Etherpad vs Microsoft 365
Etherpad and Microsoft 365 are both office suite software. Etherpad is open source under Apache-2.0, with 19k GitHub stars. Microsoft 365 is a commercial product from Microsoft.
Which to pick
- Pick Etherpad when
- You want a self-hosted shared notepad for meetings, drafting or public-sector work where authorship and history matter more than rich formatting.
- Pick Microsoft 365 when
- A business of any size that relies on Excel and Office files, Windows PCs or Microsoft identity and security tooling.
Side by side
A web-based real-time collaborative text editor that colours each author's text, keeps every revision and lets you replay a document's history with a timeslider.
Subscription bundle of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Exchange email, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, with identity management through Entra ID.
Formatting and layout are basic compared with Google Docs, and the project says it is run by a small volunteer team looking for maintainers.
Licence tiers are confusing, admin is complex, and prices rise regularly with bundled AI.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
TypeScript, Node.js and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
19k GitHub stars
10k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 15 years ago, latest release v3.3.13.
Not known
Other comparisons
More office suites and document editors
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.