#37 in Collaboration & CommunicationUpdated 2026-08

Etherpad

by Etherpad · Self-hosted real-time collaborative editor with full authorship history

41.2 — BenchRank score out of 100

Homepage

Visit website See full Collaboration & Communication ranking

Overview

Etherpad is a self-hosted, real-time collaborative text editor released under Apache 2.0. Every keystroke is attributed to its author and every revision is kept, so the timeslider can replay a pad's whole history. The core ships small and is extended with plugins for comments, images, tables, drawing, code highlighting, OAuth/LDAP/OpenID auth and AI.

Best for: Teams and institutions that must self-host collaborative editing and keep full authorship history.
Pricing: No prices are shown; Etherpad is open-source software under Apache 2.0 that you install and host yourself.
Runs on: Self-hostedCLI

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

Self-hosted under Apache 2.0, with no telemetry and full data export
Character-level authorship and a timeslider for full revision history
Large plugin ecosystem covering auth, comments, media and AI
105 languages, and runs on hardware from a Pi to a data centre

Trade-offs

You run the server yourself; no official hosted service is offered
Maintained by a small volunteer team that is actively seeking maintainers
Features like comments, tables and images require installing plugins
Install needs git and Node.js 24 or newer

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

MCP support: 60 out of 100
API quality: 0 out of 100
Documentation: 40 out of 100
Agent friendliness: 39 out of 100
Changelog: 100 out of 100
Marketing site structure: 50 out of 100
Operational trust: 15 out of 100

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

Openness: 85 out of 100
Maintenance: 100 out of 100

This doesn’t look right — report a problem with Etherpad’s score

Alternatives in Collaboration & Communication

Ranked 1
90.8 — BenchRank score out of 100
Novu
Novu · Open-source notification infrastructure for multi-channel product messaging
Best for: Development teams adding multi-channel product notifications to a web or mobile app.
Ranked 2
79.4 — BenchRank score out of 100
Plane
Plane · Project management, wiki and AI agents in one workspace
Best for: Teams leaving Jira or Linear that want projects, docs and AI agents in one self-hostable tool
Ranked 3
78.5 — BenchRank score out of 100
AgentMail
AgentMail · Email inbox API that gives AI agents their own addresses
Best for: Developers giving AI agents their own email inboxes for two-way threads, attachments and webhooks.