There are many open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, but most of them don’t have web-based collaborative editing. The new Euro-Office project aims to fix that with a “truly open, transparent, and sovereign solution for collaborative document editing,” using OnlyOffice as a starting point.
Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by Nextcloud, EuroStack, Wiki, Proton, Soverin, Abilian, and other companies based in Europe. The goal is to build an online office suite that can open and edit standard Microsoft Office documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) and the OpenDocument format (ODS, ODT, ODP) used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The current design is remarkably close to Microsoft Office and its tabbed toolbars, so there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve for anyone used to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Importantly, Euro-Office is only the document editing component. It’s designed to be added to cloud storage services, online wikis, project management tools, and other software. For example, you could have some Word documents in your Nextcloud file storage, and clicking them in a browser could open the Euro-Office editor. That way, Nextcloud (or Proton, or anyone else) doesn’t have to build its own document editor from scratch.
Euro-Office is based on OnlyOffice, which is open-source under the AGPL license. The project explained that “Contributing is impossible or greatly discouraged” with OnlyOffice’s developers, with outside code changes rarely accepted, so a hard fork was required. The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The project’s home page explains, “A lot of users and customers require software that is not potentially influenced or controlled by the Russian government.”
This is one of several projects from (primarily) European tech companies to build alternatives to Google Docs and Microsoft 365. There’s also Collabora Online (Collabora is based in the United Kingdom), which can already integrate with Nextcloud and other services, and the French/German LaSuite Docs. The “digital sovereignty” movement in Europe aims to get away from tech products controlled by the United States and China, which includes services from Microsoft and Google.
It’s a bit interesting that OnlyOffice was chosen as the starting point for Euro-Office, rather than LibreOffice. Development on a web-based version of LibreOffice was restarted in February, and many LibreOffice components are already used in Collabora Online. The project didn’t offer a complete explanation, only saying in the FAQ section, “We believe open source is about collaboration and we look for [opportunities] for integration and collaboration with the LibreOffice community and companies like Collabora.”
The most likely explanation is that OnlyOffice is already a capable web-based collaborative editor, and according to the Euro-Office developers, it only needs some code cleanup and additional features. LibreOffice Online will take a while to reach the same production-ready state—if it ever does. OnlyOffice and Euro-Office are also much closer to Microsoft Office’s design than LibreOffice, and there are also some ongoing disputes between LibreOffice and Collabora over LibreOffice’s web version.
You can check out the codebase on GitHub, but there’s currently no online demo or services that have already integrated the Euro-Office editors. Since Nextcloud and Proton are contributing to the project, it might eventually be an option in Proton Drive or self-hosted Nextcloud servers.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
