What does "Microsoft Office compatible" actually have to mean?
That a colleague opening your file in Word sees what you saw. Anything less makes the suite unusable in practice, because the format is the interface to everyone outside your organisation, and this is where most open-source alternatives quietly fail.
OnlyOffice is the strongest on this point, and it is an architectural difference rather than a tuning difference: OnlyOffice was engineered around the OOXML formats from the start rather than adding them to an existing format, which is why it holds document fidelity through complex layouts, embedded objects and macros where converters lose track. SoftMaker Office reads and writes DOCX, XLSX and PPTX with the same aim from a German product that has been at it since 1987.
Collabora Online is built on LibreOffice technology, which means excellent ODF support and good but slightly less exact OOXML rendering — usually invisible, occasionally not, and worth testing against your own worst document rather than a sample.
The practical test before switching: take the ugliest real document you have, the one with the tracked changes, the merged cells and the branded template, round-trip it, and open it in Word. That answers the question the feature list cannot.
How can a suite encrypt documents and still allow live collaboration?
By doing the editing in the browser and never letting the server see plaintext. CryptPad encrypts on the client with keys the server never receives, and the collaborative editing happens between clients — so several people type in the same document at once while the server stores only ciphertext it cannot read.
That is a genuinely rare combination. Zero-knowledge normally rules out collaboration precisely because a server that cannot read a document cannot merge two people's edits into it, and CryptPad works around it by moving that merge to the clients.
CryptPad covers documents, spreadsheets, presentations, kanban boards, forms and a whiteboard, so it replaces both Google Docs and parts of Notion, from XWiki SAS in Paris with French hosting. Free at 50MB, from about €5 a month for 5GB, and self-hostable.
The costs are real: performance on very large documents is weaker than a server-side editor, Microsoft format fidelity is not the priority it is at OnlyOffice, and losing your key means losing the document. CryptPad is the right answer when confidentiality outranks compatibility, and the wrong one otherwise.
What does it take to actually replace Google Workspace?
More than an editor. Google Workspace is files plus documents plus calendar plus contacts plus meetings, and replacing only the documents leaves four gaps that quietly pull people back.
The combination that works in European public sector is Nextcloud plus Collabora Online. Nextcloud provides file sync and share, calendar, contacts and — through Nextcloud Talk — calls; Collabora Online is the recommended and fully integrated editor, so documents open straight from the Nextcloud file manager with no extra step. The whole stack runs on your own infrastructure, which is why it appears in government agencies and public institutions that cannot use American cloud services at all.
OnlyOffice reaches the same place from the other direction, embedding into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Alfresco, SharePoint and Confluence — so an organisation that already has a content platform can add editing to it rather than migrating.
Collabora Online deploys via Docker in minutes, with Kubernetes Helm charts and multi-server setups for larger installations, and speaks WOPI — the same protocol Microsoft Office Online uses — so it works with any storage platform implementing it.
Does an office suite need to be in the cloud at all?
No, and for a lot of businesses the cloud is the problem rather than the feature. SoftMaker Office processes everything locally with no cloud requirement, which means documents never leave the machine and there is no processor to assess, no DPA to negotiate and no outage to wait out.
SoftMaker also ships portable versions that run from a USB stick without installation — genuinely useful on locked-down machines, shared workstations and in environments where installing software requires a change request.
OnlyOffice covers the same ground with free Desktop Editors for Windows, macOS and Linux that work offline on local files, at no cost for personal or commercial use.
The trade is real-time collaboration, which needs a server by definition. The honest answer for many small businesses is a local suite for the documents that matter and something shared for the handful that genuinely need simultaneous editing — rather than moving everything to the cloud to support the ten percent that needs it.
What does a European office suite cost against Microsoft 365?
Much less, and the free tiers are unusually substantial. OnlyOffice Desktop Editors are free for personal and commercial use, and the self-hosted Community Edition is free up to 20 concurrent connections — enough for a real small business. Collabora Online has a free Community Edition. SoftMaker publishes FreeOffice as a genuinely free product rather than a trial. CryptPad is free at 50MB.
The paid steps are modest: OnlyOffice cloud from about €4 per user per month, SoftMaker from about €29.90 per year, CryptPad from about €5 per month. Against Microsoft 365 Business Standard at roughly €12 per user per month, a twenty-person company saves a meaningful amount annually.
The cost that does not appear on the invoice is compatibility friction — the hour lost when a document renders wrong for a client. Testing that before switching is what determines whether the saving is real.
And the self-hosted options move cost rather than remove it: Collabora Online and OnlyOffice Community are free to license and still need someone to run, update and back up the server.
