Multiple authors can edit the same LaTeX document simultaneously in the browser with live cursor tracking, conflict-free merging, and instant PDF compilation on every save. Overleaf Community Edition brings the collaborative editing experience that millions of researchers and academics rely on, with no compile time limits, storage quotas, or collaborator caps imposed by the hosted tiers. The web editor provides syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and bracket matching alongside an integrated PDF preview panel powered by a bundled TeX Live distribution supporting pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, and LuaLaTeX engines. The file tree panel organizes multi-file projects with separate files for chapters, figures, bibliography references, and style definitions. BibTeX and Biber handle bibliography management, and detailed compilation logs offer clickable error navigation to the exact source line causing each issue. Users upload images, PDFs, and data files directly through the browser, and a template gallery provides starting points for journal articles, conference papers, theses, presentations, and CVs. Over 17,800 GitHub stars and a decade of active development anchor the project. The application runs as containerized microservices including the Node.js web application, MongoDB for persistence, and Redis for session management. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

In TeXlyre, two coauthors edit the same LaTeX or Typst file at once, and the PDF compiles inside the browser tab instead of on someone else's server. Start from a template: arXiv preprint, IEEE paper, Tufte book, Beamer deck. pdfTeX, XeTeX, and LuaTeX compile with BibTeX and Biber. Errors turn into readable cards that jump to the failing line. Live cursors show who is typing where. A shared link brings coauthors in, no accounts needed. Chat sits beside the editor, and comments can be discussed and resolved. Tracked insertions and deletions land in a review panel to accept or reject. Draw.io and TikZ editors open inside the project for shared diagrams. MathLive edits a formula under the cursor with a virtual keyboard. A bibliography panel tidies BibTeX, matches DOIs, and imports from Zotero and OpenAlex. Large files travel straight from one collaborator's browser to another. Projects export as ZIP, sync to a local folder, or back up to GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and Codeberg. Vim, Emacs, and Helix keybindings are one setting away. The app installs as a progressive web app and works offline. Language servers like LTeX LS Plus, Harper, and Tinymist plug in through recipes beside your own signaling and TeX Live package servers. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Real-time collaborative Markdown behind your own firewall: HedgeDoc (formerly CodiMD, descended from HackMD's open-source edition) keeps team notes on team infrastructure. Share a note's URL and collaborators are editing together instantly - live cursors, changes appearing keystroke by keystroke - in a three-mode interface that toggles between raw Markdown, rendered preview, and side-by-side split. The Markdown dialect is extended where engineers need it: Mermaid, Graphviz, and Vega-Lite diagrams, MathJax for equations, syntax-highlighted code blocks, embedded content, and a presentation mode that turns a note into reveal.js slides with a single YAML header. A dropdown permission system controls each note - freely editable, limited to signed-in users, or locked read-only - and published notes become clean read-only pages for wider distribution. Revisions track every change with the ability to revert to any earlier version. The AGPL-3.0 codebase is light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi and deploys via Docker with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite. Authentication covers LDAP, SAML, OAuth2, and email. It deliberately stays a focused document editor - no page trees or kanban - and does that one job with excellent keyboard-first ergonomics for meeting notes, RFCs, runbooks, and shared scratchpads.

In continuous open-source development since 2009, Etherpad is the original really-real-time collaborative editor - used by Wikimedia, governments, EU public-sector institutions, and tens of thousands of self-hosters. Its core idea is visible authorship: every keystroke is attributed with author colors, every revision preserved, and the timeslider lets you scrub through a document's entire history character by character. Multiple people type into the same pad and see each other's changes instantly - it scales to thousands of simultaneous editors per pad. The base install is deliberately lightweight; capability comes from roughly 290 plugins installable from the admin web UI: comments, images, tables, drawing, video chat via WebRTC, math rendering, code highlighting, and authentication via OAuth, LDAP, or OpenID. AI is pointedly a plugin, not a default - you choose the model and infrastructure, or never turn it on. There is no telemetry. For integrators, an HTTP API (with OpenAPI definitions at /api/openapi.json) manages pads, users, and groups for embedding in your own applications, and the ueberDB abstraction layer supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and SQLite backends. Full data export is built in, the format is open, it is translated into 105 languages, and it runs on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a server farm. Apache 2.0 licensed, Node.js based.

