Etherpad is the original real-time collaborative text editor: share a link and everyone types in the same “pad” at once. It is deliberately simpler than a full office suite, and it excels at meeting notes, brainstorming, and drafting text together. It is used by Wikimedia, EU institutions, universities, and civic-tech groups.

Features

• Real-time editing that scales to many simultaneous writers
• Author colours, so you can see who wrote what
• A timeslider that replays the document’s full history, character by character
• Full export to text, HTML, and other formats
• More than 100 interface languages
• No telemetry

Plugins

Much of Etherpad’s flexibility comes from hundreds of plugins, installed from the admin interface or the command line: headings and alignment, comments, Markdown, tables, spell check, and even video chat.

Deployment

Official images are etherpad/etherpad on Docker Hub and ghcr.io/ether/etherpad. For anything beyond testing, use PostgreSQL (recommended) or MySQL; the built-in “dirtyDB” is for development only. Etherpad requires a recent Node.js if you install it directly.

Pads are reachable by anyone who knows the URL unless you configure authentication, so put it behind your reverse proxy with access control, or use the authentication plugins, if the content is private.

Etherpad vs the alternatives

• HedgeDoc: collaborative Markdown with live preview, better for technical notes
• CryptPad: end-to-end encrypted collaborative documents, spreadsheets, and more
• Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE: full office suites for formatted documents

Etherpad’s strengths are speed, simplicity, and its authorship history.

License

Apache License 2.0.

Links

• Repository
• Website