Etherpad — the editor for documents that matter

Real-time collaborative editing where authorship is the default, your server is the only server, and you decide what AI (if any) ever touches your text.

About

Etherpad is a real-time collaborative editor for documents that matter.

Every keystroke is attributed to its author. Every revision is preserved. The timeslider lets you scrub through a document's entire history, character by character. Author colours make collaboration visible at a glance — not buried in a menu.

Etherpad runs on your server, under your governance. No telemetry. No upsells. AI is a plugin you install, pointed at the model you choose, running on infrastructure you control — not a feature decided for you in a boardroom you weren't in. See PRIVACY.md for the two opt-out network calls Etherpad's own code makes and how to disable each.

The code is Apache 2.0. The data format is open. It scales to thousands of simultaneous editors per pad. Translated into 105 languages. Extended through hundreds of plugins. Used by Wikimedia, governments, public-sector institutions, and self-hosters worldwide since 2009.

Full data export is built in. The history is yours.

Try it out

Try out a public Etherpad instance

Project Status

Etherpad has been doing the same thing — well — since 2009. No pivots, no acquisitions, no enshittification. Maintained by a small volunteer team.

We are actively looking for maintainers. If you have experience with Node.js, real-time systems, or institutional collaboration tooling and you want to work on infrastructure that thousands of organisations quietly depend on, please open an issue or contact John McLear.

Code Quality

Testing

Engagement

Who uses Etherpad

For more than a decade, Etherpad has quietly underpinned the documents that matter to:

• Wikimedia Foundation — collaborative drafting across editor communities.
• Public-sector institutions across the EU — including organisations that legally cannot use US-cloud SaaS for sovereignty and GDPR reasons.
• Universities and schools worldwide — including jurisdictions where Google Workspace is no longer permitted in education.
• Civic-tech and democratic-deliberation projects — citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, public consultations.
• Newsrooms and investigative journalism teams — where authorship and editing history matter for legal and editorial integrity.
• Tens of thousands of self-hosted instances worldwide, run by IT teams who chose Etherpad because it is theirs.

Public Etherpad Instances for you to try out. Third party instances not provided by the Etherpad foundation.

Installation

Quick install (one-liner)

The fastest way to get Etherpad running. Requires git and Node.js >= 24.

macOS / Linux / WSL:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/etherpad/master/bin/installer.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/etherpad/master/bin/installer.ps1 | iex

Both installers clone Etherpad into ./etherpad-lite, install dependencies, and build the frontend. When the installer finishes, run:

cd etherpad-lite && pnpm run prod

Then open http://localhost:9001.

To install and start in one go:

# macOS / Linux / WSL
ETHERPAD_RUN=1 sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/etherpad/master/bin/installer.sh)"

# Windows
$env:ETHERPAD_RUN=1; irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/etherpad/master/bin/installer.ps1 | iex

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