Category: tech

A Student/Worker’s Guide to European Google Docs / Office 365 Alternatives

What is it like to study or work professionally in 2025? Doesn’t it always involve the same setup?

You work from project to project in shifting groups. Each group shares a folder with Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and a host of other files. Multiple people can edit the same file at the same time. Most of the time you do this in your browser, but often you want to look up or edit something on your phone.

The Problem

For this kind of work, the world has gravitated towards Google Docs/Workspaces and Microsoft 365. But as of May 2025, this feels unsustainable. Let me state the obvious reasons:

  • As the saying goes, “If it is free then you are the product”. It is a bad thing to work in tools that track and analyze you and then sell the data or use it to sell ads to you. We should demand basic privacy from our tools.
  • The tech giants have too much power, and we should give them less.
  • Yes: Google and Microsoft are US companies, so all your emails and documents on their services are immediately available to a slew of agencies who can scan them for keywords, and your access is not guaranteed. As privacy activist Max Schrems will tell you, local law like the European GDPR does not protect your data from US companies.

How can we work around this?

Requirements for a Google Docs/Microsoft 365 Alternative

I wrote this guide because I couldn’t find one and had to test a number of solutions for myself. I think good guides are absent because of confusion about what the requirements are. Discussions of Google Docs alternatives tend to cover mostly the nearly irrelevant (email services with notetaking) or the technically onerous (“next, set up the reverse proxy”). That’s not it. To do our project work, this is what we require:

  1. Editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in the browser.
  2. Sharing documents and folders with simultaneous editing.
  3. A service that you can sign up for easily.
  4. Free and paid tiers with transparent pricing
  5. Generous storage for large projects.
  6. Placement in a European GDPR-covered setting (no US or US-owned companies, sorry).
  7. Preferred: No ads or tracking. (We should be willing to pay for our tools.)
  8. Preferred: App for editing on the fly.
  9. Preferred: Network drive (like Google Drive / Dropbox).
  10. Optional: Zero-Knowledge encryption, meaning that the company cannot read your documents, even if they want to.
  11. Optional: Integration with email.

I have tested the relevant offerings that I am aware of, uploading Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, and trying out sharing features. As far as I can tell, these are the worthy European Docs/Office alternatives that fit the requirements. I am not receiving any payment for these recommendations, and I may update this list if things change.

Most Complete Package: kSuite

kSuite docsGood:
-Fully featured office suite and email
-Good sharing
-Network drive in pro tier
-Extras like video conferencing and a WeTransfer clone
-Best email import
-Mobile app for editing
-Europe-based AI option

Bad: 
-Can be rough around the edges; occasional messages in French, and network drive sometimes needed restarting
-No zero-knowledge encryption

Pricing:
Free tier: 20/15 GB.
My kSuite: €2/month for 1TB
kSuite Pro: €6.58/month for 3TB and network drive
kSuite Pro: €12.42/month for 6TB and network drive

kDrive app editing word document I think kSuite from Swiss Infomaniak is the most complete Docs/Office alternative. It has good Word/Excel/PowerPoint compatibility, emails, and sharing of folders/documents including no-login editing (which I use in teaching contexts), in addition to video conferencing and Slack-like channels.

Here, I have uploaded a moderately complex Word document from an article about the Commodore 64, which includes images and an Excel vector diagram. It works surprisingly well, but this is generally true for most of the services, as they basically use either Collabora Office or OnlyOffice (this one) as underlying tech.

Also consider the app editing the same document. kSuite is not as polished as Google Docs, but it is a serviceable and quite complete platform that you can run whole projects or organizations on.

Simple and Incomplete: Mailbox.org

Mailbox.org logo

Mailbox.org file editingGood:
-Office suite and email with collaboration functionality
-Video conferencing 
-Basic Zero-knowledge encryption for selected files
-Includes email

Bad: 
-Office compatibility is incomplete
-Tiny storage allowances
-A little rough, sometimes switches to German
-No free tier means all collaborators must be on paid plans
-App does not allow editing

Pricing:
Standard: €3/month for 10/5 GB.
Premium: €9/month for 50GB.

