Office Suites

Why Self-Host Your Office Suite?

Commercial office platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 process every document, spreadsheet, and presentation on servers you do not control. For organizations handling confidential data — legal documents, financial models, internal strategy — this means sensitive information passes through third-party infrastructure subject to foreign jurisdiction, data mining, and potential subpoenas. Self-hosted office suites give you the same collaborative editing capabilities while keeping documents entirely within your network.

OnlyOffice and Nextcloud Office provide full-featured document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors that run on your own server with real-time collaboration. CryptPad takes this further by encrypting documents end-to-end, so even the server administrator cannot read the content. For spreadsheet-heavy workflows, NocoDB and Teable offer Airtable-style database-spreadsheet hybrids that replace both Google Sheets and Airtable with a single self-hosted tool. Baserow and Grist provide similar visual database interfaces with different architectural approaches — Baserow focuses on no-code simplicity while Grist combines spreadsheets with Python formulas for power users.

The cost argument is straightforward: Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 charge per user per month, and those costs compound as your team grows. A self-hosted office suite on a single server can support dozens or hundreds of users at a fixed infrastructure cost. Mathesar adds PostgreSQL-backed data management, and IronCalc provides a lightweight spreadsheet engine for environments where a full office suite is unnecessary.