Self-hosted alternatives to Google Docs and Microsoft 365: Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE Docs compared

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the web, let a team write in the same document at once, in the browser, with the files on Google's or Microsoft's servers. Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE Docs do the same on a server of your own: each is an office suite that runs in the browser and plugs into Nextcloud, which keeps the files, the versions and the sharing. We ran both on the same server, with the same Nextcloud and the same documents. What Google and Microsoft charge, and what you give up by leaving them, is near the end of this page, from their own pages.

The short answer

Pick ONLYOFFICE Docs if your team lives in Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and works at a computer: it looks and behaves most like Microsoft Office, renders documents in the browser, and used the least extra memory per person. Pick Collabora Online if people also edit on their phones, you prefer open formats, or you want nothing held back for a licence: its free edition edited documents on a phone, where ONLYOFFICE's free edition only shows them, and it was the smaller of the two at rest. Both kept everything in our Swedish contract, budget and slide deck, apart from one PowerPoint transition.

What we tested

We set up Nextcloud on a fresh Melonslab VC-P Alloy (2 vCPU, 8 GB) with Debian 13 by following our guide Nextcloud with rootless Podman step by step, and every step worked as written. We have no guides for the two office servers, so we installed each the way the projects document it and fitted it into the same pattern: a user of its own, a Quadlet unit, its password or key as a Podman secret, and our Caddy in front. How we ran Collabora Online and How we ran ONLYOFFICE Docs show the files. Both ran at the same time; Nextcloud used one of them at a time, through its Nextcloud Office app (richdocuments 11.1.2) for Collabora or its ONLYOFFICE app (10.2.1).

We gave both the same three files, each in a folder that Anna shared with Erik:

• a Swedish consulting contract in Word format: a header and a footer with "Sida 1 av 2", a table of contents, seven numbered sections, a price table in kronor, two tracked changes from Anna Berg and Erik Lund, two comments, Swedish set as the language, and two misspelt words ("avtallet", and later "veckka") to see the spell check;
• a budget in Excel format: 48 transactions in kronor, VLOOKUP for account names, XLOOKUP and SUMIFS on a summary sheet, conditional formatting that turns overspending red, a column chart and a pivot table;
• a slide deck in PowerPoint format: four slides, two pictures, speaker notes and four transitions, one of them PowerPoint 2010's "prism".

We made the files with the Python libraries python-docx and python-pptx and, for the budget's pivot table and chart, with LibreOffice; we have no copy of Microsoft Office. So they are Office files, but not files saved by Microsoft's own programs, and LibreOffice is the engine inside Collabora. Keep that in mind when you read the fidelity results.

In each editor, Anna opened all three files, wrote a sentence at the end of the contract, changed one amount in the budget, edited the title slide and saved. We downloaded the saved files and opened them in LibreOffice 26.8 on our own computer to see what survived. Then Anna and Erik edited the contract at the same time in two headless browsers, we restored an older version, shared the contract by a public link with edit rights and edited it without an account, opened it in a phone-sized browser, exported it to PDF, switched Erik to Swedish, measured memory at rest and with 1, 2 and 5 people editing, opened one document with 22 users at once, and rebooted the server.

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 were not tested. We did not sign up for either. What this page says about them comes from Google's and Microsoft's own pages, linked where we use them and read on 14 October 2026.

The numbers

Memory is each editor's container, measured with podman stats every three seconds. Nextcloud itself used another 177 MB at rest after the reboot, and its web server grew to about 360 MB while five people edited, with both editors. The opening time is from the click in Nextcloud until the document could be edited, in a headless Chromium on a fast connection. Our documents are small; large spreadsheets and long reports take more memory in both.

Setup

Both are one container behind Caddy, plus an app in Nextcloud. The differences are in how they reach Nextcloud and how they trust it.

• Collabora and Nextcloud talk to each other in both directions over WOPI: Nextcloud asks Collabora which file types it handles, and Collabora fetches and saves each document through Nextcloud. Collabora only accepts documents from the Nextcloud it is told about (aliasgroup1), and Nextcloud only answers Collabora's requests from the addresses on its WOPI allow-list, which has to hold both the server's IPv4 and its IPv6 address: Collabora's requests reached Nextcloud over IPv6 first, and were refused with "Unauthorized WOPI host" until we added it.
• ONLYOFFICE signs every request between it and Nextcloud with a shared secret, a JSON Web Token key. Without the right key it refuses to open or convert anything; a request without a token got error -8 back.

