We offer 2 different on-premise products:
Collabora Office (desktop) is the enterprise-ready edition of the world’s most widely used Open Source desktop office suite. We provide installation and administration utilities together with long term maintenance and contracted support to deliver successful deployments with expertise.
Collabora Online – Collaborative editing in the cloud, on your own terms.
There is also a comparison document between both products in our “white papers and case studies page” called “What are the differences between Collabora Online and Collabora Office?“
We offer our free version CODE. CODE is a continuously updated, rolling release where we try out our latest feature work, and has no SLA or long term support. As such, we don’t recommend CODE for business or production environments.
If you are familiar with Linux, then CODE would be like our Fedora or openSUSE version – rather than RHEL or SLES, and lots of people use it.
More information here: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
CODE is the development version of Collabora Online, used primarily for testing. Most of the core functionality will be identical between the two, and in many cases CODE will have more up-to-date functionality than Collabora Online even, but since it is a testing environment, it is not recommended for anyone who needs a stable supported release. It is perfect for testing, home use or small teams, but not recommended for a production environments.
Collabora Online is our enterprise-ready, supported version which is available as a subscription plan based on the number of users per year. This comes with SLA, maintenance, Long term support, software and security updates and much more.
You certainly can – we offer Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) entirely for free. CODE is actually the most up-to-date version of Collabora Online available, and fulfils two purposes, namely enabling many to test an use Collabora Online for free, and providing valuable feedback for our developer team. Any issues discovered can be further tested before the stable supported version is released to Collabora Online users. For more information about how to install CODE, visit our CODE page.
For test purpose, we offer our online demo (the only solution hosted by us) and CODE (on-premise), our development edition.
Our online demo is the only solution hosted by Collabora, focused on providing to our potential customers and partners an easy way to test Collabora Online with different FSS solutions such as Nextcloud or ownCloud. We don’t have a time limit on our demo account, so you can try it out as long as you like. The only limitation we have is space. A demo account has 10MB of space free for testing out your office files. So, it has only test purposes.
Collabora Productivity is the largest contributor to LibreOffice, you can check out our 2021 infographic or read more in our 10 years celebration.
Deploying Collabora Office (vs. a free LibreOffice) provides access to our huge depth of experience, combined with long term support, security maintenance, ease of deployment features (MSP patches, ADMX group policy management), and of course we love to work with our customers to help shape our product features and roadmap as we go ahead.
Collabora Office’s long term support term support and maintenance means that you don’t get forced to switch version every six months and re-certify your application.
Collabora Office allows you to file an unlimited number of Level-3 problems and tickets with Collabora which we address as part of our product management process as we work together.
For those who would like an SLA with engineers starting work on your timeline with your severity to rapidly fix any issue you may come across – we provide Level 3 (code fix) support entitlement packages on top – to provide ultimate peace of mind:
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/support-and-services/
With fixes for that being available as Collabora Office updates, our customers typically do Level 1/ Level 2 support in-house.
With Collabora you can not only achieve significant cost savings, but also get a much better product and a real product management relationship with those behind it, with a smaller company that really cares about your business.
We include Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw – for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings.
Collabora Online is available on Android, iOS and for Chromebooks. We offer an excellent responsive mode to work with Collabora Online in any browser via mobile devices.
You can download Collabora Office for Android or iOS from our main webpage.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/collabora-office/id1440482071
Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collabora.libreoffice
Latest .apk for Android: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/downloads/Collabora-Office-Android-Snapshot/
All of the key Microsoft file formats both OpenXML and legacy binary file formats – DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX as well as RTF and macro enabled versions of these (although we disable macros online). In addition it is possible to import Visio and MS Publisher files as well as many other flavors. Clearly we prefer nicely standardized Open Document formats – ODT, ODS, ODP but your Microsoft files and other formats will be well at home using Collabora Online. We spend lots of time working on improving our filters and making our interoperability excellent.
We save back to the core Microsoft file formats, as well as OpenDocument equivalents. We provide PDF download as well.
We are often asked this question, as many assume a less well-known company such as Collabora Productivity must have interoperability problems. The opposite is in fact the case. Collabora Online was born out of the LibreOffice community which in turn traces its roots back to 1985, and as such has been working with varying document formats for nearly 40 years. Furthermore, Collabora Online and the desktop application Collabora Office offer higher levels of interoperability than any other office suite we know of, as every other competitor is essentially offering two separate products for their browser and desktop experiences. Since Collabora Online is run on a server, the browser based functionality is the same as the desktop, operating more like a hyper-efficient remote desktop than a browser based application.