Mailbox.org is the unfancy package that isn’t quite there. It features basic video meeting facilities, calendar, and tasks, and there is a Zero-Knowledge encryption facility for encrypting individual files with an extra password. But for practical work, the lack of a free tier means that all collaborators must be on a paid plan, the storage space is quite small, and the app does not allow editing. Also, as the image shows, the editor cannot show complicated word diagrams. Mailbox has been around for a while, but it is not quite there.

Cleanest Office Package, but with Trackers: Drime

Drime_logo

Drime file managerGood:
-Office suite with clean & modern design
-Nice group-oriented features
-Generous storage
-PDF and video editing

Bad:
-Lots of trackers on both website and app
-App only allows previews, no editing
-No email service
-Promised network drive not there yet
-No Zero-knowledge encryption

Pricing:
Free tier: 20 GB.
Starter: €2.99/month for 500GB
Essentials: €5.5/month for 2TB
Essentials: €10.99/month for 3TB
Advanced: €19.99/month for 6TB
(Plans allow multiple users.)

Drime is a new service with a clean and modern look, as well as good onboarding and well-designed groupware features. If you want an easy-to-use office package without email, this is a good bet. Office compatibility is identical to kSuite because it uses the same underlying software (OnlyOffice), but the general design is a bit more polished.

My main reservations are first that Drime collects lots of data on both app and website, (for all solutions tested I am going by the official declaration on Google Play, as well as by reporting from DuckDuckGo and Privacy Badger), and second that the app only allows browsing, not editing. If you can live with those caveats, Drime is a good option.

Most Secure: CryptPad

CryptPad word editorGood:
-Office suite with clean, modern design
-Also diagrams, Kanban (like Trello), and whiteboard
-Zero-knowledge encryption
-Good sharing options

Bad: 
-No email service
-No app and no network drive
-Small storage plans, so this is just for your documents
-Two-step upload procedure

Pricing:
Free tier: 1GB
Duo: €10/month for 25GB
Team: €15/month for 75GB
(Duo and Team and have multiple users.)

If you are sufficiently worried about privacy, CryptPad is the package to get. This is a nicely designed browser-only package with Zero-knowledge encryption. To explain: the company’s server stores your files in encrypted form without the key to decrypting it, so in theory the company cannot share your files even if subpoenaed. I am assuming that your interest in this feature comes from a good place.

CryptPad Office compatibility is good (again, this is OnlyOffice under the hood), and sharing options are quite sophisticated, including time-limited sharing. There are also interesting options for shared whiteboards and Kanban (Trello-like), so this is a quite complete package for collaboration.

Bonus: Email services

Though we are used to it, we don’t have to get our office and emails from the same provider, and for the email-less packages, a separate email provider is necessary anyway. Most privacy-conscious users swear by Swiss Proton which also features a Drive and VPN, or German Tuta. Both are zero-knowledge encrypted for maximum privacy. Encryption comes with the tradeoff that search is slow and poor because the server cannot search through your encrypted mails.

Furthermore, email import is shaky, not for technical reasons, it just is. Proton can import large email archives, but they decided that multi-level Gmail labels were not important, so a well-organized Gmail archive will end up jumbled (nested labels are not rocket science, people). Tuta’s email import also does not work well with Gmail labels and struggles with large archives. kSuite’s import was much better in this regard.

Recommendations

There it is. A complete package, some office-only packages, some very polished, some a little rough. One with many trackers, some with encryption. Some writers will notice that all the screenshots show the whitespace between pages, but you cannot hide it in any of the packages! This drives me a little crazy, having participated in the decade-long struggle to get this feature into OpenOffice.

The packages are much better than I had hoped, but there are obvious opportunities: What if kSuite added encryption for selected folders? What if Drime got rid of the trackers and added encryption? What if there was an encrypted mail service that properly imported Gmail? For now, I believe there are three main options, depending on your needs:

  • The complete package: kSuite, which includes email and collaboration.
  • The polished office suite without email, but with trackers: Drime.
  • The encrypted and truly privacy-conscious combination: CryptPad + Proton.

It is an individual choice whether to stick with the big tech platforms. Also consider how you feel about tracking, encryption, and convenience. I just hope to have contributed to making the choice easier. Over to you.

 

PS. If there is interest, I may publish a how-to-guide about practically moving your documents away from Google/Microsoft.

