextcloud¶
Nextcloud is a suite of free and open-source client-server software for creating your own file hosting services on a private server you control.
Danger
We don't recommend using the E2EE App for Nextcloud as it may lead to data loss; it is highly experimental and not production quality. For this reason, we don't recommend third-party Nextcloud providers.
CryptPad¶
CryptPad is a private-by-design alternative to popular office tools. All content on this web service is end-to-end encrypted and can be shared with other users easily.
Criteria¶
Please note we are not affiliated with any of the projects we recommend. In addition to our standard criteria, we have developed a clear set of requirements to allow us to provide objective recommendations. We suggest you familiarize yourself with this list before choosing to use a project, and conduct your own research to ensure it's the right choice for you.
Minimum Requirements¶
In general, we define collaboration platforms as full-fledged suites which could reasonably act as a replacement to Google Drive.
- Must be open source.
- Must make files accessible via WebDAV unless it is impossible due to E2EE.
- Must have sync clients for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
- Must support document and spreadsheet editing.
- Must support real-time document collaboration.
- Must support exporting documents to standard document formats (e.g. ODF).
Best-Case¶
Our best-case criteria represents what we would like to see from the perfect project in this category. Our recommendations may not include any or all of this functionality, but those which do may rank higher than others on this page.
- Should store files in a conventional filesystem.
- Should support TOTP or FIDO2 multi-factor authentication support, or passkey logins.
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