Whether you’re a Mac, Windows or Linux user, or you like to edit on desktop, mobile or your favourite modern browser, Collabora Online is available to offer you freedom of choice. Also, unlike the familiar alternatives, our browser-based and desktop applications have full interoperability since they share a common codebase. No more glitches when you try and edit that slide show online that you just had on your laptop.
Our subscriptions are based on a yearly price with discounts available for multi-year contracts. Please contact us to discuss details.
For Collabora Online, a user is someone who has access to use the supported and maintained software. So everyone who has an account to create, edit and collaborate on documents. An important advantage of our approach is, that we don’t charge you for the number of documents that users have open in the browser simultaneously. Another advantage is that users can also share documents with others who have no account, to co-edit or review. We do not charge for external users.
We offer a special price for educational institutions and NGOs. If you want to deploy Collabora and you are an educational institution or a NGO, please contact us to discuss details.
There are no limitations on users and you can add extra users to your subscription.
You can access Collabora Online via one of our partners or by integrating it into your own environment.
We offer an on-premise solution, so, we don’t host the product. Collabora Online is a software component which can be integrated into your web application and enables viewing and editing office documents in dozens of file formats. Collabora Online uses unparalleled file format support and rendering capabilities of LibreOffice. The way to integrate into your app is to implement WOPI support, which is very easy and straightforward, and we have the documentation to help you.
It’s the very point of Collabora Online to allow editing of documents, and nothing more – the rest, like the document storage, authentication etc. is the responsibility of the those who integrate Collabora Online into their product.
Collabora Online runs on the server in your data center, and is interacted with through a standard browser – there is no need for any client installation. It is necessary however to integrate Collabora Online with another product that will do data storage, and access control for users.
Our design requires an uninterrupted network connection to get access to your document data. This has many security advantages as outlined over more complex DRM based models – potentially allowing an admin to audit and control all access to the document perpetually. It does require a network connection however. If Collboration is not required, then downloading via a sync and share integration (eg. ownCloud, Nexcloud, pydio, Seafile and many others) makes sense – then you can edit off-line and sync when you return.
The server requires the ability to run a Linux system, VM or docker container. How much server hardware you require depends on how many concurrent users you expect – normally there is some significant capacity factor between users and concurrent users. After scaling for that – we expect 10 users per CPU thread, and 50Mb of RAM per user, with another 1Gb for system, along with around 100kbit of B/W per user.
Absolutely. Collabora does not provide any hosted solution – we provide only the software, support, maintenance and a product management relationship to our customers and partners.
Users need to host this themselves on premise or in the cloud. A key feature of an on premise install is that we can protect all of your data, processing, documents and keep them all on-premise, ideally on your own hardware. This is great to ensure that all your data is protected and retained inside the right jurisdiction and control – but also, as compared to public clouds located in a jurisdiction, we can ensure that no-one from the outside world is using the same hardware – and potentially exploiting one of the new Intel bugs to exfiltrate it to some other jurisdiction. Indeed – with Collabora Online – suitably configured we can ensure that the only document data that leaves your data-center is the screen content (which is hard too avoid) with added water-marking containing the users’ name. It is possible for us to disable print, download, copy/paste, etc. for browser users too.
Absolutely. Collabora does not provide any hosted solution – we provide only the software, support, maintenance and a product management relationship to our customers and partners.
Users need to host this themselves on premise or in the cloud. A key feature of an on premise install is that we can protect all of your data, processing, documents and keep them all on-premise, ideally on your own hardware. This is great to ensure that all your data is protected and retained inside the right jurisdiction and control – but also, as compared to public clouds located in a jurisdiction, we can ensure that no-one from the outside world is using the same hardware – and potentially exploiting one of the new Intel bugs to exfiltrate it to some other jurisdiction. Indeed – with Collabora Online – suitably configured we can ensure that the only document data that leaves your data-center is the screen content (which is hard too avoid) with added water-marking containing the users’ name. It is possible for us to disable print, download, copy/paste, etc. for browser users too.
We have an admin-console that allow an admin to see all users currently connected, what documents are open, their resource usage, and graphing of recent resource usage. In addition it is possible to connect monitors to external services and feed this as live information to those.
We release a minor upgrade roughly every month. We have major releases every six months or so. Users are supported on each major version for three years – so you have plenty of time to choose when you want to update between major versions to stay secure.
