Etherpad is an open-source, real-time collaborative editor for documents that matter. It lets teams, schools, and institutions edit the same pad together with every keystroke attributed to its author and every revision preserved. Runnable on your own server, Etherpad has underpinned collaborative drafting for Wikimedia, public-sector institutions across the EU, and thousands of self-hosted instances for over sixteen years.

Key Features

• Real-time collaborative editing — multiple authors type in the same document simultaneously, with live cursors and updates.
• Authorship attribution — every keystroke is credited to its author via colour coding, so you can see who wrote what at a glance.
• Timeslider — scrub through the entire edit history character-by-character and replay how the document came into being.
• Self-hosted and sovereign — runs on your infrastructure with no telemetry, no upsells, and full data export.
• 290+ plugins — add comments, images, tables, drawing, video chat, maths, code highlighting, and OAuth/LDAP/OpenID authentication.
• Open data format — Apache-2.0 code and a portable, exportable document format with built-in data export.
• 105 languages — translated by a global community of volunteers.

Why Use Etherpad?

Etherpad is ideal when authorship, history, and control matter more than feature bloat. Because you run it yourself, your documents never leave your governance — a decisive advantage for regulated industries, journalism, education, and any organisation that cannot ship text to a third-party cloud.

Use Cases

• Collaborative drafting for newsrooms and investigative teams where editing history matters for editorial integrity.
• Public-sector and government collaboration under strict sovereignty and GDPR requirements.
• Classrooms and universities building real-time group writing assignments.
• Citizen assemblies and democratic-deliberation projects (participatory budgeting, public consultations).

Platform

Server: Linux (Node.js). Access: web browser, plus desktop and mobile apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, and a command-line client.

Licence

Apache License 2.0

Website

etherpad.org