ONLYOFFICE Docs (the Document Server) provides online editors for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, fillable forms, and PDFs. Its editors are built around Office Open XML, the DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats, which makes it the self-hosted option that handles Microsoft Office files most faithfully.

Features

• Real-time co-editing, with fast and strict co-editing modes
• Editors for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, PDFs, and diagrams
• A familiar, tabbed Microsoft Office-style interface
• Comments, track changes, version history, and reviewing tools
• Plugins and macros, plus optional AI assistant plugins
• 46 interface languages, right-to-left support, dark mode, and accessibility features

How it fits

Like Collabora Online, ONLYOFFICE Docs is an editing server that a file platform calls. It has connectors for Nextcloud, Seafile, ownCloud, Moodle, Odoo, and others. The file platform stores the files; ONLYOFFICE edits them.

Editions

Edition	Notes
Community	Free, AGPL-3.0, recommended for up to about 20 users
Enterprise and Developer	Paid: clustering, admin panel, mobile web editors, support

For a household or small team, the Community Edition is plenty.

Deployment

The official image is onlyoffice/documentserver. Run it behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS on its own subdomain, set a JWT secret, and enter the same secret in your file platform’s ONLYOFFICE connector settings. The JWT secret is what stops anyone on the internet from using your document server, so do not skip it.

ONLYOFFICE is resource-hungry; plan for a few gigabytes of RAM.

ONLYOFFICE or Collabora?

Choose ONLYOFFICE if your documents are mostly Microsoft Office formats and your users expect a Word-like interface. Choose Collabora if you value ODF and LibreOffice compatibility. Both integrate well with Nextcloud, and you can try each without changing your file storage.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (Community Edition).

Links

• Repository
• Website