Over the last couple of decades, Google Docs successfully captured the education market. Compared to Microsoft Office of old, Google Docs is free, fast, web-based, and autosaves to the cloud. There’s no need to install anything or worry about file compatibility with others. It solved a lot of problems for sure.
As always, the problem is that this convenience comes from Google. Especially in the context of education and children’s privacy, there has to be a better way.
Fortunately, office documents don’t take up a lot of storage. That makes this one of the most populated categories.
Local
LibreOffice (Complete)
If you’re still using MS Office on your computer and have no interest in online features, listen up. You see, before Google dominated the market with Docs, Microsoft was the top dog for a very long time. Its only competition came from Oracle under the name of Open Office. LibreOffice is the open-source descendent of that project.
Unlike the self-hosted options on this list, LibreOffice is a consumer product. It requires zero tinkering and supports all platforms out of the box (except iOS). Android support is however limited to a document viewer.
LibreOffice is brought online by Collabora and also mail.com. The latter integrates LibreOffice into their groupware offering.
Cloud ☁
kSuite (Complete)
kSuite includes a complete office suite with collaboration features. Read more about them in the G-Suite alternatives article.
Murena (Complete)
Murena sells privacy-friendly smartphones that come with the privacy-friendly Android alternative /e/ pre-installed. Murena Workspace is their cloud service that emulates Google’s. It’s powered by Nextcloud and OnlyOffice. You get an @murena.io email address that acts as your portal to their services. They also offer privacy-friendly contact and calendar sync and privacy-friendly cloud storage.
Zoho (Complete)
Warning:
Zoho is not open-source.
Zoho‘s Workspace includes a collaborative office suite. Read more about them in the G-Suite alternatives article.
Proton (Docs)
Proton has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a privacy-focused email service. They’ve recently bundled a modern-looking office suite into Proton Drive. It’s fully-featured and, of course, E2EE. It supports collaborative real-time editing and in-line threaded comments.
They offer native apps for all platforms (except Linux), but they’re not very good apps. After all, they are Drive apps with docs functionality, not dedicated docs apps. That said, docs is still a very new feature to Proton.
Bit.AI (Docs)
Warning:
Bit.AI is not open-source.
Switching from Google Docs to Bit.AI is so easy that Google should worry. Bit.AI feels much snappier and more intelligent. The design is much cleaner. Formatting buttons float in a bar above selected text, instead of being persistent. That reclaims a permanent chunk of vertical screen real estate, and also feels modern. There’s also no menu bar here, which might sound odd until you realize you never actually needed it.
Bit.AI gets the distractions out of the way so you can get to writing. It also allows you to organize projects into workspaces with different colored documents. My favorite features are version history and “Document Stats” like word count. Such features and integrations make Bit.AI far more intelligent than Google Docs.
That said, it’s far from perfect. For one, you can’t create spreadsheets or presentations. You can embed external ones into your documents, but that’s not the same. There’s also no mobile version available, and it’s not open-source.
If you’re interested in a free option, there’s more bad news. The free tier cuts you off after 50 documents across 5 collaborators. Sooner or later you’ll need to either upgrade to a paid plan or offload your documents elsewhere.
Arcane (Docs, Sheets) ⛓️
Arcane is a blockchain-based decentralized office suite. It supports docs, sheets, and photo backup. No presentations here.
The blockchain implementation makes it decentralized and server-less. You don’t need to have your own server to host it on, but you also don’t need to trust a central server with all your data. A bit of a middle ground
An added benefit here is Blockstack ID. You sign up with Blockstack, not with Arcane, then use any app on the Blockstack blockchain. Storage is also handled by Gaia, which lets you set up your own storage and keep your data on it.
The whole thing is pretty hit or miss though. It works fine for the most part, but it’s still pretty buggy. This is probably a failing on Blockstack’s end and not Arcane’s, but that’s expected with a new platform. Having access to Blockstack’s app list is also cool. You could presumably spend a lot of time in the future once it becomes more useful and stable.
Update 2024:
Arcane suddenly dropped off the face of the earth, with no announcement, after 4 years on the market. Nobody is even complaining about this anywhere either. I even started secondguessing my memory, if I dreamt it all up. But no. Websites like SourceForge and AlternativesTo are still linking to its dead website. Blockstack ID is also no longer a thing. The Blockstack blockchain seems to have rebranded to Stacks, and they still use Gaia. Just web3.0 things I guess.
