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Fully Managed Etherpad
as a Service

Deploy Etherpad as a fully managed service starting at €9/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, support and monitoring included.

Etherpad is an open-source real-time collaborative editor — every keystroke attributed, every revision preserved — used by Wikimedia, EU public-sector institutions, universities, and newsrooms since 2009. It runs on your server, under your governance. With DANIAN, you pick the region and we run the rest.

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA  No credit card  Cancel anytime

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA
No credit card  Cancel anytime

Etherpad

Etherpad

STARTING AT

€9/month
Automated Backups
Monitoring
Automated Updates
Auto SSL

USAGE

Unlimited
Human Support
Custom Domains
Terminal Access
File Manager Access
Deploy in your region 21 locations worldwide
GermanyFinlandNetherlandsUKSwedenUnited StatesCanadaSingaporeJapanAustraliaBrazilSouth Africa+9 more →
Etherpad Preview Image

ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is Etherpad

Etherpad is an open-source web application for real-time collaborative document editing. Multiple people open a URL, type at the same time, and see each other's edits character by character. Every keystroke is attributed to its author. Every revision is preserved. The history scrubber lets you replay a document keystroke by keystroke.

Etherpad has been actively developed since November 2008 — originally by AppJet, acquired by Google in December 2009, and released as open source under Apache 2.0 that same month. Today the project is maintained by the Etherpad Foundation, with development coordinated on the ether/etherpad GitHub repository. The codebase is JavaScript, runs on Node.js, and uses a key-value backend that talks to MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.

The current major-version line is 2.x, released in 2024, which moved the project to pnpm, modernised the build, and brought session transfer between browsers as a native feature. Etherpad scales to thousands of simultaneous editors on a single pad, supports 105 languages, and has a plugin ecosystem of roughly 290 community modules — covering authentication, exports, embedded chat, formatting, federation, and storage backends. Wikimedia, Mozilla, NPR newsrooms, and EU public-sector institutions have relied on it for over a decade.

FEATURES

What Etherpad does

Etherpad is a focused tool. It edits text. It tracks who wrote what. It plays back history. It exports cleanly. It does not try to be a wiki, a project tracker, a chat platform, or a generative model. Its scope is the deliberate kind.

Real-time collaborative editing

Every keystroke from every editor appears on every other screen in real time. No save button. No "your changes will be lost" dialogs.

Full revision history

Every change is preserved. A timeslider lets you scrub through the document from the empty pad to its current state, character by character.

Sidebar chat

A meta-conversation channel runs alongside the document. Editors coordinate without leaving the pad or switching to another tool.

Native export and embedding

Pads export to HTML, plain text, Markdown, DOCX, and PDF. Read-only embed URLs let you surface a pad inside a CMS or knowledge base.

Per-author colour coding

Each editor's text is highlighted in a unique colour. You see authorship at a glance, in the document, not buried in a sidebar.

Plain text by design

No syntax highlighting, no embedded macros. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, ordered and unordered lists. Markup that survives a copy-paste.

Plugin ecosystem

Roughly 290 community plugins extend Etherpad with image embeds, headers, markdown rendering, LDAP and OIDC authentication, custom themes, and federation.

Plain-old HTTP API

A REST API drives pad creation, listing, deletion, content replacement, and authentication. You can script your platform's Etherpad use without forking the codebase.

WHAT'S ALWAYS INCLUDED

Every app. Fully managed.
Nothing extra to pay for.

Every app you deploy includes the full managed service — security, backups, updates, and support from day one.

Automatic updates and patches

Apps run the latest stable version. Security patches applied silently, with rollback if needed.

Daily off-site backups

Multiple daily backups in redundant off-site locations. One-click restore if anything goes wrong.

24/7 uptime monitoring

Continuous monitoring with instant alerting. We respond before you notice.

SSL, firewall, DDoS protection

Auto-renewing SSL, hardened firewall rules, DDoS mitigation on every deployment.

Performance and scaling

We monitor resource usage continuously. When your app needs more headroom, we flag it and upgrade with your explicit approval.

Dedicated engineering support

Real engineers on chat. DNS, SMTP & migration help. All included in €9.

WHY MANAGED

Why teams pick managed Etherpad

Through 2025, Google Workspace pricing rose 17 to 22 percent across plans, and Gemini AI was bundled into every paid tier — meaning Google's models read every Docs document by default. Teams who used Google Docs primarily for collaborative drafting started shopping for a real-time editor that does not phone home.

Self-hosting Etherpad is straightforward to start and difficult to keep running. The official Docker image gets a single instance to first-pad in an hour. What it does not solve: the default storage engine — dirtyDB — is not safe for production, the changeset table grows without bound because Etherpad has no automated pruning, and silent client disconnections under multi-user MySQL load are a recurring issue documented across the GitHub tracker since at least 2022.

The specific failure mode that catches most operators: the InnoDB .ibd table file backing the pad store does not shrink as old revisions age. One nonprofit reported their Etherpad MySQL database growing from 26 GB to 43 GB in less than a year on a near-idle instance — almost all of it sessionstorage rows nobody had warned them about. The fix involves stopping the application, running ALTER TABLE store ENGINE=InnoDB, and pruning rows by hand.

