ONLYOFFICE

Overview

ONLYOFFICE is an office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA, a company headquartered in Riga, Latvia. The project began in 2009 as TeamLab, an internal team collaboration platform with social-networking features, and was rebranded to ONLYOFFICE in July 2014, at which point its source code was released publicly. The community edition, which includes Desktop Editors and Docs, is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). Ascensio System SIA also sells a separately licensed Enterprise edition with additional management and support features; this page covers the open source community edition only.

ONLYOFFICE was among the first office suites to build browser-based document editors using the HTML5 Canvas element, an approach that helped it achieve close compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX) alongside native support for OpenDocument formats. The Desktop Editors application, which bundles the document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors into an offline desktop client, is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, with Linux packages distributed as deb, rpm, Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage. As of mid-2026 the project is on the 9.x release series, with new versions published regularly on GitHub alongside a corresponding changelog.

Key Features

• Office format compatibility — Editors for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that read and write DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and OpenDocument formats
• Real-time co-editing — Multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously, with tracked changes, comments, and version history when connected to ONLYOFFICE Docs or a Community Server
• Offline desktop client — Desktop Editors work without a server connection and sync changes when reconnected to a compatible document server
• Plugin system — Extensible via a JavaScript-based plugin API, with plugins available for translation, OCR, Speech, and third-party cloud storage integrations
• Forms and macros — Support for fillable PDF/OFORM forms and macro automation
• Cross-platform — Native builds for Linux, Windows, and macOS

Use Cases

• Teams and organizations — Self-hosted collaborative document editing without relying on a proprietary cloud suite
• Privacy-conscious users — Editing and co-authoring documents on infrastructure they control, rather than a third-party’s servers
• Office document interoperability — Opening and editing DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files created in Microsoft Office without a subscription
• Developers — Extending the editors with custom plugins or embedding them into other web applications

Who It’s For

ONLYOFFICE suits individuals, businesses, and public-sector organizations that need a full-featured, Microsoft Office-compatible editing suite and prefer to self-host or use an open source alternative rather than a subscription-based cloud office product.