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Euro-Office

European office suite

Euro-Office is an open-source, European-backed office suite for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It is a fork of the ONLYOFFICE codebase, licensed under AGPL-3.0, and aims to be a sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Euro-Office was started in March 2026 by a coalition of European cloud and collaboration vendors; the public release (launch) followed on 9 June 2026 as a free download from the project's public GitHub repositories. The project is backed by, among others, IONOS, Nextcloud, EuroStack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian and BTactic, joined by Open-Xchange and Office.eu. This page sets out what Euro-Office technically is, where it comes from, and where it sits between Microsoft compatibility and digital sovereignty.

Origin and codebase

Euro-Office is not a fresh build but a fork of ONLYOFFICE, the open-source office suite from the Latvia-registered vendor Ascensio System SIA. ONLYOFFICE itself is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and is known for its high fidelity to the Microsoft formats (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX). The coalition behind Euro-Office justifies the fork with concerns about the original project's ownership structure and a wish for more transparent, European-controlled development. One precise point follows from that heritage: Euro-Office is OOXML-strong at its core and supports the OpenDocument Format (ODT, ODS, ODP) alongside the Microsoft formats; broadening that ODF support is explicitly on the project roadmap.

What the suite offers

Euro-Office provides web-based editors for the three classic document types and is designed for embedding into other platforms rather than primarily for the single workstation:

  • Text, spreadsheets, presentations. Editors for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, plus PDF and fillable forms.
  • Real-time collaboration. Several people edit the same document at the same time, through the browser.
  • Format compatibility. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX on the Microsoft side, ODT, ODS, ODP on the open side, plus PDF. The switch from Microsoft 365 stays familiar for end users.
  • Integration, not an island. The suite is built as an embeddable document server that slots into existing platforms such as file and collaboration services.

The intended setting is public authorities, education systems and regulated industries that want to move away from US productivity clouds without imposing a break in workflow on their end users.

Licence and governance

Euro-Office is fully licensed under AGPL-3.0. The AGPL requires changes to the code to be disclosed even when the software is only operated as a network service; for a server-side office suite that is the decisive licence clause. The project is carried by a coalition of European companies rather than a single vendor. The coalition argues that combining European corporate control with open licensing addresses sovereignty and transparency questions differently than either purely proprietary US suites or small, isolated open-source projects.

Euro-Office, Office EU and ONLYOFFICE

Three similar-sounding names are easy to confuse. The distinction matters for a clean procurement decision:

flowchart LR
    OO[ONLYOFFICE<br/>Ascensio System SIA<br/>AGPL-3.0] --> EO[Euro-Office<br/>European fork<br/>AGPL-3.0]
    OE[Office.eu / Office EU<br/>commercial cloud suite] -. Partner network .-> EO
    EO --> SELF[Self-host<br/>or embed]
    OE --> HOST[Hosted service<br/>from EU data centres]
    SELF --> CHOICE[Control over operations and data]
    HOST --> CHOICE

ONLYOFFICE is the technical basis. Euro-Office is the European fork of it. Office EU (at office.eu) is a separate, commercial cloud service that is also a partner in the Euro-Office coalition; it is not the same product as Euro-Office. Euro-Office itself is software, a fork of ONLYOFFICE that organisations self-host or embed; where the data sits depends on whoever operates the software. For a self-hosted, embeddable component, Euro-Office is the choice; for a ready-hosted service from EU data centres, the hosted Office EU offering is the alternative.

Document data back within the organisation's span of control

Euro-Office is a case study in how digital sovereignty becomes concrete. Editing documents in a US productivity cloud potentially hands personal data into a foreign legal order; where the US Cloud Act applies, a US provider can be compelled to disclose data even when it sits in the EU. An open-source suite operated in the EU moves these data flows back under the organisation's own span of control and eases compliance with the revised Swiss Data Protection Act (revFADP). That is the lever that turns Euro-Office from a mere Microsoft alternative into a sovereignty tool.

For Swiss organisations, though, Euro-Office remains a building-block decision, not a ready-made Swiss offering: the coalition is EU-centred, and operation on Swiss infrastructure is the operating organisation's own responsibility. A sober assessment against the established Microsoft 365 world spans migration effort and compatibility limits as well as the evidence-and-supply-chain side of an open-source rollout. As a more mature open-source desktop alternative, LibreOffice sits alongside it, taking a different technical route and natively built on ODF.

Where the limits are

  • Young project. The public release arrived in June 2026. Maturity, migration tooling and long-term maintenance still have to prove themselves in operation.
  • OOXML heritage, not ODF-native. The strength lies in Microsoft compatibility; ODF support is growing but is not the historical core. For an ODF-native tool, LibreOffice is worth evaluating alongside it.
  • EU-, not Switzerland-centred. The coalition and its data centres are EU-oriented. Swiss data residency and operation are a separate task.
  • Embedding as the target picture. Euro-Office is meant as an integrable document server. The turnkey single-workstation comfort of a ready-hosted suite is a different product promise.

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