SHSelfHostIndex

Office Suites

Edit documents collaboratively with self-hosted office suites, alternatives to Google Docs.

50 self-hosted apps · 37 comparisons

All office suites apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 446 words

A good share of what gets filed under self-hosted office suites cannot be deployed as an app at all. Handsontable and Luckysheet are spreadsheet components for developers to embed, tldraw is an infinite-canvas SDK, and Luckysheet's upstream development has stopped in favour of its successor Univer. Check whether a project is an application or a library before anything else, or you will spend an evening hunting for a login page that does not exist.

How to choose an office tool

After filtering for actual applications, buy per document type, because no single open-source project covers the whole Google Workspace surface. For collaborative rich-text documents there is Docs by Suite Numérique, a block-based editor with real-time co-editing, backed by the French government and MIT-licensed. For Airtable-style databases there is Teable, which puts a fast spreadsheet grid on top of a genuine PostgreSQL database you can query with SQL. For scientific writing there is Overleaf, the collaborative LaTeX editor. Slides mean Reveal.js, which trades a WYSIWYG editor for writing your deck in HTML.

The third axis is collaboration weight. All three main apps do real-time multi-user editing, and all three want about 1 GB of RAM minimum — this is one of the few categories where the interesting tools are not lightweight. Single-user utilities are the exception: ConvertX converts files between a thousand-plus formats locally in a single container, and a LanguageTool server gives every editor on your network offline grammar checking in about 800 MB.

Where to start

Teable is the fastest win: a standard Docker Compose deployment, 21,700 GitHub stars, and real Postgres underneath means your data is never trapped in a proprietary format. Docs is the closest thing here to a self-hosted Google Docs, but it requires an external OIDC identity provider before it will start — pair it with something from the identity category, and treat that as a real prerequisite, not a checkbox. Overleaf is the pick if you write papers; know that the full TeX Live install is huge, the stack is resource-heavy, and several key features sit in the paid Server Pro edition.

The classic mistake is expecting one deployment to replace Microsoft 365. Nothing on this page does that; the self-hosted pattern is one focused tool per job, glued together by your file-sync layer.

Default for a first-timer: Teable. It installs in fifteen minutes, needs no identity server, and replaces the spreadsheet-as-database habit that keeps most households on Google. Add Docs the weekend after you have SSO running.

Curated picks

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Office Suites comparisons

37 head-to-head comparisons in this category.