A friend and I have a long running Pathfinder homebrew that we have collaborated on for nearly a decade in Google Docs. It is 168 pages long and represents a body of work that we are both incredibly proud of. With Google’s recent activities banning people from their own private documents, I no longer trust them with the document. I would love of LibreOffice supported local cloud hosting, but they do not. I could install Dropbox API on my Raspberries Pi and just set up my own cloud server, but I really don’t want to be responsible for the maintenance.
Any FOSS software out there make it easy to do the whole private cloud with collaboration tools in word procrssing?
There’s Onlyoffice and whole ready-to-install packages bundled with Nextcloud around. One of them is Univention Corporate Server.
There’s also Collabora based on Libreoffice.
Btw, look this up.
HedgeDoc would be another contender
This one looks cool. I have essentially settled on Cryptpad, but I like the look of this one too.
Nextcloud or Cryptpad
Look up Framasoft & use their tools:
- FramaForms
- FramaDate
- FramaPad
- Mobilizon
CryptPad, Collabora, NextCloud, Proton’s stuff are great too
Another vote for CryptPad. Hosted in France at https://cryptpad.fr/ and so not tied to US datacentres, and all your data is encrypted.
Cryptpad is also self-hostable, if that’s your bag.
I think a more fair name should be OnlyOffice. Wrapped in CryptPad for privacy and encryption. I’d also note a level of controversy around OnlyOffice, it being (still) developed in Russia, not making “we support Ukraine” / “we condemn the war” statements. There’s a bit more of that not just about the war, too.
And also to be fair, the product itself is visually quite decent, especially if you’re looking for online collaboration.
I am loving the look of cryptpad, but for some reason when I open the .odt file I exported from docs it does not actually bring in any of the info. LibreOffice opens it perfectly and shows the comments and suggestions and everything, so I am not sure what to do to get it working.
Export it from LibreOffice in to a more digestible format? Not sure what problems you’re hitting or features you need, just pointing out that a two+ step solution might be more apt.
Yeah, I managed to get it by saving it from Libre as a docx.
Murena Workspace is IMHO the best alternative of Google Docs, OpenSource and made in the EU, Murena is also the author of NextCloud which has an collaboration platform, /e/OS and associated with FairPhone, a complete infrastructure privacy focused.
Murena is also the author of NextCloud
What? I don’t think this is accurate?
About Murena (/e/foundation) https://murena.com/about/
I used Collabora inside Nextcloud for this.
How do you like it? We’ve set it up as a test at work, but we don’t really do much office-type document collaboration, so we haven’t really tested it much yet.
I’ve not had much of a chance to use it with a team yet. I’ve used it alone for some stuff and it seems to work quite well but I’ve only just got my server setup stable enough to be worth inviting other people to properly get stuck in. Sorry!
Docs looks cool. I can’t vouch for it though. https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/ and it has a horrible name.
Which is part of https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
I’d use some markdown / typst processor.
Please be aware that Google Docs the software is not the same with all those services running at Google’s servers.
You can steal Google Docs’ source code and run it on your own device, but somehow it won’t work because it depends on reliable connection to Google’s infrastructure. But anyway, that’s the part of it where you can seek for open source alternative.
Mentions like Libre Office and the like is exactly that.
To replicate all Google Docs offers you, you need some rich and generous millionaires hosting a swarm of servers for you, for online documents, sharing to friends, collaboration and stuff. If you are looking for “open source” alternative for this, you are practically asking for free money. You either pay for it, or host it yourself. There’s no free lunch.
Your response is well written and entirely misses the mark. Also, there are 100% free alternatives with all most all of the same features as Google Docs that have been suggested here. I am so confused by how far off the mark you are from both my OP and the general content of the responses here.
Fair enough.
At one point you said you want to offload the cloud part up Dropbox, and don’t want to maintain the cloud infrastructure. I used to integrate Collabora into NextCloud, and that’s something I don’t want to do again.
So I guess as I said, it’s way better to paid $5 a month if said cloud vendor exists, who could integrate offline office suite.
And thank you for your kind words even though you thought my comment missed your mark and not being helpful.
cryptpad and nextcloud are great
Proton Docs.
Fine product but is it FOSS?
AFAIK, yes
