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.
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 says it's a Dutch company, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, but the privacy policy [PDF] tells us that the company behind it is 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, Hetzner is pretty big.
That all sounds like good stuff. Last month, we reported from the Open Source Policy Summit, where digital sovereignty is a much more immediate concern than it was when we last 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 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 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 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 Nextcloud Office. There, the description says:
Nextcloud Office is built together with Collabora Productivity.
Collabora Productivity is the subsidiary of Collabora, which develops Collabora Online – the LibreOffice-based suite we wrote about earlier this week when we covered The Document Foundation's 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.)
As far as we can tell, in January 2020, Nextcloud 18.0.0 integrated OnlyOffice as its office suite. Six months later, the following major release, 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 release announcement only mentions the Talk module, but it links to 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 Nextcloud Office page talks about Collabora Online, but Nextcloud also has a separate page on using OnlyOffice with Nextcloud. It seems that OnlyOffice is still an option, and still works. What's more, on July 15, 2025, Nextcloud signed a deal with Thinkfree, and Thinkfree Office is an option too. As it happens, we 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.
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.
The Register asked Office EU and Nextcloud for comment and will update if we hear back. ®
Source: The register