etherpad

Project Overview

Etherpad is a real-time collaborative editor for documents that matter. Every keystroke is attributed to its author. Every revision is preserved. The timeslider lets you scrub through a document's entire history, character by character.

Key Features

• Real-time collaborative editing with author colors
• Complete revision history with character-by-character timeslider
• Self-hosted with user-controlled governance
• No telemetry, no forced AI
• Translated into 105 languages
• Hundreds of plugins available
• Full data export capabilities
• Scales to thousands of simultaneous editors per pad

Target Audience

• Teams and institutions that need collaborative document editing
• Organizations with data sovereignty and privacy requirements (e.g., EU public sector, universities)
• Newsrooms and investigative journalism teams
• Self-hosters worldwide

Quick Start

# macOS / Linux / WSL
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/etherpad/master/bin/installer.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/etherpad/master/bin/installer.ps1 | iex

# After installation completes
cd etherpad-lite && pnpm run prod

Core Advantages

• Doing the same thing well since 2009 — no pivots, no acquisitions
• Apache 2.0 code with an open data format
• Used by Wikimedia, EU public-sector institutions, universities worldwide, and more
• Actively looking for maintainers — contributions welcome

System Requirements

• OS: Cross-platform (requires Node.js >= 24)
• Additional Dependencies: Node.js >= 24, Git, pnpm