PPS. I excluded some services from the survey: Zoho Office (not based in Europe), Nextcloud Office, OnlyOffice, and Collabora Online (these are platforms, but not oriented towards end-users), Nuclino and Cryptee (cool, but not based on office formats). Proton Docs (more like Wordpad than an office suite). I also did try running a Nextcloud server, but it’s just too much work.

Tic Tac Toe and Conway’s Game of Life in Javascript

For the Half-Real website (10 years ago!) I made two example programs to support the book’s discussions: an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life and a Tic Tac Toe program that plays perfectly by simply going through all possible game states.

Time passes, and I can no longer count on browsers running the Java applets that I originally wrote the programs in. They never ran on tablets and mobile devices either. And I dislike websites with broken applets.

So I have rewritten them to work in JavaScript. They feel like they always did, except they launch faster – and run on mobile phones and tablet:

PS. Tech notes: I did this using GWT, which compiles Java code to JavaScript. The good news is that GWT really works and consistently converts all Java logic to JavaScript. The more complicated issues concern (as we may expect) that all UI calls are different, and especially that Java is Thread-based, but JavaScript is callback-based, so any program flow that relies on threads (as in my case) has to completely reworked.

Notes on Running an Online World for 15 years

You know about that online world that launched in September 1997 and is still running? No, not Ultima Online, the other one.

I was reading Raph Koster’s notes on the launch of Ultima Online back in 1997, and it made me realize that the online world that I programmed also launched just over 15 years ago, nearly at the same time as UO. If you didn’t grow up in Denmark, you have certainly not heard about it, but it’s called Højhuset (literally high-rise, from the metaphor that it was a series of stacked rooms). It’s still running at www.n.dk (only go there if you speak Danish).

This is what it looks like: It’s made up of non-scrolling rooms in a diagonal grid. Users can dress up, chat, and so on as expected. Users have their own apartments which they can decorate. Here is a screen shot with a celebrity visiting:

Højhuset

And most importantly: You can have nice things. The world was always a bit of a compromise between a chat system and game-like elements such as inventories and a currency, but it turned out that this was quite a feature. There have historically been long-running feuds between users who think of it as a chat system, and those who think of it as a game with the goal of amassing the most items. I initially thought that this would be a problem, but in practice this created social cohesion in each group – this was a valuable lesson for a game designer, that an external enemy does give users reason to come back.

As someone who is into game definitions, the height of the “is-it-a-game-or-not” feud was when a user had found a “Player” class in my program, and used this as proof that yes, this was a game. (New game definition: A game is a piece of software that declares itself to be a game.)

My role in this was always as a subcontractor, but I have been providing support and updates for 15 years now. One of the things I did learn as a programmer was to document my code and avoid any quick & dirty fixes which could come back to bite me. The main program (in Java) has always run on a single server. At the height of popularity, there were 2000 simultaneous users, but the improving speed of servers always just always made it unnecessary to spread across multiple machines.

Of course, there were also numerous attempts at hacking the system, which always is a point of pride for a programmer. People still try, here is even someone posting some debug output from such an attempt on Pastebin.

There were also microtransactions going back to the late 1990’s (this mostly paid via text messages).

Having read & written so much about video games since, it is hard to remember what thoughts went into my head when I was first starting out on this project, but I had played MUDs at the time, and I am sure I had read an article about the need for artificial scarcity in virtual worlds. And the strength of scarcity was one of the things that made the biggest impression on me. In the very early versions, there was no automatic dropping of items – this had to be done manually by a superuser referred to as the “superintendent” (“vice”). When going online, that user would always be met with cries encouraging the dropping of items (“smid!” in Danish). I leave you with a bit of user art, in which the superintendent gets fed up with being asked to drop items.

 

Smid!

(There was actually a brief period of time in which a new chat system was introduced on the site to replace the one I made, but users demanded the old one back. Warms your heart.)

Closer to total Curation/Censorship every Day

This image shows the dialog box that a user received when trying to install Molleindustria’s already-censored game Phone Story. Turns out this is a lauded “anti-malware” feature called Gatekeeper in OS X Mountain Lion.

Users can change the settings, but many people experience the misleading dialog above, not telling the user the truth – that they cannot install the program because they have to enable non-certified apps/developers in system settings. But rather telling the user that the file is “damaged”.