Real LibreOffice document engineering in the browser: Collabora Online is built by the company employing much of the former SUSE LibreOffice team - not a reimplementation. This deployment runs CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), the collabora/code server that renders and edits documents entirely server-side while browsers get high-fidelity WYSIWYG output, so layout and formatting survive round-trips that break lesser converters. Four editors ship in one container: Writer for text documents (comments, track changes with comparison and restoration, form handling), Calc for spreadsheets (advanced formulas, macros, pivot tables, per-user sheet views, server-enforced cell protection), Impress for presentations, and Draw for Visio-class diagrams. Format compatibility spans DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, the ODF family, PDF, and dozens more - including Visio and Publisher import. Real-time collaborative editing supports multiple simultaneous editors with visible cursors and commenting. The architectural point: documents are processed on your server and never leave it, which is why Collabora is the engine behind Nextcloud Office and integrates with ownCloud, Seafile, and any WOPI-speaking host - or embeds in your own application via the SDK. An admin console monitors sessions and memory. For organizations that need Google Docs-style collaboration with actual data sovereignty, this is the reference open-source answer.

With 6,800 GitHub stars and over a decade of development since its 2014 release, ONLYOFFICE Docs delivers a self-hosted Microsoft Office replacement with pixel-perfect OOXML rendering and real-time collaborative editing supporting both Fast (character-by-character) and Strict (manual save) co-authoring modes. The suite encompasses five full-featured editors — Document Editor for DOCX/ODT/EPUB/HTML, Spreadsheet Editor with 500+ functions and pivot tables, Presentation Editor with animations and transitions, Form Creator for fillable PDF forms with field validation, and PDF Editor for annotation and conversion — all operating within a unified web interface. Format support spans 50+ types including DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, ODS, ODP, PDF, CSV, RTF, TXT, and Markdown with server-side conversion between any supported pair. The JavaScript plugin API enables extending editor functionality through a marketplace of ready-made plugins for ChatGPT integration, speech-to-text, OCR, Zotero citations, and Thesaurus. Ready-to-use connectors integrate with Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Moodle, Odoo, Confluence, SharePoint, Alfresco, Liferay, and Chamilo, while WOPI protocol compliance enables integration with any WOPI-compatible platform. JWT authentication secures all API communications between host applications and the document server. Deploy via Docker with a single command or DEB/RPM packages on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, or RHEL. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GNU AGPL v3 licensed.

End-to-end encrypted by design, CryptPad is a real-time office suite where teams write documents, plan on kanban boards, collect answers with forms, and draw diagrams without the hosting server ever seeing their content. Rich text pages come with comments, replies, @mentions, and a document outline, while the Markdown editor adds a live preview, Mermaid diagrams, mind maps, and math. Kanban columns hold colored, tagged cards with Markdown bodies, and the diagram editor exports PNG, JPG, SVG, or PDF. Optional ONLYOFFICE editors add spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and presentations that several people can edit together. The form builder offers text, choice, grid, date, ranking, and poll questions, conditional sections, and separate author, auditor, and participant roles. Documents can be shared with contacts or teams, by link, or as embed code, with view, edit, present, or view-once access. Passwords, expiry dates, owner lists, and access lists limit who gets in, and every edit lands in a history you can step through, restore, or pin as a named snapshot. CryptDrive keeps files in folders, tags, templates, and a trash bin, while teams get their own drive, chat, and member roles. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

