Europe has been on a slow, steady push towards digital sovereignty for a while now, and a lot of that push ends up pointing at the same handful of tools. Nextcloud is the obvious example, sitting somewhere between Google Drive and a full collaboration suite for anyone who wants to self-host. On top of that, Nextcloud has historically leaned on OnlyOffice to handle in-browser document editing, and for the better part of eight years, that arrangement more or less worked.

Then the whole thing fell apart. OnlyOffice has long faced questions in Europe over its Russian origins, development footprint, and corporate history, despite its current corporate structure being outside Russia. The project has also been accused of not accepting outside contributions in any meaningful way, and its build instructions have been a long-running joke for anyone who has actually tried to follow them. So Nextcloud, IONOS, and a handful of other European organizations forked it on March 27, 2026. The result is Euro-Office, a web-based document editor with its own document server component (also called Euro-Office Docs) that the Nextcloud app talks to. OnlyOffice objected on October 30th, then, on April 1, OnlyOffice pulled the plug on the partnership and accused the project of AGPL violations for its trouble.

I wanted to try it. I got as far as compiling it and getting my Nextcloud instance to acknowledge that it existed, and that's roughly where the story ends. The integration is technically there, but it's not in a state where most people can actually use it, and the alternatives it's trying to displace already work.

The politics are the reason this project exists at all

And they're messier than the pitch suggests

Euro-Office is a fork of OnlyOffice, but the motivation was never purely technical. The pitch is all about European digital sovereignty, keeping office tooling local while getting away from a suspected Russian-based codebase. The developers were also blunt about the practical side of things, stating that OnlyOffice's pull requests sit unread, its build instructions are unreliable, and collaborating with the company in any meaningful way had seemingly become incredibly difficult.

OnlyOffice, for its part, didn't take it well. Within days of the Euro-Office release, the eight-year partnership with Nextcloud was gone, and OnlyOffice was claiming Euro-Office had violated the AGPLv3 by stripping branding and attribution. The licensing argument wasn't the whole of it, either. OnlyOffice also accused Nextcloud of running coordinated outreach to its employees and quietly building out competing commercial offerings while the partnership was still live. Euro-Office's reply was the expected one. The license permits forks, the fork stands, and the project will keep shipping. For what its worth, the original author of the AGPLv3 agrees with Euro-Office's stance.

You can pick whichever side of that argument you find more convincing, but the fallout is the same either way. Nextcloud users who had OnlyOffice running now have to decide whether to stay with a tool caught in a vendor dispute, switch to Euro-Office, or move to something else entirely.

Getting Euro-Office running is harder than it should be

I got as far as "Nextcloud sees it"

I pulled the Euro-Office Nextcloud app repository and built it from source. That part, to the project's credit, actually works. Clone the repo, pull in the submodules, run the webpack build, install the PHP dependencies with Composer, set the right ownership, and you end up with a folder Nextcloud will recognise as a valid app.

And it did recognise it. Euro-Office shows up in my apps list, it can be enabled, and there's a settings page waiting for the address of a document server. That's the first wall I hit. You still need to be running a Euro-Office Docs server somewhere, and connecting Nextcloud to it was not something I could get to cooperate. The app requires a recent version of Nextcloud to work at all, and even on a supported build, the handshake wouldn't go through in my setup, even when I manually set the values that the GitHub repository states you can set.

The other issue is a particularly weird one. The GitHub README points at the Nextcloud app store as the recommended install path, but the link sitting on the repo doesn't resolve to a working listing. There isn't even an official link in the Nextcloud App store yet, so if you aren't comfortable compiling a Nextcloud app from source, there's effectively no way in.

That's a strange place to be for a project that's being pitched as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Docs. The people who are going to reach for a tool like that are not, by and large, people who want to spend an afternoon building a Nextcloud app and then debugging why their instance can't reach their document server.

LibreOffice already solved this, and it actually works

Collabora Online is right there

The problem with all of this is that the thing Euro-Office is trying to be already exists, in a form that works today, and it's built on LibreOffice. Collabora Online is the LibreOffice-based web office suite that a huge chunk of the Nextcloud world has been using for years, either instead of OnlyOffice or alongside it. It's the engine behind the "Nextcloud Office" branding you'll see in the app store, which makes the Euro-Office pivot a slightly stranger one.

In other words, Nextcloud already had a house-branded office suite, built on a codebase it didn't have to fork anyone to use. It handles real-time collaboration, works with both Microsoft Office and OpenDocument formats, and it integrates with Nextcloud through an app that installs from the built-in app store without any of the build-from-source steps I wasted quite a bit of time on. You click a button, you point it at a Collabora server, and you have documents opening in your browser.

That's the bar Euro-Office has to clear, and right now it isn't close. The pitch for picking Euro-Office over Collabora mostly comes down to the UI. OnlyOffice's editor has always felt closer to Microsoft Office than LibreOffice's does, but that's about it. Euro-Office naturally inherits it, though that's not particularly helpful when you can't get it connected in the first place.

I want Euro-Office to work. For what it's worth, the reasoning behind the fork makes sense, the European sovereignty argument holds up, and having more than one credible web office suite inside Nextcloud is better than having fewer. The OnlyOffice codebase isn't going anywhere, and if a fork with active maintenance, a working PR process, and a build system that works can exist, that's good for everyone who uses it.

The version I tried isn't that, though. It's an early fork of a capable codebase, with the integration layer still catching up to what it needs to be. The app store link on the main repo doesn't work, there still aren't any deb or rpm packages weeks after they were promised, and the document server piece has been frustrating so far.

Right now, none of that is a lethal blow to the project. A fork that has a clear reason to exist, a couple of serious backers, and an obvious gap it's trying to fill has every chance of succeeding. While Euro-Office isn't polished yet, it can be in the future, but LibreOffice is still the answer for most people who want a self-hosted office suite that they can install today and actually use tomorrow.