Two things we had to work out:

• Inside a rootless container, the server's own public address does not lead to Caddy. Nextcloud could not reach office.example.com until its pod got an AddHost line for it, the same trick the Nextcloud guide uses for its own name. ONLYOFFICE reached Nextcloud the same way.
• Collabora refuses Podman's way out. Podman gives a container the host as a link-local address, 169.254.1.2, and Collabora blocks those as cloud metadata addresses: "Blocking connection to instance metadata address". We ran Collabora with Network=host instead, listening only on 127.0.0.1:8142.

Collabora's image is a minimal one without a shell, so podman exec collabora sh does not work; its log and its admin console at /browser/dist/admin/admin.html, behind the admin password, are the ways in. ONLYOFFICE's image has a shell and the usual tools inside.

Fidelity: what survived a save

What LibreOffice found in each file after the editor had opened, changed and saved it:

So both editors brought our files through whole. The one difference: ONLYOFFICE saved the prism transition marked as needing PowerPoint 2016, which LibreOffice does not claim to understand, so LibreOffice played the plain fade that PowerPoint 2010 files carry as a fallback. PowerPoint itself may well show the prism; we could not check. Neither editor refreshes a pivot table by itself when the data changes, just like Excel: both showed the old sum until refreshed.

The editors look different on screen. ONLYOFFICE's toolbar, rulers and comment balloons are close to Microsoft Office. Collabora has a ribbon too, with LibreOffice underneath: on the slides, it showed Calibri as Carlito, LibreOffice's look-alike font with the same widths.

Co-editing

Both edit in real time. We opened the contract as Erik, then as Anna, and Anna typed " – utkast" after the title. In both, Erik saw it within a second and a half, with a flag carrying Anna's name at her cursor.

Then both put the cursor at the start of the title and typed at the same time, letter by letter, Anna "ANNA " and Erik "ERIK ". Neither editor lost a letter, and both showed the same result to both: "ERIK ANNA Avtal om…" in Collabora and "ANNA ERIK Avtal om…" in ONLYOFFICE. As the contract had tracked changes switched on, each insertion was recorded under its author's name, in a colour per person.

With 22 users in one document, both still let the 22nd edit.

Versions

Both save into Nextcloud, which keeps the earlier copy as a version each time: on saving, and when the last person closes the document. The versions are Nextcloud's, so they work the same with both editors, and Versions in the file's sidebar lists them. We restored the first version of the contract after several rounds of edits, and got the original file back, byte for byte. Nextcloud recorded who saved each version: with ONLYOFFICE, Erik's save was listed as his; a guest's save, below, had no author.

Sharing by public link

We shared the contract by a public link with edit rights and opened it in a browser without an account. Both opened the document for editing.

• Collabora first asked for a name, and the guest's tracked changes appeared as "Gustav (gäst) (Guest)".
• ONLYOFFICE offered a name box in a corner, which we left empty: the change was saved as "Anonymous".

On a phone

We opened the contract in a browser the size of an iPhone.

• Collabora showed the document with a pencil button. After a tap it switched to a phone layout with a toolbar at the bottom, and we could edit. The page does not reflow to the screen: you scroll sideways.
• ONLYOFFICE Community showed the document and a warning: "Using the free Community version, you can open documents for viewing only. To access mobile web editors, a commercial license is required." ONLYOFFICE's own comparison lists mobile web editors as a paid feature.

Export to PDF

Both exported the contract to PDF from within the editor: three pages each, with the header, the footer and selectable text.

Swedish

Both follow the language each user sets in Nextcloud, under Personal settings > Personal info > Language. We set Erik's to Swedish, and he got "Arkiv", "Hem", "Infoga", "Granska" and "Redigering" in Collabora, and "Arkiv", "Hem", "Infoga", "Rita" and "Granskning" in ONLYOFFICE.

Both spell-checked the contract in Swedish and underlined our misspellings, as the document is marked as Swedish. Collabora checks only the languages in its dictionaries setting, which by default holds no Swedish: our unit adds sv_SE. ONLYOFFICE has a Swedish dictionary built in. The slide deck had no language set, and both checked it as English, underlining every Swedish word.

Resources

The two work in opposite ways, and the memory shows it.

• Collabora runs a LibreOffice process on the server for each open document, which draws the pages and sends them to the browser as images. One person editing added about 120 MB to its 295 MB at rest, more people in the same document hardly anything, and every further document about 70 MB: five people in five documents reached 709 MB. Its CPU does the drawing too, so a busier team needs more cores.
• ONLYOFFICE draws the document in each person's browser and uses the server to pass changes between them and to convert files. It starts higher, at 536 MB, but grew the least: five people in five documents reached 634 MB. The browser does more work instead: its editor downloads about 9 MB of script for Word files alone. After every start, also after a reboot, ONLYOFFICE spent about three minutes generating its theme previews at more than one full core, although it answered after 9 seconds.

