Initially posted on 2019-07-19
Clearly you want a high availability setup, not only to provide extra scalability, but also to provide redundancy against fault. Collabora Office has a clean and attractive architecture – which scales with your routing network:
Contrasting the situation with OnlyOffice, we see a perplexingly more complex environment (in as far as we can understand the documentation):
It is unclear if Ascencio provide licensing and supported versions of Postgress, Redis, RabbitMQ – or if this must be purchased and provided separately. An HA setup can reduce the number of points of failure, but in the event of any failure having all of the servers coupled by so many shared protocols from database, to NFS, to a message bus – brings great potential for cascading failures.
It is always a good idea to know your suppliers and where they are based. Where does your software come from? Is the development process transparent? Can you see the code you are installing? Here is a comparison table to help you decide.
| Collabora Productivity is headquartered in the UK, with staff working in the open from around the world (but primarily in Europe), from home. This gives great distributed robustness against pandemics and political risks. | OnlyOffice is created primarily by a team in Russia, development is done in-house and the open portion of this published periodically. Based in Nizhny Novgorod | R7-Office is a Russian version based on the same software and shares development resource to meet Russia’s Import Substitution requirements. Based in Nizhny Novgorod. |
| All code is Open Source. | Open Core i.e. open source code with opaque proprietary binaries. | Proprietary – built with some Open Source components |
| Ownership: Collabora Productivity is controlled by Michael Meeks (UK) and Philippe Kalaf (Canada) | Ascensio System SIA (registered in Latvia) has a single beneficial owner Lev Bannov (Russia) | Founded by Lev Bannov (Russia) |
As an interesting aside, the name R7 is derived from the world’s first intercontinental ballistic thermonuclear missile which also launched Sputnik.
Collabora Online uses an adapted versions of the WOPI standard protocol, and we can use data stores which can provide their own policies. When your document data comes down into Collabora Online we isolate and protect your document in your on-premise server inside a series of concentric security onion shells.
OnlyOffice has a model whereby it distributes your document in its entirety to all editors of the document; whatever their permissions their browser has the complete content. Collabora in contrast keeps your document data on the server, and can send only tiled images to the client. These can also be watermarked with the viewer’s name. With granular permissions to restrict copy & paste, download, print and so on – Collabora protects your documents like no other.
All Collabora Online editing happens immediately, and each user shares the same document concurrently. That allows just one document to be edited interactively in real-time, with no extra lag or latency to see other users’ typing. It also avoids locking of paragraphs in text documents, giving a great freedom to all editors.
Collabora has worked with AMD for many years to build some extreme performance, optimized for Ryzen into Collabora Online. This lets us take advantage of threading during document load, save, and importantly calculation.
Collabora Online does a great job in handling all sorts of files and file formats. More than any other office application. And still improving – thanks to a great community customers world-wide. We know we’re not always fully perfect, but look at this Word document, of which header and numbering shows as original in Collabora Online, but broken in the product that promises 100% compatibility…
On the left, there is the original document as shown in Microsoft Word. It has embedded fonts, image wrapping, comments and more. On the right side, you can mouseover to compare how Collabora Online and OnlyOffice handle the lay out, fonts, image wrapping, and comments.
This word document with a chart, misses the charts legend in Only Office. Here the same file in the three applications.
In this legacy Word document, images, frames, tables combined, you’d be pleased to work with Collabora Online.
Details are important in attractive presentations. So you surely want image transparency to be shown!
Details are important in attractive presentations. So you surely want image transparency to be shown!
In Collabora Online filling cells behaves as you expect:
Showing the green ticks at the proper position
With bullet points from Powerpoint displayed correctly
The height of the water mark in Only Office is clearly stretched.
The following Excel document has vertical text. Which is correctly rendered in Collabora Online whereas Only Office fails to do the proper thing.
Collabora Suite offers powerful features combined in one place. A myriad of common actions are available and easy to access both online and on Desktop while keeping your document visible and centred. As is shown in the example of formatting spreadsheets.
The following image shows the page formatting of a spreadsheet. Collabora Online offers the same workflow that you know, borrowing from the desktop and keeping the same user experience paradigm across different applications and different devices.
Collabora Online allows users to easily set all footer information in presentations. The user can change that directly if for example title, place or date of the presentation have changed.
Spreadsheets with VBA code can perform nice tasks. Look at this example of Collabora Office and a program that doesn’t handle it.
You expect that users can work with Microsoft format forms, and are not allowed to enter protected parts of documents…
Presentations and other documents can be saved as ‘finalized’, as read-only documents. Whereas Collabora Online nicely obeys this, OnlyOffice fails to handle these documents securely.
Collabora offers a wide range of cool slide transitions!
Unlimited Tabs, unlimited connections
Collabora Online is based on the active, successful and open LibreOffice project. Collabora contributes all of its developments and changes to the LibreOffice Technology as part of our ‘Open First’ philosophy, as well as working in the open around Collabora Online. Collabora is a major contributor to the LibreOffice project, which is nonetheless a diverse and active community.
OnlyOffice is produced by a single company with a small engineering team. In recent times Only Office opened some parts of its code – while keeping some of their work proprietary as a typical open core approach. The absence of public commit activity is a cause for concern – having a clear stream of individuals committing differentiated and self-contained improvements is a vital function of people’s confidence in the sustainability of the project.
A numerical view can help to contrast the trajectory of these two code-bases. (Numbers correct at time of writing.)
Github statistics
LibreOffice: hundreds of contributors, from all over the world. Huge, diverse and active community.
OnlyOffice: 13 contributors to the core. Commits are only from OnlyOffice employees, with no community contribution.
Translations
LibreOffice: 100+ languages. 60 with 75% or more translated.
OnlyOffice: 20 languages. Only 12 with 75% or more translated.
Events
LibreOffice: has and attends many community events from conferences to hack-fests each year. LibreOffice is backed by The Document Foundation – a vendor neutral non-profit (Stiftung) incorporated in Berlin, Germany. You can read about all the good things we’re doing around the world from Japan to Brazil and everywhere in between: in the annual report. Collabora plays an important part at these events, giving talks at many and sponsoring some.
OnlyOffice: There are no known OnlyOffice community events, the project rarely attends traditional Open Source gatherings or presents outside of business conferences.
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