Etherpad is a free, open-source real-time collaborative editor born from Google's 2009 open-sourcing of AppJet's product. See features, self-hosting, and…
Etherpad is a free, open-source, web-based editor that lets multiple people write and edit the same document at the same time, with every keystroke appearing live on everyone else's screen. Each collaborator's text is highlighted in a distinct color, making it easy to see who contributed what, and a built-in timeslider lets anyone scrub back through the full edit history of a pad.
The project traces back to AppJet Inc., a startup that launched the original Etherpad in November 2008. Google acquired AppJet in December 2009 mainly to bring its founders onto the Google Wave team, and initially planned to shut Etherpad down. A fast community backlash led Google to open-source the code under Apache License 2.0 just two weeks later, on December 17, 2009. The community-run Etherpad Foundation formed afterward to steward the project, and a 2011 Node.js rewrite, originally called Etherpad Lite, eventually became the canonical Etherpad still developed today.
Because it is fully open source and self-hostable, Etherpad is popular with organizations that want full control over where their document data lives, including the Wikimedia Foundation, universities, civic-tech projects, newsrooms, and privacy-conscious teams that prefer to avoid third-party cloud editors.
At its core, Etherpad uses operational transformation, via its 'Easysync' synchronization engine, to merge concurrent edits from any number of simultaneous authors into one consistent document in near real time, without locking sections or requiring manual conflict resolution.
Documents live at simple, shareable pad-based URLs and can be embedded directly into other websites through an iframe, made read-only, or protected with a password, which makes Etherpad useful both as a standalone tool and as an embeddable collaborative-editing component inside other products.
A plugin framework, with well over a hundred community-built plugins, extends the lightweight core with features like Markdown authoring, code syntax highlighting, inline comments, tables, drawing, spellcheck, WebRTC video and audio chat alongside the text pad, and OAuth, LDAP, or OpenID authentication, while an HTTP API and client libraries in several languages let developers automate pad creation and manage content programmatically.
Built-in export supports plain text, HTML, PDF, ODF, Microsoft Word, and LaTeX, and the software can be self-hosted via Docker, a one-line installer script, or manual Node.js and pnpm setup, backed by PostgreSQL or MySQL for production use.
Etherpad itself has no license fee: the entire codebase is released under the Apache License 2.0, which permits free use, modification, and even commercial redistribution by anyone, including companies that offer paid hosting or support around the open-source core.
There is a single 'plan' in the sense that every user runs the same software; any actual cost comes from self-hosting infrastructure, such as a small VPS or Docker host, that an organization chooses to run Etherpad on, not from Etherpad itself. There is no tiered commercial pricing, seat-based licensing, or paywalled feature set from the core project.
Yes. Etherpad is fully open source under the Apache License 2.0, with no license fees. Any cost comes only from the hosting infrastructure an organization uses to run it, since there is no official paid tier from the core project.
Etherpad was created by AppJet Inc., a startup founded by David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, and J.D. Zamfirescu, and launched publicly in November 2008. Google acquired AppJet in December 2009 and open-sourced the code that same month after community backlash to its planned shutdown.
Etherpad Lite was a Node.js rewrite of the original Java and Scala-based Etherpad, started by developer Peter Martischka in 2011. It became feature-complete by around 2013 to 2014 and was then simply renamed Etherpad, becoming the canonical version that is still developed today.
Yes, self-hosting is Etherpad's primary deployment model. It can be installed via a one-line installer script, manual Node.js and pnpm setup, or official Docker images, and supports PostgreSQL or MySQL as production databases.
Yes. Etherpad has an extensible plugin framework with over a hundred community plugins covering Markdown, comments, video chat, authentication, and more, plus an HTTP API with client libraries in several languages for programmatic pad management.
Etherpad offers lighter-weight, embeddable, real-time text collaboration without the rich formatting, spreadsheet, or presentation features of Google Docs. Its main advantage is that it is free, open source, and self-hostable, giving organizations full control over where document data is stored rather than relying on Google's cloud.