alt Hacker NewsOffice.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform
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I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if your entire pitch is "we are a bold, independent European alternative that liberates you from the hegemony of the established American players," maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."
From the FAQ on the homepage:
What is Office EU?
Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.
Mostly adding this because I wasn't sure if it was a new product or not based on a first glance over the Office EU site. Nextcloud offers recommendations for providers on their site, most of which are in the EU [0]. The Office EU website seems to be new since around January of this year [1]. More managed hosts for Nextcloud is a good thing in my book, but I'd be a bit wary to host my stuff with a brand new provider.
[0]: https://nextcloud.com/providers/
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260116234614/https://office.eu...
Is this by some random company that happens to rent an address in Hague? And even that is uncertain because there's no actual address except a vague OSM pin. And no company name either.
This seems untrustworthy, double so for a product that claims to prioritize transparency.
> Our headquarters are in The Netherlands (The Hague). Contact us to book a meeting or ask any questions.
source: https://office.eu/contact
It's always a good thing to have multiple players and I hope we can have actual EU-based alternatives, but I feel like this project, simply being a rebranded NextCloud as far as I can tell, is less interesting than La Suite numérique [1] developed by the French government or CryptPad [2] developed by XWiki, a French company based in Paris.
Microsoft draws over 3 billion dollars out of Norway yearly. We are many that want this number much, much closer to zero. At it's small steps like this that makes it possible.
"Is Office.EU a scam?" https://blog.tomaszdunia.pl/officeeu-eng/
Well that's a pompous headline from the author's PR dept. "Europe" as in, "The European Union", or just some marketing trick based on making you believe it is to give it more weight?
I'm european and can still easily confuse the "European Union" and "Europe the general area" when context is lacking, it's not a big stretch of the imagination for me that people _anywhere_ could construe this as "official" as well.
All that it looks like is backed by some emanation from the city of The Hague. No mention of the EU proper. It's european owned and backed, sure, but not EU owned and backed.
Tsh, marketing. (see Bill Hicks on marketing).
This seems to be one guy who repackages nextcloud and markets it as the "european alternative" as a quick cashcrab without any own developments
> Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite
Issue is.. if you are a traditional MS Office "poweruser", the last thing you want to do is spend your days in a web browser. These apps should also be available as native apps, similar to MS Word, Excel, Pages, Keynote, etc.
Am I being dumb: they say it's "open-source software" but I can't actually find a link (or links) to the software / source anywhere on the office.eu website??
About pricing [1]:
> What are the pricing plans?
> Office EU will offer simple plans for individuals and teams. Pricing will be competitive and designed to be easy to understand. We will publish full plan details closer to launch.
> Will there be a free plan?
> A free plan is planned after launch. It will be a good way to try Office EU before committing. Exact limits and features will be shared when it is ready.
Trademark lawyers are raising their eyebrows.
I wonder about their pricing.
I was also looking at infomaniak.com .
I'm trying to move away from MS 365 myself, both because of Trump, AI but also because Microsoft keeps making it work worse and worse with Firefox. The latest thing (as of a day or 2 ago) is every 30 minutes redirecting my outlook web to the "You just signed out of your account" page :( So I have to sign back in every time I use it, it used to simply stay open (and no settings were changed on the backend). How I hate these guys.
The most annoying thing is that none of this happens when I set my user agent to MS Edge on Windows. So they are purposefully breaking this.
Cheap purchased PR slop with fake articles and no product.
e.g.:
- https://hostingdiscussion.com/news/european-cloud-workspace-...
- https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/empresas/amp/plataforma-offi...
And it seems to be repackaged Collabora (~LibreOffice):
Are we gonna talk about that cookie banner? https://cleanshot.com/share/cDQ5RMkP
Some commercial alternatives to MS Office:
https://www.wordperfect.com/en/
https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite
https://www.hancomdocs.com/en/
I'm inclined to agree that this should have had a different name, gonna be different come up with a good name.
As for open source as they claim ... can't find the code or a link to it on their site.
So far this smells like a lot of intent but I'm not sure what this is.
Weird product page, why would you put the number of member states and residents Europe has in your „feature“ section?
You can have hosted Nextcloud on Hetzner, with Headscale, email server, Vaultwarden, and Wordpress on European infrastructure (Hetzner) individually installed just for you from Federated Computer today for $19/month unlimited user accounts. I use it every day. Human support, too...!
I prefer this : https://www.opendesk.eu/
What we need to get independent is the public infrastructures.
That has nothing to do with current tensions between Europe and the US.
It’s just unbecoming of a nation to depend in its core on the good will of another.
If the EU is successful in this endeavour, then the US will lean on them to abandon it.
Isn't Proton Docs European? Not that any European government would support them, because they don't spy on their users.
