institutionally managed open source alternatives that don’t suck

05 May, 2026

As a student who sometimes has to collaborate on documents with others, there aren’t that many options that are easy to use for others who are less tech-savvy than me to use. If it were up to me, we would all use Markdown files with pandoc, but that’s untenable when these same people think I’m a tech wizard for installing Firefox with an adblocker for them. My choices are limited to what others might have on their end which ranges from Google Docs to Microsoft Office and Apple iWork. I don’t think I need to explain why Apple’s office suite is out of the question for collaboration. Google Docs is the standard, however, it’s very limited and its Zotero integration is terrible. Microsoft Office has a relatively good editor, but its collaboration feature is often limited to accounts within the same organization. It’s a near damn impossibility to reliably get everyone who doesn’t use the university license to access Microsoft Office to see the document. As if that wasn’t bad enough, its Zotero integration is even worse than Docs’ in my experience.¹

So when I found out that my university hosts a Nextcloud instance, I was intrigued by what they were up to. They started out with giving students 50GB of storage and have since increased the storage space to 100GB. The impressive part about this is that it’s a fully featured Nextcloud instance managed by the university which is not intentionally limited like institutions often do for often stupid reasons. For example, I could use their WebDAV endpoint to sync my Zotero attachments instead of paying a hefty subscription to Zotero to sync them. Moreover, since it’s WebDAV and supported by Notability, I can finally ditch Google Drive for backing up my school notes.

Aside from that, and to the point of this post, it has an OnlyOffice plugin that is the exact same as the great OnlyOffice desktop app that I use anyway, but on the web. The best part about this is that the signup is super easy, there is no app to install and I can add people by their username on our Uni portal’s SSO. It even integrates with Zotero natively and has some pretty nice plugins aside from that like Bergamot and DeepL translator (just like the desktop app). And for my anti-"website for serious stuff" attitude, it’s perfect that I can connect this Nextcloud instance and access the docs straight from the OnlyOffice desktop app with the same user experience.

OnlyOffice with Nextcloud has a version control as well as nifty permission settings. It’s just a superior WYSIWYG editor in every way for my use case as a student which can’t be said that often about alternatives. It’s not just an open source alternative, it’s the superior app in my opinion. The UI looks good by default and the layout has largely remained unchanged over the years in which I’ve used this app. I haven’t yet tested out OnlyOffice in a group project yet, but I will do so at the next opportunity. This is giving me hope that collaboration may not suck ass in either features or in terms of unreliable document sharing.

I’m glad that my university is investing into infrastructure that is relatively independent of Microsoft/Google, even when I groaned about their investment into their own LLM stack. So many tech companies with proprietary software have such a strong hold on universities in particular and public institutions in general. Especially in an era of erratic international politics, we need to decentralize anything and everything that can be.