Docs

Overview:

Docs is an open-source collaborative text editor designed for teams, public organizations, companies, and open communities to write, organize, and share knowledge together in real time. It positions itself as an alternative to tools like Notion or Google Docs, with a focus on data ownership and self-hosting. The editor supports rich-text and Markdown writing with a block-based system, live collaboration features like cursors and comments, and hierarchical knowledge management through subpages and searchable content.

Core Features:

• Rich-text & Markdown editing: Supports writing with formatting, slash commands, and a block system, with optional offline editing.

• Live collaboration: Includes real-time cursors, user presence, comments, and document sharing.

• Access control: Provides granular permissions for managing who can view or edit documents.

• Knowledge organization: Enables creating subpages within a hierarchy and offers full-text search across content.

• Export & Import: Supports exporting documents to .docx, .odt, and .pdf formats, and importing from .docx and .md.

• AI writing helpers: Optionally includes features to rewrite, summarize, translate, and fix typos in text.

Use Cases:

• Government agencies and public organizations that need to collaborate on documents while maintaining full data ownership through self-hosting.

• Teams looking for an open-source alternative to Notion or Google Docs for structured note-taking and knowledge base creation.

• Organizations that require granular access control over shared documents to manage permissions for different team members or departments.

• Developers and system administrators who need to deploy a self-hosted collaborative document editor using Kubernetes, Docker Compose, or other community methods.

Why It Matters:

As a self-hosted, open-source alternative to mainstream collaborative editors, Docs gives organizations direct control over their document data and infrastructure. It is developed as a joint public-sector initiative by the French and German governments, which emphasizes its focus on interoperability and data sovereignty. The editor integrates a real-time collaboration engine powered by Yjs and supports both simple and hierarchical document structures, without requiring users to rely on proprietary cloud services.