Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?

chetbaker

For years I've been trying to find anything usable that can really compete with the collaborative doc editing capabilities that Google Docs or MS Office provides and I've found none.

I really think there should be a viable alternative for small companies to Google Suite / MS Office at least for collaborative editing / storage.

Yeah, yeah, of course I know OnlyOffice and Collabora. Actually, that's the solution I've found for this: Nextcloud + OnlyOffice (now I'm testing out Collabora because I can't believe how badly designed OO is).

But I'm still not 100% happy with it. I've found nothing remotely similar to what Fastmail provides for email+calendar but related with office solutions for teams (meaning collaborative folders and collaborative editing docs).

Am I missing something around? What have you found useful for non-techie teams that requires to have a shared folder and working together on docs? Thanks!

fbartels

Hi @chetbaker
in my opinion there are no real alternatives, at least not when considering the full feature set of Office 365 and the Google Apps ecosystem. So if you want full office document editing the only applications that aim to come close are LibreOffice (or Collabora) and OnlyOffice with any of their supported file storage backends.

If its just some text editor that you want to collaboratively work on then Cryptpad or Hedgedoc could be interesting to look at. But being markdown based with a split red/write pane makes Hedgedoc challenging for a lot of users and the Cryptpad UX also leaves room for improvement.

Document editing has lots of UX challenges to solve, and these challenges are seldomly free to conquer.

micmc

@fbartels said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

aim to come close are LibreOffice (or Collabora) and

Which apparently has made a jump ahead with compatibility enhancement with the most recent version. Though I haven't had the time to confirm that myself yet.

fbartels

@micmc yes, switching to web assembly has been an important step for libreoffice.

marcusquinn

Perhaps Open Xchange?

Namecheap offers it with their Email Ultimate tier:

https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/

Stephanie_Sy

try Open Xchange

micmc

@Stephanie_Sy said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

try Open Xchange

That's exactly where @marcusquinn links to, just here above...

chetbaker

Thanks for your kind answers!

I haven't check Open Xchange because I found difficult where to try it and incredible obscure their documentation. It's not even clear to me whether is FLOSS or not.

Unless Open Xchange is a real game changer in comparison with Libre/Open Office and CODE, it seems that there are basically no real options other than Google/MS365. It's really heartbreaking for 2022. Cheers!

timconsidine

@chetbaker I sympathise with your frustration that there is not a competitive offering.
Anything and everything to knock BigTech dominance into the sidelines should be welcomed.

Having said that, I don't understand why these products are so important.
Personally I think they are completely over-rated and under-utilised.
While a small minority do make good use of many facilities in spreadsheets or text documents, the vast, Vast, VAST majority hardly venture beyond the most basic functionality.

As for collaboration, I spent many years in business, working with many businesses, both clients and suppliers, most of them die-hard users of MS or Google products, and the number of times real collaboration was actually used could be counted in tens not hundreds or thousands.

Far more important is having a single instance of a document (text or database), rather than multiple copies emailed around and everyone having a separate local version. But that's just file sync/share and 'cloud' storage. No-one needs Google or MS to deliver that.

The only reason Google/MS Suites are so prevalent are that users are generally technically illiterate and their sys-admins / IT departments are not a whole lot better. Nor is the majority of the IT reseller industry who peddle and perpetuate the myth of the superiority of these 'productivity' (ha ha ha) suites.

I've been waiting expectantly and excitedly for an answer to your question in the thread title.
And then I realised.
It doesn't really matter.
Collaboration is a myth, shared file storage is enough for 99% of the benefits of GDocs/O365 for 99% of their users.

All IMHO of course.

chetbaker

@timconsidine thanks for your lengthy comment, tim! I just want to say I disagree.

I have a different experience, which is maybe connected with my experience working in teams that works all the time with collaborative documentation and folders and what not.

The golden standard for that is Google. Not just because they have a great email client fully integrated with all their products, but because it's really hard to beat the feature of working with more than 2 people in the same document. The work of collaborative writing, editing and review is a nightmare with anything different than Google and MS.

So, yes, probably in most of the cases companies lean towards these suites because it's easy to maintain by IT sys-admins and because Gmail is just a great service and everybody uses it. But in some cases, such is mine, where I do need something like what is provided by the Drive/docs element in the G Suite, there is no alternative. It's just as sad as it sounds.

eganonoa

@chetbaker I think there are plenty of alternatives, but not a single all-in-one suite.

Etherpad, for instance, is in my mind as good as it gets for collaborative document editing. I say that because it is fast and light. And because I think the idea of people collaborating over a document's format (i.e. the final document) is just silly. People should be collaborating over content and then sending the final document to someone to produce the published/finished version.

Collabora is becoming really great (but, again, I really do not believe you need a full-featured suite for collaborative work).