All of the code in Collabora Online is Open Source, we contribute that to, and work very closely with the LibreOffice project. As such, our code is mostly licensed under the MPLv2. That means that you can go and build it yourself from source, and maintain that if you want. This is somewhat similar to doing your own electric wiring at home, and/or your own plumbing of gas boilers.
For these cases – many people prefer to have someone experienced and certified to do that and support it. That is particularly so when down-time can harm others, it may even be mandatory to have your home work checked by an expert.
As such Collabora sells branded, supported binary versions that are easy to install, paired with a Service Level Agreement and a product management relationship so we can focus our roadmap on your problems.
Yes! Very. Short of not storing any data (the D in GDPR) ever, it is difficult to imagine a more GDPR-compliant online office suite than Collabora Online. GDPR regulations are numerous, and we have gone in to the topic in greater detail here, but in summary, many organisations that care most about data security, including government agencies, universities, even military organisations are now using Collabora Online.
There is no formal limit here. Ultimately performance tails off as more users are in-use concurrently, as you might expect – depending on server resources – it is normal to have 20 people in a collaborative meeting session, which works well however.
Certainly many of our integrations allow sharing of links which any user can use to collaborative edit with.
Nextcloud have integrated their talk product in a way that allows both chat and video conferencing alongside Collabora Online. ownCloud similarly use RocketChat, and other partners have their own integrations.
It is possible to enable red-lining of text documents and spreadsheets, and then very powerful change tracking, history based views, and control of edits are possible. In addition – we auto-save frequently and many integrations provide the ability to view previous revisions.
You do not have to learn a whole new office suite, Collabora Online has a familiar look and feel with the same shortcuts and commands you’d use in other online document editors.
At Collabora Online we are working to bring the best digital experience we can to all our users, regardless of their abilities or challenges.
Find out more about the latest accessibility features to enable the best user experience for everyone.
Our sdk explains how to customise Collabora Online to fit your working environment, including how to change the theming to create a branded experience for your users, among other useful documentation to deepen your integration. You’ll also find installation guides, troubleshooting and step-by-step tutorials. https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/docs/theming.html
Absolutely, we have a huge programming API surface based on the existing LibreOffice UNO APIs. Bespoke uses of Collabora Online can introduce buttons, and rich scripting interactions to communicate from client to server, using the existing standard UNO APIs for LibreOffice.
Rather a large number – you can see a list of partners on our website here.
Yes – in fact, Collabora is meant to be integrated into existing workflows and systems – think of it as a piece of a puzzle, and not the whole puzzle itself.
Our sdk explains how to customise Collabora Online to fit your working environment, including how to change the theming to create a branded experience for your users, among other useful documentation to deepen your integration. You’ll also find installation guides, troubleshooting and step-by-step tutorials.
https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/docs/theming.html
We offer three main types of support for users: Enterprise Support, Code Fix Support and Community Help.
Naturally we offer many forms of support in addition to an SLA, and we offer these through our many partners too – so you can buy easily through any one of them and get a seamless support experience.
We also provide professional services to implement bespoke features or integrations to your timeline. While we allow our customers to file as many tickets as they want, we also provide a separate SLA on ticket fixing – such that they can get engineers starting work rapidly on their problems if they so desire.
As an Open Source company we’re eager to find the best ways to work with our customers to make their document editing and collaboration experience as smooth as possible, and to ease their migration towards a better, more responsive supplier.
How fast you can get one of our in-house engineers to help you largely depends on the severity of your case.
A medium-level severity case has an initial response of 2 working days (from 9 to 5), our engineers’ weekly work effort during business hours that is put into solving your issue, and communication/feedback given once a week.
If your case requires a quicker approach, you will get an answer from us within 1 working day (from 9-5), daily effort from our in-house engineers to fix your issue ASAP (during business hours only), and feedback from us once every 2-3 working days.
Check out the starting points for new developers on the project — usually with code pointers helping you to locate the area to hack on easily.
Our target are companies that look for a secure online office suite, which they can host themselves, in their desired solution, on a private or public cloud, without any vendor lock-in. The biggest issue for most companies to not use Office 365 or Google Docs is that they have to store the data on their servers – servers they don’t control and don’t know who are being shared with. In certain industries, like Pharmaceutical / Medical, Health or Finance / Banking / Insurance / Legal and/or Military this is crucial.
