ether/etherpad

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

18507 stars · 3039 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Etherpad is a self-hosted, real-time collaborative rich-text document editor where every keystroke is attributed to an author and every revision is preserved. It runs on Node.js, scales to thousands of simultaneous editors per pad, and is extensible through hundreds of plugins including auth, video chat, and AI integrations.

Use cases

• collaboratively write documents in real time with my team
• self-host a Google Docs alternative with full data ownership
• track who wrote what in a shared document with full revision history
• draft documents with students in a classroom
• co-author research papers with visible authorship
• run a collaborative notepad for a government or public institution
• extend a collaborative editor with plugins for comments, tables, and video chat

When to choose

• you need provenance and full revision history as a core feature, not an afterthought
• you must self-host and control your data with no telemetry
• you need to scale to thousands of simultaneous editors on one document
• you want a plugin ecosystem for auth (LDAP/OAuth), AI, and media extensions

When to avoid

• you need a polished offline desktop word processor
• you want a turnkey hosted SaaS with zero server maintenance
• you need heavy layout/print typesetting rather than collaborative drafting

Facets

application · maturity active

http-server websocket plugin-system auth internationalization pdf web-framework web-development developer-tools self-hosted real-time documentation self-hosted cross-platform windows real-time-collaboration collaborative-editing rich-text-editor timeslider document-history authorship video-conferencing open-data-format nodejs web-server docker linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ether/etherpad")