EdenText is a full word processor, from quick notes to full-length books, that opens the docx and odt files you already have and keeps them looking the way Word or LibreOffice made them. Pages are real pages: A4 or Letter sizes, margins, headers and footers, footnotes, columns, and watermarks, with mirrored margins and chapters opening on the right-hand page when you are laying out a book. Paragraph, character, table, and list styles cascade with inheritance and chapter numbering, and tables sort rows and compute spreadsheet-style formulas. The academic toolbox is complete: table of contents, captions, cross-references, citations with bibliography, an alphabetical index, and LaTeX formulas. Reviewing works the way editors expect, with tracked changes, threaded comments in margin balloons, printable markup, spell checking in eight languages, and grammar checking for English. An optional AI assistant answers questions about the document and proposes edits as tracked changes through your own model provider. Nothing waits on a server: documents autosave in the browser, the app installs and works offline, and your words never leave the machine. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Thesys is a research workspace where you search academic papers, build your own library, and ask questions that answer with citations you can click straight onto the highlighted passage of the PDF. Discovery searches OpenAlex and arXiv in one pool, so a paper you find can be previewed and added to your library without leaving the workspace. Uploaded PDFs are ingested locally, and when you ask a question the answer cites its sources in the document, jumping the preview to the retrieved passage with either a full-passage or a tighter focused highlight. Reader mode opens a paper full-width so you can select any span of text and ask about that exact passage. Document summaries follow a consistent structure of problem statement, methodology, key findings, limitations, and metrics, with citations that still land on the source text. Figures and flowcharts are described during ingest, so questions and summaries can reference them too. When two papers disagree, Compare mode takes one claim and classifies each retrieved pair as corroboratory, contradictory, or neutral, with confidence shown in a side panel. Your bibliography exports as BibTeX, RIS, EndNote, or CSV for whatever reference manager you already use. Papers, embeddings, and chat history stay on your own disk the whole time. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

For research teams that need to show what was recorded and when, eLabFTW® is an electronic lab notebook that keeps experiments, lab inventory, and equipment bookings in one shared, searchable system. Each experiment holds rich-text notes, tables, images, checkable steps, custom metadata fields, tags, statuses, and attached files. Templates turn a protocol you repeat into a one-click starting point. A separate resource database catalogs antibodies, plasmids, cell lines, chemicals, and instruments, and typing # in an experiment links straight to any of them. Compounds import from PubChem by CID or CAS number, arriving with formulas, identifiers, and hazard data. The inventory tree maps buildings and their sub-locations, records where each container is stored, and tracks quantity and unit. Book a microscope by dragging a slot on the scheduler, and permissions decide who may reserve what. Entries can be signed with Ed25519 keys and timestamped through RFC 3161 authorities such as DFN, Digicert, and GlobalSign, or anchored on the Bloxberg blockchain; a timestamp archive can never be edited or deleted. Export to PDF, ZIP, CSV, JSON, or .eln archives, and import .eln or CSV files when moving from spreadsheets or another notebook. Users sign in locally or through SAML2 or LDAP, and an API with per-user keys lets instruments and scripts read and write entries. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

With DSpace, a library or research office can give every thesis, journal article, and dataset its own permanent web address, a searchable metadata record, and files visitors download from the archive. Content sits in a tree of communities and collections, and each collection decides who may deposit and how many review steps follow; reviewers accept a submission or reject it with a note that sends it back to the author. Embargoes hold files back until a set date, access policies limit other files to chosen groups, and sign-in works through LDAP, Shibboleth, SAML, OpenID Connect, or ORCID. Search covers metadata and the extracted full text of uploaded files, facets narrow the results, and browse pages sort by title, issue date, author, or subject. Editors can correct a published item through the submission form. Administrators inspect an audit trail and rewrite homepage news from an admin form. Entity types for people, organizations, projects, journals, and datasets link each publication to the work behind it, and DOIs can be registered through Crossref. Optional settings let authors keep an email address private on their researcher profile and download their own restricted files. Usage reports count visits, downloads, and top countries per item. REST, OAI-PMH, SWORD, and Google Scholar metadata connect the archive to harvesters, deposit tools, and search engines. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. BSD-3-Clause licensed.

Grammar, punctuation, and style errors a dictionary lookup can't see: LanguageTool is open-source proofreading powered by a Java rule engine covering English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and 25+ other languages. Self-hosting the HTTP server is how you get Grammarly-class checking without sending every sentence you write to a third party - a real concern when the text being proofread is confidential email, legal drafts, or unreleased documentation. Your instance exposes the standard /v2/check API, so the official ecosystem plugs straight in: browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox accept a custom server URL, and integrations exist for VS Code, LibreOffice, Obsidian, Vim, Emacs, and many editors. Notably, self-hosting restores free browser-extension checking that the hosted service moved behind a premium subscription - your server, no character limits, no paywall. Detection quality is tunable: optional n-gram datasets (multi-gigabyte language models for en, de, es, fr, nl) teach the engine word-order and confusion-pair errors like there/their and brakes/breaks, and a fastText model improves automatic language identification. Everything runs offline once models are downloaded. The core is LGPL, the API is documented with Swagger, and rules are community- maintained and constantly expanding.