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

Successful businesses and professionals around the world rely on DANIAN every day

USE CASES

Three teams who run Etherpad on DANIAN

These are representative team types we set up most often. Each starts with the same flat €9 plan.

4-PERSON CIVIC-TECH COLLECTIVE

Drafting policy consultation responses in public, in real time

Germany region. Custom domain pointed at pad.[their-org].eu. Public read-only embed URL on their main site for live drafting sessions during open consultations. They run 6 to 10 sessions a year, each with 15 to 30 participants. The audit record of who wrote what becomes part of their public-record submission.

12-PERSON UNIVERSITY RESEARCH LAB

Collaborative grant-proposal drafting across three timezones

UK region. SSO not required — the lab uses pad-level access. Heavy timeslider usage during proposal review: PIs scrub backwards to see who introduced which figure or claim. They keep one rolling pad per active grant and archive the export to their Nextcloud once submitted.

6-PERSON INVESTIGATIVE NEWSROOM

Source-protected drafting with IP logging disabled

Sweden region. DISABLE_IP_LOGGING="true" set at provision. They draft sensitive pieces in shared pads, then export to InDesign for layout. The author-colour history stays as an internal record of who contributed which paragraph — useful for editorial accountability without exposing sources externally.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run Etherpad

The choice is not between Etherpad and not-Etherpad. It is between four different ways to get a real-time collaborative document editor for your team. The math below assumes a 5-person editorial team. The DANIAN row is flat regardless of headcount.

 PATH1 USER5 USERS 10 USERSONGOING OPS TIME NOTES
Google Workspace Business Standard 
Proprietary SaaS
$14/mo$70/mo$140/mo0 hrs
Gemini AI reads document content. US data residency by default. Linear per-seat scaling.
Self-host on a VPS 
$24/month production-class VPS + storage + monitoring
~$44/mo~$44/mo~$44/mo1–2 hrs/mo at €60–120/hrPlus 5–10 hours initial setup. Add database tuning at 25+ concurrent users.
Home server 
Synology DS923+ or HP ProLiant ML30 Gen10
€210–667/mo all-in€210–667/mo all-in€210–667/mo all-in2–4 hrs/moHardware amortisation, electricity, business internet with static IP, off-site backup target.
DANIAN Managed Etherpad€9/mo€9/mo€9/mo0 hrs21 datacenter locations. Pick the region per app. 7-day free trial, no card.

BY INDUSTRY

Etherpad for specific industries

Four industries make specific demands on a real-time collaborative editor — and Etherpad's plain-text scope, audit-trail design, and self-hosted posture line up with all of them. Each section below covers the regulatory or operational standard in play, the DANIAN configuration that matters, and a quantifiable detail from production.

Across the EU, several national data-protection authorities — Datatilsynet in Denmark, the CNIL in France, the DPC in Germany's Baden-Württemberg — have ruled or recommended against Google Workspace in compulsory education over the past three years. Denmark's January 2024 decision extended a 2022 Helsingør ruling to all 53 of the country's municipalities. Universities and lycées have been quietly replacing Google Docs for student group work for the same reasons.

On DANIAN we provision Etherpad in the EU region of your choice — Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, etc — enable per-pad password protection by default, and disable anonymous editing on student-facing instances. A typical 30-student class runs 100 to 150 collaborative pad hours per semester. The author-colour history becomes the grading trail for group assignments.
Citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting exercises, and public-consultation drafting share a constraint. The deliberation needs to be observable in real time. The record needs to survive a freedom-of-information request decades later. The platform cannot be a US-cloud product hosting deliberation about US-cloud regulation. Beyond residency, EU public-sector procurement is increasingly subject to accessibility standards — EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 — which Etherpad's plain-text editor meets without modification.

DANIAN's per-region pinning and 21-location footprint cover the residency requirement. Instances ship with HTTPS, custom domain support, and indefinite revision retention — the timeslider becomes the audit log. A 60-participant deliberative pad at peak runs well on the base €9 tier; we upgrade resources in place if you scale to multiple concurrent assemblies.
Distributed editorial teams draft, fact-check, and revise pieces before they reach the CMS. The work has two requirements professional newsroom platforms rarely combine: real-time multi-author editing, and source confidentiality preserved through to publication. The investigative-journalism handbook from organisations like the Centre for Investigative Journalism explicitly recommends self-hosted collaborative editors over Google Docs for sensitive sources — the metadata trail on a US-cloud editor is its own risk surface.

We configure Etherpad with DISABLE_IP_LOGGING="true" for newsroom instances, and mount custom-domain SSL. A four-author piece across three timezones drafts well in a single pad; the timeslider replay lets editors see exactly who introduced each claim.
Volunteer-driven organisations face a particular squeeze. SaaS per-seat pricing scales linearly with their often-changing volunteer roster, while their actual collaborative-writing load runs in bursts — grant cycles, campaign launches, board meetings. A flat-rate self-hostable editor matches the cost profile. Etherpad's read-only public embed also supports the transparency posture most civic-tech projects publish under.