Nextcloud, for instance, does group folders and file sharing much better than either Google or Office 365, which have always ended in a mess. I also think Nextcloud has by far the superior administrative options, especially for a smaller organization needing something simple.

Slack and/or Element are significantly better chat clients than either Google or MS offers.

Similarly, Jitsi, BigBlueButton and Zoom each do group calling better than what Google and MS offer. And Nextcloud talk is, I think, the very best for one-to-one calls.

There are loads of Kanban services out there that provide excellent team management services. Nextcloud Deck is pretty OK in this regard.

Google provides the gold standard in calendaring and email. Nextcloud's calendar is pretty good, but not nearly as good. Outlook is alright, but Gmail and Google Calendar are still the best.

etc, etc, etc.

The fallacy, I think, is that you need one single cloud service to provide everything. I'd rather specialist services, with something capable of tying things together. Nextcloud does a pretty good job of that. You can piece a lot of stuff together in one place, inc. element, jitsi, bigbluebutton, etherpad, though the mail client is seriously lacking. Element is also quite good at bringing various things together.

But, the one thing that I think gets missed in all of this is the desktop! This is still the place, and the OS itself, to bring everything together in one place. And if you look at it like that, the whole idea of one cloud portal that tries to do it all (whether Google, MS, Zoho, Nextcloud, or whatever) seems ultimately a silly idea: both unobtainable and not sufficiently flexible or specialized enough.

chetbaker

@eganonoa thanks for your comment! My use case scenario disagrees with that vision.

I'm working with a company that is really committed with digital security and self hosted solutions. They uses a private company for hosting email and calendar (that works just good!), Element/Matrix for chat, Zoom and Jitsi for calls, and currently trying Nexcloud / CODE for shared documents. All good but the documents as I described earlier.

All of this to say it's not I need a full suite (far from it!), but a reliable service for sharing different documents (Nextcloud is fine for this) and collaborative owning/editing for rich text. That last part is the one missing.

No, Etherpad doesn't work for that (you don't have a way to store these files in a searchable way in Nextcloud or similar). I agree with you about the silliness of working together in a document's format, but that's not the way it works. The way it works is you just collaborate in a place where you can keep track of changes, you can export in a certain way, it's stored somewhere for offline editing and that is advanced enough for including stuff as footnotes and comments. Etherpad is just not that. It's close, but it's not.

timconsidine

@chetbaker there may be a terminology mis-match in our respective use cases.

Collaboration for me is working together on a document at more or less the same time. The number of times I have seen this actually happen in business is minimal.

Working together on a document at different times is way more common, so common that it is almost the only scenario to consider in practice. In this scenario, tracked changes is what really matters.
Unless they have made a lot of improvements I haven't seen, on this Google is a distant 2nd to MS Word or any of the alternatives.
In many sectors (eg legal and commercial teams), collaboration is a fringe outlier, tracked changes is what matters.
So in that scenario it's all about sync'ed file storage / cloud access rather than disparate local copies that delivers the productivity bonus.

But hey, absolutely no problem if your world is different to mine.
And to be clear, I entirely support your desire to find an alternative to BigTech offerings and wish you every success.

The fundamental problem I have with Google Docs or O365 is that they are 'walled gardens'.
The world doesn't need these.

chetbaker

@timconsidine I strongly agree.

My only disagreement is on the user case. The user case I do have is precisely the one you have been seen quite rarely "working together at the same time".

If you are right, maybe that's the reason why there are close to zero alternative to that than G suite /MS365, because there very few cases (and I'm in one of these!) where online collaboration at the same time is key. And that goes back to Etherpad that is great for that, but not really powerful and not really keen to the eye for non-techies, not to say they limited capacity for connecting with anything like Nextcloud or similar. Cheers!

marcusquinn

@chetbaker If the appetite is there, have you tried getting users to work with Markdown documents in Nextcloud?

Just make any .md file and invite your collaborators & conspirators to hack away. It's also the default format and app when you do + -> New Text Document:

The default README.md files in Nextcloud also have the handy effect of becoming that folder's "Rich Text Header" too if you have this button ticked:

I had a long rant about why I feel everyone should learn markdown, and a bunch of decent tools for it here that might yield you some ideas and new personal tools to try, at least:

https://www.marcusquinn.com/plain-text-markdown/

OK, this is just for text docs, but...

The only every time I've ever collaborated was with spreadsheets, but I did also ping some links on this here before:

And it does seem that Excel and GSheets have a growing amount of healthy competition inovating:

chetbaker

@marcusquinn yup, I'm an avid markdown user!

