Etherpad vs WPS Office
Etherpad and WPS Office are both office suite software. Etherpad is open source under Apache-2.0, with 19k GitHub stars. WPS Office is a commercial product from Kingsoft.
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 WPS Office when
- You need a free, Office-compatible suite for personal use on Windows, Mac, Linux or mobile.
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.
A free office suite with a writer, spreadsheet, presentation and PDF tools that open and save Microsoft Office formats.
Formatting and layout are basic compared with Google Docs, and the project says it is run by a small volunteer team looking for maintainers.
The free version shows ads, it comes from a Chinese vendor which matters to some organisations, and complex Office files may not round-trip cleanly.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Desktop app and mobile app
TypeScript, Node.js and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Kingsoft
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
2.7k 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.