Etherpad is a real-time collaborative document editor that runs on your own server.
Etherpad solves the problem of collaborative document editing while preserving authorship and history. Every keystroke is attributed to its author, and the complete revision history is accessible through a timeslider that lets users scrub through changes character by character. Author colors make collaboration visible at a glance. The tool runs entirely on infrastructure you control, with no telemetry or mandatory cloud services. AI integration is available only as an optional plugin that you install and configure yourself, pointed at a model of your choice.
Organizations should choose Etherpad if they need collaborative editing under their own governance, particularly in contexts where data sovereignty or GDPR compliance matters. It suits public-sector institutions, universities, newsrooms, civic-tech projects, and self-hosters who cannot or prefer not to use US-cloud SaaS. The tool has been used since 2009 by Wikimedia, governments, educational institutions, and investigative journalism teams. It scales to thousands of simultaneous editors per pad and is translated into over a hundred languages. The data format is open, full export is built in, and the codebase is extensible through plugins.
The project maintains a small volunteer team and actively seeks additional maintainers. Maintainers typically respond to new issues and pull requests within a few days. Work in the issue tracker is dominated by feature requests, bug reports, and items waiting on testing.
