- A group of European tech giants plans to launch a sovereign Office rival
- Companies and the community can contribute to the open source project.
- It’s a fork of ONLYOFFICE: Europe had concerns about that project.
“A coalition of European companies and community organizations” has announced a new open source office software suite positioned to take on American hyperscaler rivals such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, focusing on the three core elements of documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
European technology giants such as IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian and BTactic are behind the initiative.
The news comes amid ongoing tension between the European Union and American Big Tech, providing a sovereign option to support European innovation and reduce dependence on international technology companies.
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Europe plans to launch its own open source office suite
The coalition is planning a stable launch for summer 2026, with a technology preview already available for testing.
Called Euro-Office, the suite is designed to have a familiar user interface, but falls under European governance, not American governance. However, rather than targeting consumers, Euro-Office is marketed as a secure, sovereign option for the public sector, education and some businesses.
“With the geopolitical events we have seen over the past year, there is a clear need for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible and easy-to-use sovereign office solution in Europe,” wrote IONOS CEO Achim Weiß.
The announcement was shared by NextCloud, whose CEO stated that Europe already had the basic elements to create such a tool. It simply lacked the “initiative to bring them together into a comprehensive and meaningful solution.”
“We welcome contributions from anyone, including individuals, businesses, public organizations, and nonprofits,” the open source project’s GitHub page reads.
As for its bases, it is not a new project. Instead, it builds on ONLYOFFICE’s existing code, but marks a fork and detour from that code for five different reasons: blocked pull requests, controversial product decisions, lack of transparency, mobile apps that are not open source, and concerns about Russian ownership.
With the technical preview now open and the coalition collecting bug reports, testing support for common file formats, and modifying/adding features, the next few months will be spent refining the products before version 1.0 is expected to arrive in the summer.
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