Paper co-authors usually trade .tex files by email or pay for a hosted editor seat by seat; Aldine replaces both with a self-hosted LaTeX workspace where the whole team types in one document at once and sees a typeset PDF seconds later. Live cursors and presence show who is editing which paragraph, and the underlying sync is conflict-free, so two authors can rewrite the same section without overwriting each other. Every project is a real git repository: branch a draft, edit it independently, and merge it back from the interface when the argument holds together. Connect GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, or Forgejo to push and pull without leaving the editor, watch ahead and behind indicators, resolve conflicts, and open a pull or merge request on the merged result. Moving in is painless, since an exported Overleaf project ZIP dropped on the home screen imports with its root file detected and its first typeset automatic. Citations come from your own Zotero library or a single collection, kept in sync as a .bib file and inserted from a search panel or \cite autocomplete. Reviewers select text and leave anchored, threaded comments, optionally with a suggested replacement the author accepts in one click. Compiles run in a sandboxed container with no network access, warm recompiles land in about two seconds, and errors jump to the offending line. 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.

Overleaf locks its best collaboration tools behind a paid server license, and AyakaLeaf Pro is the open-source edition that hands them to your own server instead. You get the familiar online LaTeX editor, with several people typing in the same document at once, but compilation runs in an isolated Docker sandbox with a full TeX Live image, so a runaway document cannot take the service down and compile times are yours to set. Reviewers work the way they do in a word processor: track changes, comment in the review panel, and roll back through full project history with restore and download. Projects stay connected to the rest of your workflow through two-way sync with GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and Dropbox, a git-bridge for clone, pull, and push, and reference managers through Zotero and Mendeley with searchable bibliography entries. A template gallery lets you publish house styles for your lab or department, the symbol palette inserts math notation in one click, and an AI chat assistant plus a compile-error assistant help inside the editor, while an MCP server lets external AI agents edit and compile too. Administrators get SSO through LDAP, SAML, or OAuth, domain-limited self-registration, and a panel for users and projects. 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.

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 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-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.

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.

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.

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.

Doca puts rich text, Markdown, spreadsheets, slides, and an infinite canvas under one login and one permission model, giving individuals and small teams a self-hosted workspace for writing together. Every format supports real-time co-editing with presence, comments, saved history, and manual snapshots, and rich text and Markdown documents can be restored to an earlier version. Documents live in knowledge libraries with tree navigation, invitations, inherited permissions, share links, and trash, while personal files and shared folders sit on local disk or S3-compatible storage. Knowledge books go further: they subscribe to sources, run an editable workflow, keep source evidence, and route results through human review. A personal AI assistant, powered by whichever model you configure, searches authorized documents, reads PDF and Office attachments, edits images, and prepares browser drafts. MCP services let external AI clients such as Codex use those tools under your permissions. Sign in with a password, OIDC, Google, GitHub, WeChat, or QQ, review registrations before they go live, and send webhooks to other systems. A plugin SDK and marketplace add business modules, and a browser extension clips pages into documents. The interface ships in Chinese and English. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT 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.

Hocuspocus is the WebSocket backend that turns a regular editor into a multiplayer one: two people open the same document, type at the same time, and watch each other's words appear in place, with every keystroke merged cleanly and no save conflicts to untangle later. The server speaks the Yjs synchronization protocol, so clients built with Tiptap, ProseMirror, Slate, Quill, or Monaco editors connect over a persistent connection and exchange small updates that the conflict-free data type orders correctly regardless of arrival sequence, and awareness messages carry cursor positions and presence so collaborators see who is in the document. Teams that outgrow one process add the Redis extension to balance connections across multiple server instances, reaching very large numbers of simultaneous editors on the same documents. Persistence extensions store documents in SQLite for small deployments or in a database or S3-compatible storage through your own fetch and store callbacks, the webhook extension notifies your application when documents change, throttling guards against abusive connections, and hooks for authentication and document loading let you enforce per-document permissions before anyone joins. Developers embed the server into an existing Node.js, Bun, Deno, or Cloudflare Workers runtime, or run it as the collaboration tier beside their main application, and offline-first clients queue changes locally and synchronize when the connection returns. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT 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.