etherpad

Etherpad is a real-time collaborative document editor that you run on your own server. Think of it like Google Docs, but self-hosted — meaning your data never leaves your own infrastructure, and no third-party company has access to your documents.

Every character typed in a shared document is instantly visible to all participants, and each contributor's changes are color-coded so you can see at a glance who wrote what. The editor preserves every revision ever made, and a timeline feature lets you scrub back through the entire history of a document change by change. You control whether any AI tools are involved at all; AI support is an optional plugin you configure yourself, pointed at whatever model you choose.

Etherpad is translated into over 100 languages and can be extended with hundreds of community-built plugins. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and can be started with a single install command or run via a container image. Organizations including the Wikimedia Foundation, public-sector institutions in the EU, universities, and investigative newsrooms rely on it — particularly those that cannot use US-based cloud services for legal or data-sovereignty reasons. The code is released under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, meaning anyone can freely use, modify, and distribute it.