Please stay on topic, see title of topic. We have multiple topic regarding the selected office version.
My experience with Collabora was quite “flaky”. The problem is that LibreOffice runs headless on the server and the browser will only display the UI rendered on the server. It’s a bit like using a remote desktop session. This is fine if you have a connection with low latency and decent bandwidth - but as soon as your connection is not perfect, using the thing is not fun.
Another problem is the scaling of some of the applications - at least the spreadsheet did not scale properly on HighDPI devices, so you get blurry text and UI elements on a 4K screen with 200% scaling because the UI on the server is rendered for lower DPI output. But probably the scaling issue is already solved - I didn’t use Collabora in the last two years.
OnlyOffice uses local rendering with a canvas element. This means there is a lot less load on the server and the rendered output on HighDPI displays is much better.
Yes, template files are not supported in OO as far I know - but everything else is mostly quite similar to MS Office. So one just needs to get used to, then you can work with it quite well. At least for a browser based solution I prefer OO because of the problems mentioned.
In a perfect world the teams of LibreOffice and OnlyOffice would work together to create a truly awesome product which is for free for private and non-profit users - and financed by selling services to companies which don’t want to set up and maintain their own servers and have no problem paying 5-10 USD per user and month for this. But I think this will stay a dream.
Update 2020-03-26: indeed at least the HighDPI issue was addressed in Collabora 4.0, also see https://www.collaboraoffice.com/press-releases/collabora-online-4-0/
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Opsview went through several rounds of forking and renaming their own open source project to paywall some features each time.
I’ve been using Collabora CODE since I started with Nextcloud. I chose it initially because ironically it was said to have better mobile device support. I tried to use ONLYOFFICE a couple times but could never get their doc server to work. The reason for me wanting to try OO is Collabora is sorely lacking features compared to LibreOffice. I had quite a bit of trouble with Collabora too at first but eventually got it figured out.
I’ve been looking forward to the built in OO doc server in NC18 but have held at NC17 mainly due to concerns over the gallery app. But honestly, if OO is going to axe mobile device support on my 2 user home instance, they can keep it. We use that feature, and I won’t give it up.
I feel bad for the Nextcloud developers to be thrown under the bus by ONLYOFFICE like this after investing a year into the integration. It’s hard to believe the timing is a coincidence. Only thing I can say is spend the next year on Collabora instead, and by the end of it we’ll be in a good place.
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I believe this is key:
HTML5 used by OO is the only and right way to scale, pushing the rendering to browsers.
And that’s essentially the beef people have with OO - 20 docs limit (before the editing screw up).
If you want 50-100 open tabs (total for all users), HTML5 - end therefore OO - is the only way to go…
As it looks like the devs won’t bring back the feature, I tried LibreOffice Online (Collabora Online Developer Edition). There’s a lot of material online and in this thread stating that it is inferior compared to OnlyOffice in a lot of ways.
After trying it out today, I have to say that I’m impressed.
The mobile browser editing is far better in my opinion than OnlyOffice. It may be generally a bit laggy especially during scrolling, but the input mechanics on a touch screen seem more reliable to me.
While it may not run that well on a RaspberryPi (if it runs at all on ARM?), my i3 CPU from 2017 with 16GB is handling a spreadsheet file without a hitch. Memory consumption is about 1% when opening a text-only spreadsheet - I expected it to be much worse.
Installation was also very easy via docker. I ran into a problem at first because I’m not able to use subdomains, but I had some help from people on this forum. All in all, it boils down to running one docker command, setting up the webserver config and putting Collabora’s outside facing service URL into Nextcloud’s collabora app setting.
Since LibreOffice’s MS compatibility capabilities have been enough for my needs in the past, Collabora seems to be an even better replacement in my use case, rightn now.
I’m thankful to the OnlyOffice devs for pushing me to try it out 
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Don’t confuse
LibreOffice Online LOOL
And Collabora Online CODE (for dev the free version)
It’s not the same.
LibreOffice Online is the vanilla software (loolwsd service) and CODE is loolwsd with some changes under from the Collabora Team and is an OpenCore software.
While LOOL still have the 20 users limit, you can disable it by compile it yourself.
You can do this too with CODE but it’s well less documented.
I am happy with LOOL , CODE and OnlyOffice because they aren’t a great use for my cases, it is mainly a viewer for my clients. But if you work only with an online office you should test all of them to know which one suit you more.
And don’t forget to give a try later to them because you have improvement every 2-3 months
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Yes, I’m aware of this. I think we can agree that CODE is based on LibreOffice Online.
Your message seems to be implying that it’d be possible to directly use LOOL instead of CODE. Is it possible to use LOOL with Nextcloud directly or are the changes from CODE necessary to actually have usable online document editing service?
You can use LOOL directly.
But into Nextcloud App store you have to pick Collabora Online to make it work.
Here is the docker page of LOOL if you just wanna test it :
https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/
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Is the difference that great between CODE and LOOL? I don’t think the difference between Collabora Office and Libreoffice is very significant - seems to be more about providing LTS, enterprise support, and so forth.
Differences are very low indeed.
It’s just a question a purism.
I blame anybody for using CODE if it fit for them.
Yes, it might suit some.
My guess is that if we took LOOL, paired it with an efficient stack, and removed the warnings, it would be very functional.
In this very moment, i’m compiling LOOLWSD without the limitation.
I will make some test in order to see the performances.
If OnlyOffice is better, i will tweak it for having the edition capabilities into Nextcloud Mobile and without limitation.
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I’ll be interested to hear how it performs.
My problem with tweaking OnlyOffice to get around their shenanigans is that we get into a game of cat and mouse with a company that is really about freemium software. I can see them separating code into their proprietary version going forward.
I’ve seen this with several projects. I warned a friend of mine not to rely on Alfresco as an open source project. They didn’t listen, and now they’ve ripped away almost all the functionality to their proprietary version, leaving only the most basic core.
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Hi, we can move discussion of Collabora to this thread…
We can do, but there’s a bit of overlap. In relation to this topic we’re discussing the pros and cons of different solutions to the problem OnlyOffice has created - does it make more sense to try to modify it, or to move to an alternative?
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Does this effect just the docker version or is this with all versions of the community edition?
Cool – Can you give an example docker-compose file of how exactly to implement this? I read your instructions however I’m still a little unclear.
Hello, just closing this issue for a while.
Not sure if we should have posts violating licenses of partner of nextcloud in the forums.
Need to clarify this.
EDIT: See title of the topic. Last 20 posts are not related to the title.
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