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LibreOffice Online, a self-hostable libre office environment, is coming back!
(blog.documentfoundation.org)
Wasn't collabora trying to be this
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Great!
I'd love to see libre office on my personal nextcloud instance. That would be an easy and effective "feature" for nextcloud which could be adopted by many business. They're already running Nextcloud, maybe, for the digital sovereign.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts!
Why everything is going to be browser based?
Because you can use it on any device without having to install the whole app and sync the data separately... It's super convenient, and cross-platform.
It's still self hosted and you own the data.
yep... I write all my papers in Google because I can access the files anywhere, and nothing beats PaperPile for referencing yet.
That's one thing I really love about the whole self hosting deal. I find more and more apps that I can run on my server und just utilize it on all my hardware. Only have your phone on you? No problem. Working on your companies computer? Just open the browser.
No reason to install and maintain stuff on 4 different devices
My first gut reaction was "Neat, but no thank you" but the more I think about how many clients COULD be using a cloud hosted privacy respecting platform instead of 365, I quickly bit my lip.
They say in their post that they won't host it.
(IMO) even better.
Give me the package to self-host it.
Yeah, I agree with that. Give me a container.
Yes that's understood and particularly great, leaving orgs/people to self host. I'm all for it.
This should open it to being used collaboratively.
Then I can convince wherever I work, to use this instead of going with other MS stuff?
OMG YES!!!
This makes me really happy because it'll make collaborating with friends on things a lot easier.
Some new EU funding in the background?
I'm quite happy with local apps, but I could see the appeal for self-hosting if the server would scale for the client (ie laptop on the desk vs mobile phone on the road)
For personal use, being able to replace microsoft/google offerings with little to no functionality loss is amazing
Fingers crossed this can be a viable replacement for Collabora Online with Nextcloud, which has been a nightmare.
has it been a nightmare? I'm genuinely asking because I have it set up (with nextcloud master container) and although I don't use it very often, the times I do it seems quite alright
I think Libre Office is fantastic and I'm glad to see the back of Microsoft. But I miss how useful mail-merge was and how limited it is in Libre. It's my only small complaint among so many cheers for Libre.
As someone who is slowly moving off big tech, are there plugins or themes for these office suites that bring then more in line with modern UIs for office suites.
I hate Msoft and Google but the gsuite has a nice clean set up. Microsoft less so but still doesnt feel as unwieldly as open office. I was doing a doc last night and ended up getting the chrome flatpak and signing into docs.
Open Office =/= Libre Office
The latter is a long standing fork of the former and considered the "FLOSS standard office suite". It has a "modern" ribbon UI, but you have to set it like that, it usually comes with the "old layout" by default.
OnlyOffice is another office suite which brings a ribbon UI by default.
While not open source Softmaker Office mimics Microsoft Office the closest (and claims the best available MS file format compatibility, but I cannot say anything about that).
If we're talking about online editing, Collabora has web editors based on LibreOffice but with a modern UI: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
They are really great and can be self hosted (e.g. with Nextcloud).
For offline editing, as already mentioned, LibreOffice has an optional ribbon UI and OnlyOffice looks pretty modern as well.
For a second I read OpenOffice instead of OnlyOffice and was perplexed how one would call that modern lmao
How’s this project going to interact with ~~Collibre~~ Collabora (sorry!)?
I'm not getting any meaningful results searching for that project. What is it?
I think they mean https://www.collaboraonline.com/. That's what's used if you install the office addon for Nextcloud, if I'm not mistaken.
I was just looking if something like that exists yesterday, but got disappointed. Nice timing.
Check out CryptPad.org, it's:
- Open Source; so it can't be taken away from you should the org cease to exist.
- Self-hostable; although you can use or pay to use other people's instances.
- Collaborative; with real-time editing like Google docs
- Federated; so you can collaborate with others whether you're using a self-hosted instance or using any other server.
- End-to-end encrypted: The server admins can't see any of your data.
Only downsides so far is that the UX is a bit slow when first loading documents and there are no mobile apps.
EDIT: Forgot to add the important par, they recently added support for OnlyOffice in the browser, which to me, was a pretty big deal.
Love Cryptpad, but am I the only one for whom the loading indicator gives a bad flashback to early js framework web development where every website was 16 times the initial load time, 4 times the overall size and just more buggy. Website SPA or not have rarely a good reason to have a loading indicator for the initial load the browser already does that.
Wth, I never knew Cryptpad does sheets/forms, that's so cool!
This one is pretty great!
I hope they're able to move toward a client first renderer instead of the image tile approach they used previously. That was kinda a network hog and cludgy to use.
Yes please.
I'd love libreoffice in a browser, but the way collabora achieves it is abysmal.
The screen caps on the original project page seem to imply a proper web ui:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
Hard to be sure but the menu bar doesn't look like the native menu.
fuck yeah. I'll happily deploy this to my stack.
Awesome! 😁
That'll be nice to see. I like Collabora but haven't tried hosting it. Opening that up and LibreOffice up side by side with the tabbed interface, barely any different. Maybe LibreOffice exposes way more buttons in each tab so maybe more intimidating but it looks pretty good compared to what I remember when the tabbed interface was first made available. Looking forward to seeing this progress
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