Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor
Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor
Create docs and collaborate in real time on documents knowing they are end-to-end encrypted.
Just tried it out with my proton account. Looks great! It's very simple, but I also like that about it. And of course being private is wonderful.
Simplicity is an underrated feature. I'm really excited to see this come out because I'm becoming a bigger fan of proton every day.
I don't see anything different.. How did you access it?
From what I read it's being released to users gradually I think?
It's rolling out slowly. I got access to it yesterday :)
How is it private?
Today we’re announcing a new end-to-end encrypted, collaborative document editor that puts your privacy first. Docs in Proton Drive are built on the same privacy and security principles as all our services, starting with end-to-end encryption. Docs let you collaborate in real time, leave comments, add photos, and store your files securely. Best of all, it’s all private — even keystrokes and cursor movements are encrypted.
Literally the second paragraph of the post (but I'm sure you haven't read it, since you seem so busy replying to every comment here about how Proton is becoming Microsoft or something).
ooooh I love this. Proton is just winning constantly these days.
No they're not. They can't even finish a single solution, let alone actually make anything functional when you're not using their proprietary servers. They're becoming Microsoft.
Damn. Proton is doing a good job of stacking up W's these days.
They act just like Microsoft. Lot's of people think Microsoft is successful. If you think Microsoft is the champion of privacy though you might be in a cult.
I'd almost believe you were paid to hate on proton, but you'd get fired for how fucking dumb your arguments are.
The only open source mentioned in the post is their encryption. Not the document editing software. OP please remove your change to the article title, it's extremely misleading.
Well, they're not wrong. It is 'open-source', not Free Software.
? It's not open source, AFAIK.
Open source ? Does that mean I can host my own ? Would it be compatible with other self hosted instance ?
EDIT: the only source code I found hasn't been maintained for 3 years.
As I've slowly been expanding my homelab, NextCloud caught my attention. I haven't tried it quite yet, but it might be closer to what you're looking for.
Thanks, I'll have a look
If you do want to host your own google docs, look into Onlyoffice, or LibreOffice with Collabora
I like how there seems to be more and more alternatives to MS Office, even from big companies like Google. Best case scenario, this could lead to companies actually starting to use an open format, like ODF, so that all these different office applications can be used without causing issues in the file and that would pave the way for open source alternatives, like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, to become viable alternatives for a lot more people and companies. Do Google Docs and Proton Drive use/support ODF? I'm pretty sure MS Office supports it.
I wish msoffice would just die a miserable death
Word is a pain in the ass. Resize a table column by 1px and the rest of the document gets absolutely fucked
Excel suffers from similarly frustrating UI issues, but my main problem with it is that it's being used for things that it was never intended to be used for. On the extreme side, a company will shove all their HR info into one xlsx file and then someone will accidentally, somehow unrecoverably, delete it
More commonly, I've had to use it as a progress tracking/ticketing tool. An entire team adding rows, deleting rows, accidentally clearing formulas, highlighting random fucking cells, resizing columns etc. all at the same time. It's just hell.
Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme... as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can't sync with OneDrive.
If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won't even entertain discussion of any alternative.
Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand... And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.
I feel you on that first part, I always use Markdown nowadays when I don't have to use Word (or LibreOffice Writer in my case), I even use Marp to make presentations with Markdown. Since there's no dragging stuff around and eyeballing if it's actually coherent, it's much quicker, the layout is always perfect and changing the layout doesn't fuck up the entire slide/document.
It...was intended for those things. Excel is modern business' multi-tool. You're not going to excise it until there is a solution for the HR person to do basic bulk data processing, basic Excel programming without having to acknowledge they are doing programming, etc.
The other path is better spreadsheet software, but let's be honest most of the others are poor clones. Gsheets are nearly useless, only office is solid but...well, it's just Excel but free. Open office is Excel millennium edition and libre while better than open, and has a few nice quality of life improvements, it's still Excel.
Proton at this very moment
I CANT STOP WINNING!
When I was degoogling a couple years ago I had a heck of a time choosing between protonmail and fastmail.
I went with the fastmail and, while I have no complaints, I'm starting to glance at greener grass.
I love Proton and will advocate for it any chance I get, but I can also see that it might be good to have people like you who don't put all their eggs in one basket
I degoogled to Proton mail initially. I didn't like that I couldn't search my emails (a security thing or something? But annoying) and then their Drive was absolutely useless on macos. I had about 100gb and it couldn't sync even half of it.
After much help from support I eventually moved away to a combo of Fastmail, Mega and OnlyOffice.
I did the same thing. The first privacy-oriented service I heard about was Proton. And, to be fair, they're quite good. But the email search issues and struggles I had with their bridge eventually turned me off.
I left for mailbox(.)org and haven't looked back. It's great Proton has so many cool services, but the last thing I want is to get dependent on one company again, not after how hard it was to get away from Google.
If you were on Proton then you wouldn't be able to sync your calendar & contacts and you'd have to share your private keys.