We provision in the region closest to the volunteer base, set a project-controlled admin password, and document the daily off-site backup target so the project's IT lead can verify it independently. A 20-person grant-application sprint with all volunteers in the same pad at once runs without resource upgrades — Etherpad handles substantially more concurrency per pad than most editors.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before signing up — answered straight, without sales speak.

Three groups: technical setup, migration, and how DANIAN works as a service.

01

Technical and configuration

Yes. Recommended plugins are ep_adminpads2 for admin pad management, ep_set_title_on_pad for browser-tab titles, and ep_align for paragraph alignment. Other plugins from the roughly 290 community catalog can be installed.
Yes, via plugin. ep_openid_connect handles OIDC against most identity providers. ep_ldapauth handles LDAP and Active Directory. SAML lives in a few community plugins of varying maintenance status — we pick the most current and configure it against your IdP.
Yes — by default, every revision back to the empty pad is preserved. The timeslider is a built-in URL endpoint at /p/[padname]/timeslider that lets you scrub through the document keystroke by keystroke. We do not auto-prune revision history; that is the customer's call.
Yes. We set DISABLE_IP_LOGGING="true" on request — common for newsroom and legal-aid use cases. This removes the editor IP address from server logs and from the changeset metadata. Author-colour history and the timeslider replay continue to work; only the IP trail is removed.

02

Migration and onboarding

We can activate your app on your own custom domain/subdomain. Examples: mydomain.com, anyword.mydomain.com.
Or, on our randomized free subdomain. Example: 963.apps.danian.cloud
If you wish to use a custom domain/subdomain, select that option when ordering your app (or notify us later). We will send you the required DNS records and if needed, our tech team will modify them for you.
21 datacenter locations across six continents. You choose the region at provisioning. Application data sits in the region you choose; pick whichever is closest to your users or matches your data-residency preference.
Yes. Request a region migration from the dashboard and we run the move in the background. The system emails you when the migration completes; total transfer time depends on data volume but typical instances finish in a few hours. There is no extra charge for a region change.
Yes. Full data export is available at any time, in a portable format you can bring to any infrastructure.
Indirectly. Etherpad's plain-text scope means rich formatting from Google Docs — tables, embedded media — does not transfer cleanly. Export your Docs to plain text or Markdown; then import them as new pads. Author history from Docs cannot carry over — only the current state.

03

Billing, support, and platform

€9 covers everything we do for that app: hardware in the region you choose, daily off-site backups with one-click restore, automatic security patches and version upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL and firewall, and engineering support on Email/LiveChat. There are no setup fees or hidden line items. For more info see our Pricing page.
If you decide to continue, we charge €9/app/month from day 8. If you don't, the trial ends and you can export your data. No card is required for the trial, and we never auto-charge you without explicit consent.
No. The €9/month is flat regardless of how many users log into your app. Add 5 users or 50; the price doesn't change.
24/7 Live chat and email support, both staffed by engineers who run the systems. We handle DNS configuration, SMTP setup, app integrations, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and migration help. Response time is typically under an hour. There is no tier system — every customer gets the same support.
Yes. Cancel from the dashboard. We don't charge a cancellation fee, we don't lock data, and we will export your data to you on request before deletion. data to you on request before deletion.
Every customer instance is backed up daily to a separate region from the primary. We test restores. You can request a restore at any backup point within the retention window — usually 7 days for daily backups.
Your application data sits in the region you choose at provisioning — 21 datacenter locations across six continents. Account-level data (billing, account email, support ticket history) is processed centrally. Application data region is picked by you, per app.
99.9% uptime SLA on every app, every tenant. Service credits are documented at danian.co/service-level-agreement. The status page is located at status.danian.co.
When your tenant approaches the resource ceiling — the base tier holds 1 vCPU/RAM, 30 GB storage — we notify you. Resource upgrades happen with your explicit consent; we will not upgrade your tenant or charge you without it.
We wait. We don't suspend the app or delete your data on the first failed charge. We email you, you fix the card on file, and we continue.
Invoices can be downloaded from the billing dashboard in PDF the day each charge succeeds. EU VAT is added where applicable and the VAT-reverse-charge regime applies for VAT-registered businesses with a valid number.
150+ open-source apps across automation, team chat, file sync, analytics, AI, password management, email marketing, dev tools, project management, smart home, CMS, and federated social. See the full catalog →
Yes. Every instance comes with a web-based terminal and a file manager in your DANIAN management dashboard. Useful for managing your data and customizations.
Resources scale with your usage. If your app needs more vCPU, RAM, or storage, we add it — and we ask first before any change to your plan. €9 is the floor; resource-heavy workloads may price higher, but you'll always know in advance.
Yes. We have both a Partner program and an Affiliate program available. Anybody can sign up.
No contract. No minimum commitment. Cancel anytime from the dashboard with one click. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card. After the trial converts to paid, you can still cancel at any month without notice or penalty.

DEPLOY IN YOUR REGION

21 datacenter locations on six continents

Pick the region closest to your users.

United States, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Chile, South Africa and more coming soon

Global Reach Map

Try managed Etherpad for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.