Both fit beside Nextcloud on a server with 8 GB, and together, with Nextcloud, used about 1 GB at rest.

Updates and backups

Collabora publishes only full version numbers and latest for its free edition, so our unit follows latest with Podman's automatic updates: a new CODE release, about once a month, installs by itself. ONLYOFFICE follows the 10.0 tag, so fixes within 10.0 install by themselves, and you move to 10.1 by changing the tag. ONLYOFFICE 10.0 had come out two days before our test, and the Nextcloud app we used supported it.

Neither keeps your documents: they live in Nextcloud, with their versions, so the Nextcloud guide's backup covers them. For the office servers, keep the unit files and the secrets. Both came back by themselves after a reboot, and Nextcloud reconnected to them without help.

How we ran Collabora Online

As a user collabora, created like nextcloud in step 1 of the Nextcloud guide, with a password for Collabora's admin console:

printf %s "$(openssl rand -hex 16)" | podman secret create collabora-admin-password -
mkdir -p ~/.config/containers/systemd

~/.config/containers/systemd/collabora.container:

[Container]
ContainerName=collabora
Image=docker.io/collabora/code:latest
# Collabora refuses Podman's link-local route to the host, so it uses the host's network,
# listening on 127.0.0.1:8142 only: the port is not open to the internet.
Network=host
# The only Nextcloud that may open documents here
Environment=aliasgroup1=https://cloud.example.com:443
Environment="extra_params=--port=8142 --o:net.listen=loopback --o:net.proto=IPv4 --o:ssl.enable=false --o:ssl.termination=true"
Environment="dictionaries=sv_SE en_GB en_US"
Environment=username=admin
Secret=collabora-admin-password,type=env,target=password
AutoUpdate=registry

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Start it with systemctl --user daemon-reload and systemctl --user start collabora; the log says Listening to client connections on port 8142 when it is ready. Two errors in its log did no harm in our test: it clamps its threads to the two cores of a 2 vCPU server, and it has no "proof key" to sign its requests with; documents opened and saved without one.

The block in Caddy's ~/Caddyfile:

office.example.com {
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8142
}

In Nextcloud's nextcloud.pod, add a line under the existing AddHost, then systemctl --user daemon-reload and systemctl --user restart nextcloud-pod as nextcloud:

AddHost=office.example.com:host-gateway

And as nextcloud, install Nextcloud Office and point it at Collabora. The allow-list holds your server's IPv4 and IPv6 address:

occ app:install richdocuments
occ config:app:set richdocuments wopi_url --value=https://office.example.com
occ config:app:set richdocuments wopi_allowlist --value=203.0.113.10,2001:db8::10
occ richdocuments:activate-config

The last command should end with Detected WOPI server: Collabora Online Development Edition.

How we ran ONLYOFFICE Docs

As a user onlyoffice, created the same way, with the key that ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud share:

printf %s "$(openssl rand -hex 24)" | podman secret create onlyoffice-jwt-secret -
mkdir -p ~/.config/containers/systemd

~/.config/containers/systemd/onlyoffice.container:

[Container]
ContainerName=onlyoffice
Image=docker.io/onlyoffice/documentserver:10.0
# Only Caddy, on this server, can reach ONLYOFFICE: the port is not open to the internet.
PublishPort=127.0.0.1:8143:80
AddHost=cloud.example.com:host-gateway
Volume=onlyoffice-data:/var/www/onlyoffice/Data
Volume=onlyoffice-lib:/var/lib/onlyoffice
Environment=JWT_ENABLED=true
Secret=onlyoffice-jwt-secret,type=env,target=JWT_SECRET
AutoUpdate=registry

[Service]
Restart=always
TimeoutStartSec=900

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Start it with systemctl --user daemon-reload and systemctl --user start onlyoffice; curl http://127.0.0.1:8143/healthcheck answers true when it is ready. Older ONLYOFFICE guides also mount /var/lib/postgresql: in 10.0, the container ran without a database of its own, with only its document service, converter and nginx inside. Show the key, which Nextcloud needs:

podman secret inspect --showsecret --format '{{.SecretData}}' onlyoffice-jwt-secret

The block in Caddy's ~/Caddyfile:

onlyoffice.example.com {
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8143
}

In nextcloud.pod, add AddHost=onlyoffice.example.com:host-gateway and restart the pod, as for Collabora. Then, as nextcloud, with the key from above:

occ app:install onlyoffice
occ config:app:set onlyoffice DocumentServerUrl --value=https://onlyoffice.example.com/
occ config:app:set onlyoffice jwt_secret --value=THE-KEY
occ onlyoffice:documentserver --check

The check should say is successfully connected. The key is then also stored in Nextcloud's database, which is how the app works. Use one of the two apps at a time: occ app:disable richdocuments before you enable onlyoffice, or the other way round.