Slides (Slides)
If you’re bothered by the lack of presentation solutions so far, we’re finally here. Slides is like a website builder but for presentations. The presentations also run in the browser like websites when you visit their link. And unlike similar solutions, Slides has a user-friendly GUI. That means you don’t need to know how to code in order to make a presentation.
Under the hood it’s using Reveal.js, which you can use directly. It’s similar to Flowtime.js and Impress.js.
CryptPad (Complete)
CryptPad touts itself as the private Google Docs. It’s fully open-source with zero-knowledge E2EE, and you can feel all that security. It’s noticeably slower than most cloud-based options and takes a few extra seconds to load. Their servers are in France which is cool. You can also self-host it and see if you can make it more performant with better hardware.
While CryptPad is designed to be self-hosted, there are public instances you can use for free or for a fee. Your documents will expire after some time unless you make an account though. All public instances include the security features by default. The “flagship instance”, as they call it, is ran by the developers of the project.
Under the hood it uses OnlyOffice so you know what to expect there. It does have more tricks up its sleeve though, with support for forms, diagrams, code, and Kanban. Like Proton, they’ve bundled their office suite with cloud storage. The storage is pretty limited though, meaning you’ll only be using it for documents.
Affine (Complete)
Affine is much more than just an open-source office suite. It also includes cloud storage, notes, collaboration, versioning, planning, diagrams and annotation. It’s a blend of many different services including Notion, but with a focus on privacy. It’s local first and self-hostable, ensuring your organization’s data stays safe.
Collabora (Complete)
If you like the idea of LibreOffice but wish it was online, that’s exactly what Collabora does. Collabora can do everything you’d expect from a corporate collaborative office suite. They charge $20/user/year (up to 99 users) for a completely managed solution with LTS and SLA. You can also self-host it on your own hardware. Unlike LibreOffice, they offer native and fully-featured mobile apps. Oh, and it supports Nextcloud out of the box.
Self-hosted
OnlyOffice (Complete)
OnlyOffice is the biggest name in self-hosted office suites. In fact, it powers most of the cloud services on this list. OnlyOffice is the most stable, powerful, and feature-complete self-hostable office suite.
It covers all the basics with dedicated offerings for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. You can manage teams, permissions, and sharing.
It’s straightforward to install on your server, and even integrates with Nextcloud. Be warned that self-hosting needs quite a bit of horse power, so don’t expect your little Raspberry Pi to cut it. It’s also pretty bulky, so expect load times closer to MS Office than the speedy Google Docs or Bit.AI. You can definitely feel the heft here.
If you’d rather go for a cloud-based approach, they have a wide array of paid subscription options you can opt for. The cloud service is free with some limitations. Using your own domain requires either coughing up $20/admin/month or self-hosting.
EtherPad (Docs)
EtherPad is a free and open-source document editor. It’s very well-built and modern-looking, with support for collaborative editing and customization. It includes real-time chat and is extendable using its API and plugin support. Public instances are available to can create and edit documents, but the idea is to host it yourself.
Compared to OnlyOffice, it is much lighter. At the time of writing there are 239 plugins available for Etherpad, of which 83 are official. The plugin list seems to receive active development much like the project itself.
EtherCalc is a completely separate project. It doesn’t share EtherPad’s polish, but it’s a usable spreadsheet editor. It even includes a built-in form builder. Both integrate with Nextcloud using OwnPad. That gives you a fairly complete and easy to set up office suite experience.
Flowtime.js (Slides)
Flowtime.js lets you make presentations as webpages. This is actually really cool for many reasons. The most important one being that you don’t need to send a presentation file that is only compatible with a particular doc suite. This is a webpage, so any browser can view it without needing to have access to a specific doc suite. And since web browsers all work the same, your presentation looks and behaves the same way on all devices.
It’s also important because we’re severely lacking in presentation functionality on this list. Reveal.js is basically the same, so you can try both to decide your preference.
Impress.js (Slides)
Impress.js is a better looking version than Flowtime. Forget boring presentations with slide of text after slide. Impress is for visual storytelling with advanced 3D effects and transitions. Imaginative creators can have a field day with this one.
WebSlides (Slides)
WebSlides is another browser-based presentation tool, but it doesn’t use JavaScript like the others. It relies entirely on HTML and CSS. This makes it a lot easier to use as HTML and CSS are a lot simpler and more popular than JavaScript. Of course, you won’t be making any crazy special 3D presentations with this one.