In the battle of the online office suites, a new contender has entered the ring... but under the wrestler's mask, we think there may be a familiar face.

[1]Office EU runs its digital-sovereignty flag up the pole boldly:

Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite (like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) that is 100 percent European-owned and runs entirely on European infrastructure.

Office EU [2]says it's a Dutch company, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, but the [3]privacy policy [PDF] tells us that the company behind it is [4]EUfforic Europe BV , registered in November 2025. As that URL hints, the website appears to be hosted in a Hetzner datacenter in Helsinki – but then, [5]Hetzner is pretty big .

That all sounds like good stuff. Last month, we [6]reported from the Open Source Policy Summit , where digital sovereignty is a much more immediate concern than it was when we last [7]attended the event in 2023 .

The Office EU website also has a little more technological detail:

What is Office EU?

Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on [8]Nextcloud Hub . It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.

The answer links to the Nextcloud homepage, rather than to the specific [9]Nextcloud Hub product page . That gives us a clue, but as we dug into it a little further, we found that things were not as clear as they first seemed.

When the company [10]launched Nextcloud Hub in 2020 , it said that it offered:

ONLYOFFICE – Built in ONLYOFFICE makes collaborative editing of Microsoft Office documents accessible to everyone

Now, though, the Nextcloud Hub page links to a different integrated office suite, called [11]Nextcloud Office . There, the description says:

Nextcloud Office is built together with Collabora Productivity.

[12]Collabora Productivity is the subsidiary of Collabora, which develops [13]Collabora Online – the LibreOffice-based suite we wrote about earlier this week when we covered The Document Foundation's [14]decision to restart work on LibreOffice Online . (Indeed, after that article was published, The Document Foundation's Paolo Vecchi contacted The Reg FOSS desk and asked us to clarify this point – which is partly why we are spelling this out.)

[15]Gram: Zed, but with AI and chat features removed

[16]BunsenLabs Carbon keeps the CrunchBang flame alive with Debian 13

[17]Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

[18]Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

As far as we can tell, in January 2020, [19]Nextcloud 18.0.0 integrated OnlyOffice as its office suite. Six months later, the following major release, [20]Nextcloud 19.0.0 , in June, the integrated office suite changed:

Talk 9 with built-in office document editing courtesy of Collabora, a grid view & more

The [21]release announcement only mentions the Talk module, but it links to [22]Collabora Online's announcement , which goes further:

The immediate availability of Collabora Online as the default collaboration and office app in Nextcloud Hub starting from today's released Nextcloud 19

The [23]Nextcloud Office page talks about Collabora Online, but Nextcloud also has a separate page on [24]using OnlyOffice with Nextcloud . It seems that OnlyOffice is still an option, and still works. What's more, on July 15, 2025, Nextcloud [25]signed a deal with Thinkfree , and [26]Thinkfree Office is an option too. As it happens, we [27]mentioned ThinkFree Office the very next day, in a story that LibreOffice dropped support for Windows 7 and 8.x.

For now, though, it looks to us like this new European online workspace is a hosted instance of Nextcloud with Nextcloud Hub, and that implies that it's using Collabora Online as its office suite.

[28]

None of that is a bad thing. It's not only perfectly possible to host this sort of setup yourself, it's also a good idea. However, organizations looking to get their data and tools away from providers in the US and bring it inside the EU, in a hurry, may well lack the people and skills to do this. The more companies ready to help and make this easier, the better.

[29]

The Register asked Office EU and Nextcloud for comment and will update if we hear back. ®

Get our [30]Tech Resources



[1] https://office.eu/

[2] https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/officeeu-the-fully-european-alternative-for-microsoft-office-and-google-workspace-launched-in-the-hague-302703895.html

[3] https://hel1.your-objectstorage.com/officeeuaa001/officeeu-privacy-policy-v01.pdf

[4] https://companyinfo.nl/organisatieprofiel/ontwerpen-van-computerprogrammas/eufforic-europe-b-v-s-gravenhage-98746243-000063888564

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/24/ai_isnt_done_yet_memoryrelated/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/eu_foss_fears/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/open_source_policy_summit/

[8] https://nextcloud.com/

[9] https://nextcloud.com/hub/

[10] https://nextcloud.com/blog/the-new-standard-in-on-premises-team-collaboration-nextcloud-hub/

[11] https://nextcloud.com/office/

[12] https://www.collaboraonline.com/about-us/

[13] https://www.collaboraonline.com/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/libreoffice_online_deatticized/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/04/gram_cut_down_zed/

[16] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/bunsenlabs_carbon/

[17] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/stop_tahoe_update/

[18] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/firefox_149_beta/

[19] https://nextcloud.com/changelog-unsupported/#18.0.0

[20] https://nextcloud.com/changelog-unsupported/#19.0.0

[21] https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-brings-productivity-to-home-office/

[22] https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-as-default-in-nextcloud-hub/

[23] https://nextcloud.com/office/

[24] https://nextcloud.com/onlyoffice/

[25] https://nextcloud.com/blog/thinkfree-office/

[26] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/thinkfree

[27] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/16/libreoffice_ditch_windows/

[28] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aam2uBebNGmpXDim2vg2OAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[29] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aam2uBebNGmpXDim2vg2OAAAAI0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[30] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/