Just signed up today for the family plan in my ongoing degoogling process
It's a bit pricey but so far loving it. Specially Proton Pass, coming from bitwarden (which I liked), it's nicer and faster, much faster
Don't put all your eggs in one basket again, that's what makes degoogling such a difficult thing. There's several proton services I intentionally avoid and use alternatives for so I don't have to uproot my entire digital life to leave them if they start being shitty. If you go from using all google services to all proton you're setting yourself up to need the same sort of big migration down the road. 15 years ago google was also an awesome company that kept making incredibly useful things for users just because they could and look at them now.
Maps is what makes degoogling hard ;p
Everything else is pretty straightforward.
My only gripe with Proton Pass so far is that I'm used to Bitwarden's right-click autofill menu and some sites' 2FA codes don't automatically pop up for some reason.
Does pass support custom url filters yet? I self host and so I have a lot of 192.168 bookmarks...when I tried pass it had no way to organize them by url prefix (port number).
Seems to work fine on my web front to deluge
Good question, don't know.
I'll check it out and report back
Unfortunately it doesn't yet. Having same issue.
And so what happens to your passwords if Proton were to go offline and you needed to continue using Proton Pass? Do they have an open source server you can use like Bitwarden does or vaultwarden? Or are you essentially locking yourself into a new walled garden for no reason other than name recognition? Why not just use KeePassXC which is encrypted locally rather than share your password with a third party who can easily capture your private key password?
Doesn't appear you can do anything of that via the Drive mobile app. Maybe one day they will make that possible.
If they can ever get a spreadsheet application I could fully get away from Google for that kind of thing without losing out on anything I care about.
wake me when we can use them as a saml provider
I know there are different use cases for each, but generally do people prefer self hosted nextcloud, proton docs, or libre office?
Nextcloud and OnlyOffice. Collabora is basically a VNC session over LibreOffice. While OnlyOffice is web-native and has much better compatibility.
FWIW collabora and open office can integrate with other clouds like Seafile and owncloud Infinite scale. So even without NextCloud it can be used. It can also be used stand alone.
probably depends what youre into, I have my own home lab so I setup nextcloud with collabora for my personal stuff
They're just too expensive. Like, sure, it costs money to run, but 3.49€/month (the discounted 24 month rate) for the mail only plan, 15 GB storage. (41.88€, $45.17 USD, $67.28 AUD per year)
That's really expensive if you just want mail.
The other stuff, is also really expensive. To the point that makes you think, "there is no way google is making THIS much to make up the difference in advertising to me for a comparable plan".
remember, it's not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it's about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.
then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data
it'd be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that's before any income from rental
If you just need an email account I'd suggest to have a look at posteo.de. I am with them for many years now. Price is good and terms also.
Switched to them in 2022 after a 2-year of proton precisely because the revised proton plans were weird and because id heard a lot of negative stories about getting locked out (from the proton side, not losing password). Ironically I almost just went thru the lockout process but thankfully the email support guy was able to get things sorted.
Tbh I miss nothing and since I use simple login or anonaddy for most misc things, switching was easy. My proton account is de facto dead...I wouldn't refuse to return, but I'm really just an a la carte guy.
You get mailserver capabilities with that tier as well though. You shouldn't be using the plus plan unless you need the email storage or host custom domains and don't want to deal with the admin.
To be fair, it's not as clear as it could be that there are other "plus" plans. If you happen to land on the proton mail page when looking, they only show you the mail plus option (and unlimited). And even then really truncate what exactly you get for each paid option. There's a page that I was only able to find after opening my free account (it exists when not logged in, just never found it) that explains in depth all the options and differences.
Annoyingly, most of the individual upgrade pages don't give the 2 year purchase option either.
Awesome...I can move my budget over to my proton.me account now.
I don't think there's a spreadsheet app yet. Hopefully soon
Are they trying to become Google alternative?
Only if they start shutting all their services down if they don't become the world leader within the first 3 years.
Interesting. I will try to find out if it's 1:1 in handling .docx like OnlyOffice which i hope it is. It sucks that OnlyOffice won't run natively on Wayland.
It is fork of onlyoffice, https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2023/07/self-hosted-onlyoffice-docspace
Ehhh It is? Thanks for letting me know cause i didnt know that
Great, hopefully it is as useful. Surveys and such are a must for any migration.
It's all good but I wish they increase the storage for free tier a bit more
I get the thought process from a market standpoint, but this is a trap we all fall into because the big services subsidize subsidize subsidize to keep you locked in. If you want 15gb free, you sell your privacy. That's the equation, not "service a and b are equivalent except more gbs".
I wish they could provide more storage for paid users, or allow users to a la carte add storage. $4/mo to merely match Gmail's 15GB feels a bit steep, and it must be feasible for them to offer their mail service with 100GB+ for $5/mo.
guess at eod both paid and free users feel the same
notice the lack of the word 'free'
Google Docs is free because they use your data for advertising and AI training.
