// the find
ether/etherpad
Etherpad: A modern really-real-time collaborative document editor.
Etherpad is a self-hosted, real-time collaborative text editor that has been running in production since 2009. It's the go-to choice for organizations that can't or won't send their documents through US-cloud SaaS — EU public sector, newsrooms, universities under Google Workspace bans. The plugin architecture lets you bolt on auth, video, markdown, comments, and more without touching core.
Per-keystroke authorship attribution with a timeslider that lets you scrub the full document history character-by-character — this is genuinely rare and useful for editorial and legal contexts. The Easysync OT algorithm is well-documented (actual PDFs in the repo) and has been battle-tested at scale. The admin UI was recently rewritten as a proper React/TypeScript SPA with a type-safe API and live settings editing — the codebase is not stagnant. Privacy stance is unusually honest: PRIVACY.md names the two outbound network calls the core makes and tells you exactly how to disable them.
Still depends on Node.js and a plugin ecosystem spread across hundreds of separate npm packages of wildly varying quality and maintenance — your production instance will drift from the documented happy path the moment you add plugins. The default database ('dirtyDB') is a flat file that will quietly corrupt under load; the README warns about this but it's a footgun for anyone who doesn't read carefully. Authentication out of the box is either nothing or a plaintext password in settings.json — you need external plugins (ep_openid_connect, ep_hash_auth) to get anything production-worthy, and the plugin compatibility matrix is not well-documented. Actively seeking maintainers, which is an honest signal but also a real risk for a project your org depends on.