- A group of European tech giants is planning to launch a sovereign Office rival
- Companies and the community can all contribute to the open-source project
- It’s a fork of ONLYOFFICE – Europe had concerns about that project
“A coalition of European enterprises and community organizations” have announced a new open source office software suite positioned to take on US hyperscaler rivals like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, centered around the three core elements of documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
European tech giants like IONOS, Nextcloud, Eurostack, XWiki, OpenProject, Soverin, Abilian and BTactic are behind the initiative.
The news comes amid ongoing tension between the European Union and US Big Tech, bringing a sovereign option to support European innovation and reduce reliance on international technology companies.
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Europe plans to launch its own open-source office suite
The coalition is planning a stable release as soon as summer 2026, with a tech preview already available to try.
With the so-called Euro-Office, the suite is designed to have a familiar user interface but falls under European governance, not US governance. However, rather than setting out to target consumers, Euro-Office is being marketed as a secure, sovereign option for the public sector, education and some enterprises.
“With the geo-political developments we have seen in the last year, there is a clear need for a reliable, fully Microsoft-compatible and easy to use sovereign office solution in Europe,” IONOS CEO Achim Weiß wrote.
The announcement was shared by NextCloud, whose CEO stated that Europe already had the building blocks to create such a tool. It just lacked the “initiative to bring them together into a meaningful, comprehensive solution.”
“We welcome contributions from anyone, including individuals, companies, public organizations and non-profits,” the open-source project’s GitHub page reads.
As for its foundations, it’s not a brand-new project. Instead, it builds on existing ONLYOFFICE code but marks a fork and a steer away from that code for five separate reasons: blocked pull requests, controversial product decisions, a lack of transparency, non-open-source mobile apps and concerns about Russian ownership.
With the tech preview now open and the coalition collecting bug reports, testing common file format support and tweaking/adding features, the next few months will be about refining the products before version 1.0 is expected to land in the summer.
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