Euro-Office vs OnlyOffice: The Fork That's Splitting the Self-Hosted Office World

On March 27, 2026, a coalition of nine European companies walked into the Bundestag in Berlin and announced they were forking OnlyOffice. The project is called Euro-Office, and it's already the most controversial thing to happen in the self-hosted office world since LibreOffice split from OpenOffice.

If you're running OnlyOffice on your infrastructure — or considering it — this matters. Here's what happened, what's different, and which one you should bet on.

Why the Fork Happened

The consortium behind Euro-Office includes some heavy hitters: IONOS, Nextcloud, Proton, XWiki, OpenProject, EuroStack, Soverin, Abilian, and BTactic. Their complaints boil down to two things.

Geopolitical concerns. OnlyOffice is officially registered in Latvia, but the consortium claims most of the development team is still based in Russia. In the current geopolitical climate — especially for European government deployments — that's a dealbreaker for many organizations.

Contribution barriers. The Euro-Office team says contributing to OnlyOffice is "impossible or heavily discouraged," with build instructions that are "unreliable, outdated, or simply broken." If you can't meaningfully contribute to an open-source project, is it really open-source in practice?

Rather than building from scratch, they chose to fork OnlyOffice's codebase, citing its modern architecture and strong browser performance compared to LibreOffice-derived alternatives like Collabora Online.

OnlyOffice Fires Back

OnlyOffice didn't take this quietly. They terminated their 8-year partnership with Nextcloud — one of the most significant breakups in the self-hosted ecosystem — and accused Euro-Office of violating GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL v3) terms. Specifically, OnlyOffice claims their license includes additional conditions under Section 7 (like retaining the OnlyOffice logo in derivative works) that Euro-Office allegedly ignores.

This licensing dispute is far from settled and could shape how AGPL forks work across the entire open-source ecosystem.

Euro-Office vs OnlyOffice: What's Actually Different?

Let's be honest — right now, not much. Euro-Office is a tech preview built on the same OnlyOffice codebase. Both offer:

• Document, spreadsheet, presentation, and PDF editors
• Full Microsoft format support (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX)
• ODF open standard compliance
• Browser-based collaborative editing

The real differences will emerge over the next year as Euro-Office starts building features independently. The consortium has signaled priorities around European data sovereignty, transparent governance, and easier community contribution.

Who Should Care

European government and enterprise teams evaluating office suites for compliance and sovereignty requirements — Euro-Office was literally presented to the German parliament. If your procurement process cares about where code is developed, this fork exists for you.

Nextcloud users are directly impacted. With OnlyOffice terminating the Nextcloud partnership, future Nextcloud releases will likely ship with Euro-Office integration instead. If you're running Nextcloud + OnlyOffice today, keep an eye on how this transition unfolds.

Everyone else running OnlyOffice in production — you're fine for now. OnlyOffice Docs 9.3 is polished, feature-rich, and not going anywhere. The fork doesn't change your existing deployment.

Self-Hosting Either One Today

OnlyOffice is production-ready and available on Elestio for one-click deployment. You get automated backups, updates, monitoring, and SSL — starting at ~$29/month for a 4 CPU / 8 GB RAM instance.

Euro-Office can be pulled from GitHub's container registry for testing:

docker pull ghcr.io/euro-office/documentserver:latest
docker run -d -p 8080:80 --restart=always \
  -e JWT_SECRET=my_jwt_secret \
  ghcr.io/euro-office/documentserver:latest

But don't run it in production yet. The first stable release is targeted for summer 2026.

What to Watch

Three things will determine whether Euro-Office succeeds or becomes another abandoned fork:

1. The licensing lawsuit. If OnlyOffice's AGPL Section 7 claims hold up, Euro-Office may need to rethink its branding and compliance approach.
2. Feature divergence. The governance and sovereignty angle already differentiates Euro-Office, but long-term survival requires shipping features the original won't. The consortium needs to build on its governance advantage with tangible technical differences.
3. Nextcloud's default. If Euro-Office becomes Nextcloud's default office integration, it instantly gains millions of potential users. That's the kind of distribution that makes forks stick.

The Bottom Line

Euro-Office vs OnlyOffice isn't really about features today — it's about governance, trust, and where you want your office stack's future to live. If European sovereignty matters to your organization, Euro-Office is worth watching closely. If you need a production-ready self-hosted office suite right now, OnlyOffice on Elestio is still the proven choice.

For a broader comparison of self-hosted office suites — including how Collabora Online fits into this picture — check out our Collabora Online vs OnlyOffice deep-dive.

Either way, this fork has already reshaped the self-hosted office landscape. The 8-year Nextcloud-OnlyOffice partnership is over, licensing battles are brewing, and European institutions are paying attention. This story is just getting started.

Thanks for reading ❤️