
Comparing Collabora with OnlyOffice
The facts you really want to know
Initially posted on 2019-07-19
Installation, setup and support
High availability, fault tolerance, upgrade-ability ?


Clearly you want a high availability setup, not only to provide extra scalability, but also to provide redundancy against fault. Collabora Office has a clean and attractive architecture – which scales with your routing network:
- Each document is served by a single node to which all requests and edits are sent for that document by the HA gateway: F5, HA proxy etc..
- Each node is ultimately stateless and needs only limited local storage).
- Collabora Online requires no third party services except of course it needs to connect to your existing file-storage solution.
- Collabora Online regularly saves documents to your existing storage.
- Collabora Online requires only a standard, basic Linux base-system to run on top of.
Contrasting the situation with OnlyOffice, we see a perplexingly more complex environment (in as far as we can understand the documentation):
- OnlyOffice requires a separate Highly Available(HA) Redis frontend.
- Each OnlyOffice node requires access to a shared, HA NFS server.
- OnlyOffice requires access to a HA postgress database cluster.
- OnlyOffice requires access to an HA RabbitMQ message bus.
It is unclear if Ascencio provide licensing and supported versions of Postgress, Redis, RabbitMQ – or if this must be purchased and provided separately. An HA setup can reduce the number of points of failure, but in the event of any failure having all of the servers coupled by so many shared protocols from database, to NFS, to a message bus – brings great potential for cascading failures.
Privacy and security
Keeping your documents on the server


Collaborating on documents in the cloud quickly.
Faster startup time
Performance and Responsiveness
Interactive co-editing
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All Collabora Online editing happens immediately, and each user shares the same document concurrently. That allows just one document to be edited interactively in real-time, with no extra lag or latency to see other users’ typing. It also avoids locking of paragraphs in text documents, giving a great freedom to all editors.
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Fast spreadsheet core
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Collabora has worked with AMD for many years to build some extreme performance, optimized for Ryzen into Collabora Online. This lets us take advantage of threading during document load, save, and importantly calculation.
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Proper document handling
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Opening a letter head file
Collabora Online does a great job in handling all sorts of files and file formats. More than any other office application. And still improving – thanks to a great community customers world-wide. We know we’re not always fully perfect, but look at this Word document, of which header and numbering shows as original in Collabora Online, but broken in the product that promises 100% compatibility..
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Fonts, images, comments…
On the left, there is the original document as shown in Microsoft Word. It has embedded fonts, image wrapping, comments and more. On the right side: use the slider! You’ll see how Collabora Online handles the lay out, fonts, image wrapping, comments and how Only Office does that.
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The above Word document shows how Collabora Online nicely handles embedded fonts, image wrapping, comments, and more. Look how that compares!
Getting the basics right
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In Collabora Online filling cells behaves as you expect
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Showing the green ticks at the proper position
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The following Excel document has vertical text. Which is correctly rendered in Collabora Online whereas Only Office fails to do the proper thing.
Rich in features, nice to work with
User Experience
Collabora Suite offers powerful features combined in one place. A myriad of common actions are available and easy to access both online and on Desktop while keeping your document visible and centred. As is shown in the example of formatting cells.

Rich in features
Sorting data is one of the most used functions in a spreadsheet. You’ll be glad to notice that Collabora Online offers the usual dialog full with functions for sorting. OnlyOffice, on the other hand, only supports simple sorting on one column.


Using documents with VBA





Proving reliable
Same experience online and on desktop
As user you expect a file to look the same online and on the desktop. Look how that is with conditional formatting in Collabora and OnlyOffice. The latter notably “guarantees Seamless Switch from offline to online”..

Collabora Office has a full feature set of conditional formatting. And where others fall short, also the online version offers the user to chose from a variety of icons to make important data show clearly.
Collabora Office has a full feature set of conditional formatting. And where others fall short.
Ensuring correct user input



Presentation and animations


The next Powerpoint presentation has a 6 step-animation on the second slide. Below we show three stripes – one each for how this Microsoft presentation shows in Powerpoint, in Collabora Online, and in Only Office.
Let the facts speak for themselves.
Unlimited Tabs, unlimited connections

Truly open source and built alongside a strong community
Community Analysis
A numerical view can help to contrast the trajectory of these two code-bases. (Numbers correct at time of writing.)
Github statistics
- LibreOffice: hundreds of contributors, from all over the world. Huge, diverse and active community.
- OnlyOffice: 13 contributors to the core. Commits are only from OnlyOffice employees, with no community contribution.
Translations
- LibreOffice: 100+ languages. 60 with 75% or more translated.
- OnlyOffice: 20 languages. Only 12 with 75% or more translated.
Events
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- LibreOffice: has and attends many community events from conferences to hack-fests each year. LibreOffice is backed by The Document Foundation – a vendor neutral non-profit (Stiftung) incorporated in Berlin, Germany. You can read about all the good things we’re doing around the world from Japan to Brazil and everywhere in between: in the annual report. Collabora plays an important part at these events, giving talks at many and sponsoring some.
- OnlyOffice: There are no known OnlyOffice community events, the project rarely attends traditional Open Source gatherings or presents outside of business conferences.