Every EU-Sovereign Alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office (2026)

Europe has decided it has a problem. Approximately every government, school, and business on the continent runs its daily work on either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 — both US-owned, both subject to US law like the CLOUD Act regardless of where the data physically sits. After a year of geopolitical wobbles, "digital sovereignty" went from a think-tank phrase to a procurement requirement, and a surprising number of credible alternatives appeared more or less at once.

My colleague Gareth recently spent a few hours self-hosting one of them (Mijn Bureau) and came away cautiously impressed. This is the wider map: every serious EU-sovereign alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office I could find, who's behind each one, and — the part the marketing pages bury — whether you can actually use it today.

A few things to get straight first, because "sovereign office suite" is doing a lot of work as a phrase and the products underneath are wildly different:

• Most of these are not one program. They're bundles. Underneath almost everything below sit the same handful of open-source building blocks — Nextcloud for files, Collabora or OnlyOffice for document editing, Matrix/Element for chat, Jitsi or LiveKit for video. The "suite" is mostly integration, branding, and an identity layer.
• "Sovereign" ≠ "you can use it." Several of the best ones are government instances locked to civil servants. Others are open source but openly admit they're not ready for production. A couple are just commercial repackaging of free software.
• Switzerland isn't in the EU. I've included Proton and Infomaniak anyway because sovereignty-minded buyers ask about them constantly, but flagged them.

Here's the whole landscape in one table, then a breakdown of each.

The comparison table

Product	Who's behind it	Country	What it actually is	Can you use it?	Open source / cost
La Suite numérique	DINUM + ANCT (French govt)	🇫🇷 France	Full suite: Docs, Grist, Visio, Tchap chat, mail, Drive	Main instance is civil-servants-only (via ProConnect); anyone may self-host	Open source (MIT); self-host free
openDesk	ZenDiS / Ministry of the Interior	🇩🇪 Germany	Full suite bundling Nextcloud, Collabora, OpenProject, XWiki, Element, OX, Jitsi	Community Edition self-hostable by anyone; Enterprise SaaS for public sector	Open source; SaaS/support paid
Mijn Bureau	MinBZK (Dutch govt)	🇳🇱 Netherlands	Helm charts wiring Nextcloud, Collabora, Docs, Grist, Element, Meet behind Keycloak	Anyone — explicitly encouraged to self-host, modify, resell. Early/heavy dev	Open source; self-host free
Euro-Office	IONOS, Nextcloud, Proton, XWiki, EuroStack et al.	🇪🇺 EU coalition	Document/sheet/slide/PDF editor only (fork of OnlyOffice); needs a host platform	Self-host (fiddly) or via Nextcloud Hub 26 / Office.eu	Open source (AGPL); free
Office EU (office.eu)	EUfforic Europe BV	🇳🇱 Netherlands	Commercial SaaS repackaging Nextcloud Hub + OnlyOffice/Collabora, hosted on Hetzner	Waitlist / early access	Built on open source; paid SaaS
Nextcloud Hub	Nextcloud GmbH	🇩🇪 Germany	The platform layer: Files, Office, Talk, Mail, Calendar	Anyone — self-host or via a provider (IONOS etc.)	Open source (AGPL); self-host free, support paid
Collabora Online	Collabora Productivity	🇬🇧 UK	Online LibreOffice — the editing engine inside many suites	Anyone — self-host (CODE free) or paid supported	Open source; support paid
OnlyOffice	Ascensio System SIA	🇱🇻 Latvia (dev in 🇷🇺 Russia)	DOCX-native online editors, MS-style ribbon	Anyone — self-host; Community Edition capped at 20 connections	Open core; Enterprise paid
LibreOffice	The Document Foundation	🇩🇪 Germany	The classic free desktop office suite (ODF standard)	Anyone, free download; LibreOffice Online relaunching	Open source; free
CryptPad	XWiki SAS	🇫🇷 France	End-to-end encrypted suite: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Kanban	Anyone — free public instance, self-host, or paid Cloud	Open source; donations/Cloud paid
Proton	Proton AG	🇨🇭 Switzerland (non-EU)	Mail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar — E2E encrypted	Anyone — freemium SaaS. Not self-hostable	Open-source clients; paid plans
Infomaniak kSuite	Infomaniak	🇨🇭 Switzerland (non-EU)	kDrive, mail, Docs, video — own green datacenters	Anyone — freemium SaaS	Proprietary; paid plans

The government-built national suites

These are the most genuinely "sovereign" — built by or for public administrations, with public money — and also the hardest for an outside business to just sign up for.