Has anybody tested the Email client? Is it somehow on par with Outlook (Desktop/install version)?
why isnt the EU sovereign office platform just libreoffice contributions?
rework it into a web friendly version.
what requirements does the EU have for not using libre office?
XHR requests to cookiebot.com -> dig cookiebot.com -> 141.193.213.20 -> ipinfo.io -> Austin, TX
I can't find any info about the people behind it. The branding, mentioning "The Hague" and the rest of the landing page seems to try really hard to fool me into believing this is official from the European Union, I wouldn't trust them with anything, just get Libreoffice.
Be careful.
Offices are going out of fashion.. why name a product Office in 2026?
Has it been hugged this easily? Doesn't load for me.
Good luck to them, but without an equivalent to Microsoft Access it's not really a replacement for Microsoft Office for many power users. (Yes, I'm aware that Access has some weaknesses as a database but for quick-and-dirty custom applications it's still the easiest platform out there.)
Yeah no. I want entirely offline stuff that runs within equipment I completely control going forwards.
One thing this whole current shit show says is geopolitics are too unstable to put your data into any system or legal jurisdiction you don’t directly control.
As an American, I remember when none of this was an issue a mere 18 months ago, and it’s crazy to think we did this to ourselves. This is all so unnecessary… and dumb, very dumb.
> You will be able to choose. Office EU can connect to different AI providers through APIs, such as ChatGPT, Mistral, and others
Seems a misstep to list an American AI provider first...
The problem is that the Oslo world is deeply encoded into the DNA of the European union and its elites. The very goal of "restoring" the old world is what they have in mind. The moment that goal seems to even just return as a hallucination, they will drop all of these initiatives and defect. Everyone knows, so nobody even tries to get something real built.
With the university who trained these politicians, with the institutions who shaped them, with these politicians who created this multi-crisis - believing everyone out there was invested in a stable world as they were- a independent Europe is not possible. They just have to much hackable surface, to much API, they will crawl before any hacker offering them a way "back out" with the decades to come.
wtf!? I enter my email address for an invitation, receive a link to an est. 2 pages form for answering a shit load of unrelated question, like org name, org country, last summer vacation, first time I got pimples... Is this a request to become the next pope?
To preface, I am Swedish.
But I work in IT and Office 365 is not "Office suite online" anymore. Office 365 started with running Exchange in the cloud by MS as it is a PITA for IT. That was basically it.
Office 365 is now:
- Office suite, both online and desktop apps (Vital for full feature Excel)
- Entra for Users, Groups and Policy, SSO, conditional access, MFA (Entra is actually Azure AD, not sure if this is still the case but all Office 365 get an Azure AD tenant it runs on)
- Device management via Intune, that is policy, push apps/installs, reinstalls, Autopilot, run scripts etc on machines, device state config
- File sharing with Sharepoint & Teams & personal Onedrive (this also adds endpoint backup)
- Teams - chat, video, workspace - We live in Teams at work.
- Email (that includes admin, extensive admin)
- DLP - Data loss prevention
- The power suite where users & admins can make their own apps
+ MS Graph API for all this
Oh, and it comes with Copilot chat baked in (GTP 5.3 based now) with enterprise controls.
At a big company you can have people ONLY working on the Entra part to secure user accounts. Or people ONLY on Intune to setup and manage PCs, policy etc.
Office 365 is a beast and I will argue GSuite does not match up as companies basically HAVE to buy Slack on the side to get parity. Also sysadmin on GSuite sucks.
The link actually made me laugh but also sad. It is frankly embarrassing. We in EU can do tech Spotify, Klarna, Lovable, Mojang, Dice, Arelion, Ericsson and this is only in Sweden. Look at a 4G network, it is insanley complex.
So yea not sure what the solution is. But this is too little too late. It should have started in 2008 maybe they would have a chance. It is also sheer numbers. MS is massive and Azure/O365 is their cash cow now. They make sure it is damn good.
This has been a longtime coming, it is not unique but it is still significant
The enormous momentum of the installed base and occupied headspace of Microsoft systems made them lazy and complacent decades ago. They have been peddling insecure unreliable software for a generation now, and believed their was no viable threat.
It took too long, but finally. Trump and his mad bad actions are good for the Europeans like a heart attack is good for your health
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This is just a Nextcloud rebrand with a confusing domain name. It claims "Core is [100%] Open Source" but no source code is provided beyond what's already available in the upstream projects, and it's unlikely that there will be (as this happens a lot). It's a one-man project without a track record or certifications based out of a shared office space [1].
And don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with starting a business rebranding Nextcloud and keeping your development closed source, as long as you're honest about that, which this initiative is not.
If you're looking for a Nextcloud hoster, there's a long list of partners here [2] that have contractually obligated themselves to contribute back to Nextcloud for every user they onboard.
[1] https://blog.tomaszdunia.pl/officeeu-eng/
[2] https://nextcloud.com/partners/