Everything you need to know about Euro-Office, Europe's open source alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs – including features, launch dates, and how to access it

Europe's rival to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, Euro-Office, is set to start shipping next week as part of the bloc's move towards sovereign technology.

First announced in March, Euro-Office has involved a collaboration between a number of European companies and organizations, including IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian, BTactic, OpenXchange and Office.eu.

It's a web-based editor integrated into other products that handle documents, for example file-sharing solutions, online wikis, or project management tools.

It allows users to view, edit and work with others on spreadsheets, documents, presentations and PDF files, as well as other file formats including DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, ODT, ODS, ODP, and TXT.

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Users can edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentation files with others in real time and save the document back to the application used to open it, or download in various file formats.

The inspiration behind Euro-Office

The Euro-Office project comes as part of a growing trend to try and reduce EU reliance on US software.

The new office suite will be released as an integration in solutions from participating companies from the start, including the latest Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring version.

IONOS Managed Nextcloud customers will follow, with the roll-out to IONOS’ Nextcloud Workspace offering planned for later this summer.

French company XWiki expects to integrate it in the fourth quarter of this year, while Netherlands-based Office.eu also plans to roll it out.

“Our top priority was to provide a version that people could actually work with. First, we had to clean up the code, implement some security updates, and integrate Euro-Office with existing solutions,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud.

"The next step is to work on the desktop and mobile apps and integration features. For a truly sovereign solution, it is also important to fully support open standards such as ODF formats, and this will be on top of the agenda for the next release."

In order to make it as easy as possible for contributors to join the open source project, automated testing has been set up, code comments have been translated into English, documentation has been improved, and the code has been cleaned up.

Controversy surrounding Euro-Office

There's a bit of controversy around the project. Euro-Office is based on the code of open source productivity suite OnlyOffice.

In March, project maintainers issued a statement accusing Euro-Office of violating the software’s licensing terms and international intellectual property law.

OnlyOffice is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL v3), with a few additional requirements, OnlyOffice said.

These include preserving OnlyOffice branding in derivative works, providing proper attribution to the original technology, and fully complying with open source distribution obligations.

"These conditions are not optional. They are a fundamental part of using the software legally and ethically," the firm said.

"Any argument that a modified or derivative version of the software may be distributed under a “pure” AGPLv3 license, excluding the additional conditions imposed pursuant to Section 7, is legally unfounded."

Euro-Office is available on GitHub, here.

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