La Suite numérique (France)

• Built in-house by DINUM (the interministerial digital directorate) and ANCT, and the most polished of the national efforts. The components are real products: Docs (a Notion/Confluence-style collaborative editor built on the open-source BlockNote), Grist (spreadsheet-database, now used by 15 ministries and all 100 prefectures), Visio (video on LiveKit), Tchap (Matrix-based chat, 600,000+ users), plus mail, Drive, and France Transfert.
• All of it is open source on GitHub under the MIT licence, and several pieces were built jointly with the Dutch and German governments.
• The catch: the hosted instance is reserved for state civil servants (and partners invited for a specific public-sector mission), authenticated via ProConnect. Private companies can't just use it internally. You can deploy your own instance — the code is free — you just don't get the government's.
• France is the EU's outlier in actually building this stuff in-house rather than buying it. Visio is slated to replace Zoom/Teams across government by 2027.

openDesk (Germany)

• Made by ZenDiS (the government-owned Centre for Digital Sovereignty) on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior. Rather than build from scratch, ZenDiS integrated a best-of-breed stack: Nextcloud (files), Collabora (documents), OpenProject (project management), XWiki (wiki), Element/Matrix (chat), Open-Xchange (mail/groupware), Jitsi (video), all behind a Univention "Nubus" portal and identity layer.
• 100% open source on openCode, shipping as source, Docker Compose, and Helm charts. It's targeting ~160,000 licences across German public bodies and has been used at the Conference of Minister Presidents and the ICC.
• Can you use it? Yes, more than La Suite: there's a Community Edition anyone can self-host, plus an Enterprise Edition with SLAs and a SaaS option via national hyperscalers (STACKIT, IONOS) for public-sector orgs.
• Honest assessment from people who've used it: the integration between components is decent but uneven — Nextcloud and OpenProject link nicely, but chat, calendar and video don't yet match the comfort of Teams + Exchange, and XWiki just opens in a new tab.

Mijn Bureau (Netherlands)

• The Dutch entry from MinBZK. Architecturally it's the simplest idea: a set of Helm charts that put existing open-source tools (Nextcloud, Collabora, Docs, Grist, Element/Matrix, Meet) behind a Keycloak SSO setup.
• Uniquely, the maintainers actively encourage anyone to use, modify, or even resell it — no public-sector gate at all. It's also the youngest and least finished of the three; email support was literally being added while we were testing.
• We self-hosted it on a Hetzner box and it worked better than expected, with caveats: no real admin dashboard yet (you manage users through Keycloak/Kubernetes), and email is still the hard missing piece.
• If you want something self-hostable today and you have a high pain tolerance, this is the most "just grab it and go" of the national suites — at the cost of maturity.

All three increasingly federate with each other over the open Matrix standard, which is the genuinely interesting part: a German civil servant could one day chat securely with a French one across sovereign instances.

The new "sovereign coalition" and commercial suites

This is where 2026 got noisy. Several industry coalitions and startups launched products explicitly branded as the European answer to Microsoft — with varying degrees of substance.

Euro-Office

• Launched March 2026 by a coalition of European vendors — IONOS, Nextcloud, Proton, XWiki, OpenProject, EuroStack, Soverin, Abilian, bTactic — and hit 1.0 on June 9. It's a fork of OnlyOffice's open-source core, covering documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDF, with strong Microsoft format (DOCX/XLSX/PPTX) compatibility.
• Crucial nuance most coverage misses: it's not a standalone suite. In its own words it's "an integration component" that only handles editing — storage, sharing and navigation have to come from a host platform like Nextcloud Hub, Proton Docs, or OpenProject.
• Using it: you can self-host it on Linux, but it's fiddly; realistically you'll get it via a packaged stack — Nextcloud Hub 26, IONOS's Nextcloud Workspace, or Office.eu.
• It's also the most politically charged entry. The Document Foundation (LibreOffice) publicly attacked it for building on Microsoft's formats — "compatibility is not sovereignty" — and OnlyOffice initially accused the fork of licensing violations (since resolved). The backers chose to fork OnlyOffice partly over concerns about its Russian ties.

Office EU (office.eu)

• A commercial SaaS from Dutch company EUfforic Europe BV, in The Hague, pitching itself as "100% European-owned" with EU-only hosting, full GDPR compliance, and apps for docs, sheets, slides, drive, mail, calendar and video.
• Here's the honest version: it's Nextcloud Hub in a new skin. The platform is Nextcloud + OnlyOffice/Collabora (and now Euro-Office), hosted on Hetzner. The company configured ready-made open-source tools, branded them, and sells them as a service.
• That's not inherently bad — plenty of people happily pay someone else to run Nextcloud — but be clear about what you're buying: convenience and EU hosting, not novel technology. You could self-host the same stack yourself for the cost of a VPS.
• It's currently waitlist / early access, aimed at SMEs, NGOs, and families rather than governments.

Nextcloud Hub

• Worth listing on its own because it's the platform that half of this list quietly runs on. Built by Nextcloud GmbH (Frank Karlitschek), employee-owned, German. Hub bundles Files, Office (your choice of Collabora, OnlyOffice, or now Euro-Office), Talk (chat/video), Mail and Calendar into one self-hostable web app.
• Fully open source (AGPL). Self-host it for free, or buy it managed from a provider like IONOS. Hub 26 Spring (June 2026) added the new Euro-Office editing experience.
• If your goal is "Google Drive + Docs + Meet, on my own server, in Europe," this is the most direct, mature, build-it-yourself answer — and it's the foundation under Office.eu, much of Mijn Bureau, and openDesk's file layer.