Licence and cost

We read the licence texts and pricing pages on 14 October 2026.

• Collabora Online is made by Collabora Productivity in the United Kingdom, on LibreOffice, and its source code is under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. CODE, the Development Edition we tested, is free, and Collabora's CODE page calls it "perfect for testing, home use or small teams, but not recommended for production environments": a monthly rolling release without long-term support. It set no limit on users or documents in our test, and its settings say so too, unless you switch on its "home mode", which removes the welcome screen and feedback popups but limits it to 20 connections and 10 documents. Otherwise the welcome screen, which each new user sees, cannot be switched off. Collabora Online for Business, with long-term support and security updates, costs 3 euros per user a month for up to 99 users; Enterprise, from 100 users, at a price you ask for.
• ONLYOFFICE Docs is made by Ascensio System in Riga, Latvia, and its Community Edition is under the GNU AGPL 3.0. Its GitHub page says the Community Edition is for "up to 20 recommended" users and has no mobile web editors, no admin panel and no clustering. We saw no hard limit: the 22nd user could edit too. Docs Enterprise is priced per server by the number of simultaneous connections, where every browser tab with a document counts as one; ONLYOFFICE's pricing page starts at 1,500 US dollars for one server with 50 connections and a year of updates and support, and 3,000 for 100.

For a company that edits its own documents on its own server, both free editions allow it at no cost.

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 today

What follows is from Google's and Microsoft's own pricing pages, read on 14 October 2026, not from our tests.

Sources: Google Workspace pricing and Microsoft 365 for business. Google showed list prices with an introductory discount for new customers, which we left out. Both sell their business plans for up to 300 users.

For 10 people, that is €816 a year for Business Starter and about 8,000 kronor a year for Business Basic, and it grows with every person you add. A server running Nextcloud and either editor costs the same for 3 people as for 30.

What you give up compared with Google Docs and Microsoft 365

On your own server, the documents stay in Sweden, the price does not follow the number of people, and nobody changes your plan for you. But be honest about what you leave behind:

• Microsoft's own engine. Microsoft 365 opens Word, Excel and PowerPoint files with the same code as the desktop programs. Both editors kept our test files whole, but they were not made in Microsoft Office, and macros, SmartArt, form fields, Excel tables with slicers and the like were not in our test. Expect to check your most important templates.
• Phones. Microsoft 365 Business Basic includes the phone versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, according to Microsoft's page. Collabora edits in the phone's browser; ONLYOFFICE's free edition only shows documents on a phone.
• AI. Gemini is in Docs, Sheets and Slides from Google's Business Standard, and Microsoft sells Copilot with its plans, according to their pricing pages. Neither of our free editions comes with an AI assistant set up.
• Offline work. Both of ours edit in the browser, connected to your server. Offline, you work on the file the Nextcloud desktop app has synced, in a desktop program.
• Running it. Updates, a server, backups and someone who notices when it stops are yours. Collabora's free edition is a rolling development release without long-term support, which its makers do not recommend for production.

Which one to pick

ONLYOFFICE Docs suits a team that exchanges Word, Excel and PowerPoint files with customers and works at computers. Its interface is the closest to Microsoft Office, it draws documents in the browser so the server grew least as more people joined, and it has a Swedish dictionary built in. Its weak points are no editing on phones without a paid licence, more memory at rest, an image of 2.1 GB, a key shared with Nextcloud that you set by hand, and a free edition its makers recommend for up to 20 users; above that, plan on Enterprise at 1,500 US dollars or more per server.

Collabora Online suits a team that also edits on phones, works with OpenDocument files as well as Office files, or simply wants every feature free: CODE edited on our phone-sized browser, kept the PowerPoint transition that ONLYOFFICE rewrote, and was the smaller at rest. Its weak points are memory and CPU that grow with every open document, the WOPI allow-list and host networking it needs in our setup, a welcome screen you cannot switch off, and a free edition that is a development release; for production, Collabora sells Business at 3 euros per user a month.

Both run beside Nextcloud on the same server. Follow the Nextcloud guide and add either from the sections above; a Standard Micro, with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 250 GB of disk for the files, runs Nextcloud with either editor for a small team, as our test did on a VC-P Alloy with the same cores and memory. For a larger team on Collabora, which draws every page on the server, take more cores. If you are still choosing where the files live, see Nextcloud or Seafile?.