Paolo has a longer discussion of it here, but it does seem like that Apple has made it possible for the dialog to mislead in order to dissuade users from installing software not sold through the Mac App store and/or made by a licensed developer.

[Note: It is unclear whether this dialog is intentional. Some people claim that it is not the default dialog, but some developers experience it nonetheless.]

I wrote about this scenario some time ago as “Fear of an App Planet“: that our ability to easily and transparently develop and distribute games for PCs and Macs is gradually eroding. Worrying.

Fear of an App Planet

(Returning to our regular schedule.)

With Apple announcing an App store for the Mac following the App Store for iPhones and iPads, it’s worth pondering what this means for video games.

  1. It’s a great way to allow the distribution of games of different scope, so why is this the first major commercial internet-based software store for a major operating system? Seems so obvious. (Though Linux users have long had similar systems, though only for non-commercial software.)
  2. The Mac App store will have similarly strict and semi-random policies as the iOS app store. As I have argued before, I think the app store policies are ambiguous and inconsistently enforced by design: this has the desired chilling effects of self-censorship among developers, while Apple can claim that it intended no such thing.
  3. It has historically been the case that console games were heavily controlled and censored, while PC and Mac games allowed for freedom of expression. Assuming that more software sales move from boxed and regular web to the Mac App Store, we are going to see the Mac becoming less of a platform for edgy and experimental content. You can still get your software elsewhere, but convenience matters.
  4. And again: there would be an uproar if a major bookstore censored books according to Apple guidelines, so why do we accept censorship for games?
  5. Which means that the potential future in which all games on all platforms are distributed through app store-like channels … that is a potential nightmare.

New version of Firefox due to FarmVille

If you are using Firefox, you have probably been asked to upgrade to 3.6.6 over the weekend. You may notice that the list of fixed bugs only has one item.

Yes, the primary motivation behind Firefox 3.6.6 is that 3.6.4 introduced problems for FarmVille players. (A new 10-second timeout for Flash sometimes prevented FarmVille from loading.)

From this we can learn that Firefox developers are not (willing to admit that they are) playing FarmVille. Obligatory critical comment in the bug report:

(I have a few comments about the prevalent anti-FarmVille sentiment, but more about that later.)

Guimark2: Some HTML, Flash, Java benchmarks

And now for something completely different.

My past as a Commodore 64 demo programmer means that I find benchmarks quite irresistible. What is the fastest way to accomplish a given task?

Following Steve Jobs’ denunciation of Flash as slow, Sean Christmann recently posted his Guimark2 test suite for comparing vector, bitmap, and text rendering across platforms. Sean built Flash and HTML versions of the tests. One of the clear results was that HTML5 just isn’t that fast yet.

But being mostly a Java programmer, I couldn’t help building Java versions (perhaps I wanted to counter the perception that Java is slow). You can try the Java tests here, Vector, Bitmap, Text and compare them to the tests on the Guimark2 page.

Here are the results from the two machines I tested on:

Test/OS XP, HTML XP, Flash XP, Java OS X, HTML OS X, Flash OS X, Java
Vector 11.9 21.9 20.7 4.5 19.8 31.9
Bitmap 4.3 12.7 208.2 13.0 12.9 42.0
Text 19.2 1.5 11.4 29.9 16.6 14.1

Test results in Frames Per Second (Higher is better)

As you can see, on my two test machines, the Vector test is fastest in Java on OS X, the Bitmap test is fastest in Java on XP (5 times faster than any other platform/language), and the Text test is fastest in HTML on OS X.

Is this always the case? No. As can also be witnessed on the Guimark2 page, these results are highly variable between different OS configurations, browsers. As far as I can make out, really high Java bitmap scores require an ATI or NVidia graphics card, and may not always be present on Windows Vista or 7. On OS X, Flash runs faster in 32-bit Safari, while Java runs fastest in 64-bit Safari (tested here). And so on.

Benchmarking is a lot more complicated than it used to be, but I just thought I’d share these results. The tests also link to the source code if you are interested. Feel free to post your results here or on the Guimark2 page.

PS. Test machines:

  • 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad T60p running Windows XP, Firefox 3.6, Java 1.6, Flash 10.
  • 2010 15″ MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard, Safari (64-bit), Java 1.6, Flash 10.