The editing engines underneath

When a "suite" lets you open a .docx in the browser, one of these three is almost always doing the work. Picking between them is the single most consequential technical choice.

Collabora Online

• Made by Collabora Productivity (UK), it's essentially LibreOffice running on a server, streamed to your browser. It employs the world's largest team of LibreOffice engineers and contributes back upstream.
• Architecturally clean (a single stateless container; documents stay server-side) and fully open source with no feature gating — the free CODE build has everything; you pay only for supported stable releases. ODF is its native format, with the best fidelity on complex layouts.
• The trade-off vs OnlyOffice: a classic LibreOffice menu UI rather than an MS-style ribbon, and edits process server-side so it can feel slightly less snappy. This is the editor inside openDesk and Mijn Bureau.

OnlyOffice

• Made by Ascensio System SIA, registered in Latvia — but its development team is in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, which is precisely why the Euro-Office coalition forked it and why some buyers steer clear on sovereignty grounds.
• Technically it's the most Microsoft-like option: DOCX/XLSX/PPTX are its native formats, the UI is a ribbon, and MS-Office compatibility is often excellent. It's open core, though — the free Community Edition is capped at 20 concurrent connections and some features (like mobile web editing) have been pulled into paid tiers.
• Snappier than Collabora (client-side rendering) but with a smaller contributor community and a history of licensing fluidity. The irony of the sovereignty story: the most "MS-compatible" European editor is also the one with the most awkward geopolitics.

LibreOffice

• The grandparent of the whole movement. The Document Foundation (a Berlin non-profit) maintains the free desktop suite built on the open ISO ODF standard — the "real sovereignty, no compromises" choice, and the one many German states (e.g. Schleswig-Holstein) are standardising on.
• The limitation: classic LibreOffice is a desktop app, not a collaborative cloud suite — so it doesn't directly replace Google Docs' real-time editing. TDF is relaunching LibreOffice Online to address exactly that.
• TDF is also the loudest critic of the others, arguing that chasing Microsoft format compatibility entrenches Microsoft's lock-in rather than escaping it. They have a point — and, as ZDNet noted, a horse in the race.

Privacy-first European alternatives

Not government projects, but European, sovereignty-relevant, and genuinely usable today — worth knowing if encryption matters more to you than a full Office clone.

CryptPad

• An end-to-end encrypted collaborative suite from XWiki SAS (France/Romania): Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Kanban, Whiteboard, and a Drive — where the server literally cannot read your content.
• Open source, hosted in the EU (France, via OVH), BSI C5 / GDPR compliant. You can use the free public instance, self-host with no feature limits, or pay for CryptPad Cloud with support. Funded by a mix of EU grants, donations and that paid hosting.
• The trade-off of true E2E encryption is weaker MS-format fidelity and some features being CryptPad-only — but for sensitive collaboration it's in a class of its own here.

Proton (Switzerland)

• The Swiss privacy company behind Proton Mail now offers a full stack — Mail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar — all E2E encrypted, freemium, and notably easy to actually adopt. It's also part of the Euro-Office coalition.
• Two caveats for the sovereignty-minded: Switzerland is not in the EU (though it has strong privacy law), and Proton is a hosted SaaS you cannot self-host. You're trusting Proton rather than owning the infrastructure.

Briefly worth knowing

• Infomaniak kSuite/kDrive (Switzerland, non-EU) — a stable commercial suite (drive, mail, Docs, video) from a provider that owns its own green datacenters. Proprietary, paid, but a serious grown-up option.
• mailbox.org (Germany) — well-regarded encrypted email plus an Open-Xchange-based office suite.
• Tuta (Germany) — encrypted mail and calendar, narrower scope but fully German.

So which one should you actually pick?

There's no single winner yet — which option fits depends entirely on what you are and how much pain you'll tolerate:

╭───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ You are a…                  →  Start with…                     │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ EU government department    →  La Suite / openDesk / Mijn      │
│                                Bureau (your country's instance) │
│ Business that wants to       →  Nextcloud Hub (self-host) or    │
│ self-host today              →  openDesk Community Edition      │
│ Business that wants it run    →  Office.eu, IONOS, or a managed │
│ for you, in the EU            →  Nextcloud provider             │
│ Encryption-first team        →  CryptPad or Proton             │
│ Sovereignty purist           →  LibreOffice + ODF everywhere    │
╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

The honest summary: the building blocks are all here and they're better than the last time you looked, but nobody has matched the seamless integration of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 yet — and the single hardest piece, email you can reliably self-host and get delivered, is still the one everyone struggles with. As Gartner's analysts put it, most European organisations are weighing options and running limited pilots rather than doing full migrations.

But the direction of travel is unmistakable. A year ago this article would have been three immature projects and a desktop app. Now it's a genuine ecosystem — government-funded, open source, federating over open standards, with real money and real developers behind it. Give it another six months.