The thing with the nextcloud implementation is that you can't work in the same markdown doc at the same time with a colleague.

marcusquinn

@chetbaker Hmmm, I've not tried it, but I wonder what this is in the top-right of the .md file editor then?

eganonoa

@chetbaker said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

My use case scenario disagrees with that vision.
I'm working with a company that is really committed with digital security and self hosted solutions. They uses a private company for hosting email and calendar (that works just good!),

Just to say, my use case is exactly this above. My organization is among the most digitally-threatened organizations out there, with adversaries that include the largest and most sophisticated state actors out there (think China, Russia, but include those and expand your scope much further than that). We are known to be heavily targeted and surveilled, while also having a mission that ultimately requires us to lean as close as possible to digital sovereignty.

And the reality is that, if you are an organization like this, the very last thing you should be doing is engaging in collaborative editing. The ability for document shares to be open and accessed in the sharing process is simply too great, just as are the chances of leaving open shares for far longer than they should be. The whole live collaboration thing is a security nightmare and the big, consumer companies like Google aren't much good for this because convenience trumps good practice every day.

In terms of what you are saying you are looking for: "The way it works is you just collaborate in a place where you can keep track of changes, you can export in a certain way, it's stored somewhere for offline editing and that is advanced enough for including stuff as footnotes and comments." What I would say about this is three fold:

If you really are concerned about digital security, you would not want to keep a historical record anywhere of who said what, when. Comments and tracked changes are quite dangerous from a personal or business liability perspective.
To this day, there has never been a more robust solution than document comparison software (in-built or otherwise). Running proper blacklines/redlines on documents and edits, while sharing complete documents is significantly more robust.. So if this is all you want, the question should really only be about versioning, group shares, and secure ways of transmission of documents not in group shares.
Live collaboration is really an edge case and is not something that needs anything like a complete editing system with footnotes, etc. Etherpad does the live editing job as well as you could want (albeit with some big caveats regarding security if sharing outside of your own restricted circle).

eganonoa

@timconsidine said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

Collaboration for me is working together on a document at more or less the same time. The number of times I have seen this actually happen in business is minimal.

100% agree. This is exactly what i take collaboration to mean and it is truly a rare thing, not often needed at all.

jdaviescoates

@chetbaker said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

The thing with the nextcloud implementation is that you can't work in the same markdown doc at the same time with a colleague.

Pretty sure you can

Youtube Video

necrevistonnezr

@timconsidine said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

Working together on a document at different times is way more common, so common that it is almost the only scenario to consider in practice. In this scenario, tracked changes is what really matters.
Unless they have made a lot of improvements I haven't seen, on this Google is a distant 2nd to MS Word or any of the alternatives.
In many sectors (eg legal and commercial teams), collaboration is a fringe outlier, tracked changes is what matters.

Fully agree. I work in a legal team, tracked changes and using the exact same document format as the other contractual party is a must. You can’t start telling JP Morgan on the other side to please use markdown or „Sorry, you won’t see all my amendments because I used LibreOffice“. And in these industries, „collaboration“ is exchanging lengthy agreement drafts via email.

timconsidine

@necrevistonnezr said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

start telling JP Morgan on the other side to please use markdown

Would love to see their reaction ! "what down ? I use mouse not arrow keys "

fbartels

@necrevistonnezr said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

on the other side to please use markdown

Markdown is a nice markup, but as said before not really handy for non technical users. Depending on the document you want to work on Markdown could also be "too simple", but Latex is an even harder pill to swallow for the average user.

jdaviescoates

@chetbaker might be worth taking a look at https://docs.plus which is a fork of Etherpad with a load of plugins

jdaviescoates

@eganonoa said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

And Nextcloud talk is, I think, the very best for one-to-one calls.

Especially if the plan is to work together on a document. I've found this experience to be great too (both co-editing an OnlyOffice doc, or working together on a Nextcloud Text doc).

timconsidine

@jdaviescoates said in Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?:

might be worth taking a look at https://docs.plus

Looks great !
A good candidate for Cloudron ?
(Haven't looked yet at the install and system requirements.)
EDIT : I see there is a Wishlist for this

nebulon

since docs+ is really just etherpad with plugins, I wonder if our current etherpad could not be improved in that direction already.

timconsidine

@nebulon yes !
I was checking out how to build a package ... but would much rather leave it to the professionals !
I like Etherpad but docs+ would be even better.

micmc

As per realtime collaboration on docs using Markdown I don't know if anyone had tried but HedgeDoc available here on Cloudron is amazing.

There also exist imho a great altenative to MS/G docs for the documents work with team collaboration it's called Quip and I use to use it a few years back when it started, and before I start to move to more private/secure/nosniff/notrack solutions, and it works pretty well, only in the like of MS/G they're SaaS and not FOSS. On that I'm with @timconsidine and would rather adopt and make all that is possible to get us/people away from big tech dominance as they've become a plea imo, especially in the last two years. So let's get back our tech, our web, our Internet and so let's work on open source as much as we can in all cases we can.

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Is there any real alternative to Google Docs / Office 365 out there?