Etherpad is a lightweight, self-hosted editor for real-time collaborative writing, a private stand-in for the text side of Google Docs. Everyone edits the same document at once, with colour-coded authorship and a full revision history. Because you run your own instance, there is no third party sitting between you and your collaborators. It is open source under the Apache licence and extended by a large plugin ecosystem, with an actively maintained 3.x line. Choose it if you mainly need shared text documents and want to keep them on your own server.
Etherpad
Self-hosted real-time editor for collaborative writing.
etherpad.org
FreeOpen SourceWebSelf-hosted
Pricing Free and open source; your only cost is the server you self-host it on.
Strengths
- Self-hosted, with no third-party server
- Real-time collaboration with authorship history
- Open source with a large plugin ecosystem
- Lightweight and straightforward to deploy
Considerations
- Text documents only, not a full suite
- Documents are not encrypted at rest by default
Listed in Office Tools
