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Fully Managed HedgeDoc
as a Service

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

HedgeDoc is an open-source collaborative Markdown editor — real-time pad editing, slide mode, KaTeX math, Mermaid and PlantUML diagrams — combining the convenience of HackMD and Notion with the privacy and control of self-hosted infrastructure. Released under AGPL-3.0, maintained by the community since the 2020 fork from CodiMD.

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

HedgeDoc

HedgeDoc

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 →
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ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is HedgeDoc

HedgeDoc is an open-source, real-time collaborative Markdown editor licensed under AGPL-3.0. Multiple people edit the same document at once, with rendered math, diagrams, and slides visible side-by-side. The project began life inside HackMD in 2015, forked as CodiMD, and was renamed HedgeDoc in December 2020.

HedgeDoc is community-maintained — no corporate backer, no per-seat license, no AI add-on cliff. Releases ship on a roughly monthly cadence, and the project maintains a public security-advisory log on GitHub.

The codebase runs on Node.js 20, with PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or SQLite for storage and the choice of local filesystem or S3-compatible object storage for image uploads. Real-time sync uses socket.io with operational-transformation merging on the server side. HedgeDoc 2 — a complete rewrite in TypeScript on NestJS, with Y.js CRDT — is in alpha; the 1.x line will keep getting security and bug-fix releases until 2.0 reaches general availability.

Notable public instances run at the IETF (notes.ietf.org), CIRCL Luxembourg, Universität Hamburg, GWDG Göttingen, TU München, and at least four other German universities listed in the project's documentation. AGPL-3.0 means whoever operates a network instance must publish the running source — the entire stack is auditable end-to-end.

FEATURES

What HedgeDoc does

A real-time collaborative editor for Markdown documents, with rendered math, diagrams, and slides in a single side-by-side view. Six rendering systems ship in the box; six authentication methods plug in; six permission levels per note give you a path from public to private without changing tools.

Real-time collaboration

Multiple cursors, live presence, conflict-free merge on every keystroke. The 1.10.8 release closed a data-loss path that affected documents with five or more simultaneous editors.

KaTeX and MathJax

Inline $x$ and display $$\sum$$ LaTeX renders directly in the pad. KaTeX is the default in HedgeDoc 2 for speed.

Slide mode

Add --- between slides and the pad presents itself in reveal.js. Speaker notes, fragments, and themes all work.

Pluggable authentication

OIDC, SAML, LDAP, plus first-class GitHub, GitLab self-hosted, Google, Mattermost, Nextcloud, Microsoft Entra ID, and Authelia.

Three editor modes

View, Edit, and Both. Mobile keeps the toolbar in reach; desktop renders math and diagrams next to the source as you type.

Diagrams as code

Mermaid, PlantUML, Graphviz, vega-lite, sequence diagrams, flowcharts, and abc-notation for music — all rendered from fenced code blocks.

Granular permissions

Six levels per note: Freely, Editable, Limited, Locked, Protected, Private. Defaults are tunable per instance via CMD_DEFAULT_PERMISSION.

Export and API

Export to Markdown, static HTML, or a printable slide deck. REST API for note CRUD; Prometheus /metrics endpoint for monitoring.

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 HedgeDoc

In May 2025 Notion folded its AI add-on into the Business tier at $20/seat, locking new Plus customers out of AI features mid-renewal. Teams who only ever wanted collaborative Markdown — not databases, not agents — started looking for a flat-priced, no-lock-in alternative. HedgeDoc is the closest functional substitute.

The work that "just running HedgeDoc" doesn't include is the part that hurts at month four. The Docker image starts on SQLite by default — fine for a demo, wrong for ten people on a shared pad. Image uploads land on a local volume that most self-hosters never back up. The reverse-proxy triad — CMD_DOMAIN, CMD_PROTOCOL_USESSL, CMD_URL_ADDPORT — is famously the trip wire behind every "my interface looks weird" forum thread; getting it wrong silently breaks websockets at /socket.io/ and leaves users staring at a spinning load icon. Node.js 18 reached end-of-life in April 2025, so anyone still on an old container is running an unsupported runtime.

That's the operational tax. We pay it for you.

Every DANIAN-managed HedgeDoc instance ships with PostgreSQL as the database backend, not SQLite. We set the reverse-proxy triad correctly the first time. Image uploads land on a separately-backed-up volume in your region if you ask. Anonymous registration is off by default. The Node runtime is pinned to a current LTS line, and version upgrades happen on a staging copy before they touch production data.

When the project ships a high-priority release — like 1.10.8, which fixed silent data loss for documents with five or more concurrent editors — we don't wait three months to find out about it. We watch the release feed, validate the patch on a copy of your database, and roll it forward in a maintenance window.

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

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

USE CASES

Three teams who run HedgeDoc on DANIAN

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

15-person open-source project

After Notion folded AI into Business, we just wanted Markdown back

Region: Germany. Auth via GitHub OIDC; CMD_DEFAULT_PERMISSION=editable for the org. Used for RFCs, weekly meeting notes, and a public roadmap page. Mermaid diagrams for architecture, KaTeX where the design touches math. Backups land in the same region; Markdown exports feed the project's GitLab and downstream docs site.

University research lab

200-student seminar, math on every page, no SaaS contract

Region: Germany. SAML against the Shibboleth federation; slide mode for guest lectures; KaTeX for live equation editing. Pads spin up per-course-week and archive to the institution's GitLab at semester end. Anonymous edit off; staff can publish read-only links to enrolled students.

Weekend hackathon secretariat

600 people, 48 hours, every team gets a pad before they arrive

Region: Sweden. Anonymous edit on; CMD_DEFAULT_PERMISSION=freely; short sessions; uploads restricted to registered staff. Pre-staged team pads linked from the registration confirmation email. The instance lives for three weeks and gets snapshotted to cold storage before teardown.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run HedgeDoc

Stay on the SaaS that HedgeDoc replaces, self-host on a VPS, set up a home server, or pay a managed-hosting service. The math at one seat is close. At ten seats, the picture is different — and the operational cost of each path is the part the price sticker doesn't show.

 PATH1 SEAT5 SEATS 10 SEATSWHAT YOU ACTUALLY PAY FOR
Proprietary SaaS
HackMD Prime Team · $8/seat
$8/mo
 $40/mo
$480/yr
$80/mo
$960/yr
Hosted editor; SSO behind Enterprise upsell; your notes on someone else's database. Notion Plus at $10/seat and Notion Business at $20/seat sit in the same column for broader-substitute teams.
Self-host on a VPS
$24/mo production-class
$24/mo
$24/mo
+ ops time
$24/mo
+ DB tuning
A production-class VPS, plus 4–8 hours of your time per month: patching, backups, reverse-proxy debugging, the CMD_DOMAIN triad, monitoring, the 1.10.8 upgrade window.
Home server
Business mini-PC, 36-mo amortised
~€18/mo~€18/mo~€18/moOne-time hardware €650–900 over 36 months, plus electricity, plus business internet, plus your own on-call. Off-site backup is still your problem.
DANIAN Managed HedgeDoc€9/mo€9/mo€9/moEverything above. Plus the patch we'll roll out two weeks before you read the release notes.

At 10 seats, the gap to HackMD Prime Team is around $71/month and the gap to Notion Business is around $191/month. At 1 seat the picture is narrower — the case for managed is operational at that scale, not financial. The home-server path looks competitive on the sticker; the difference is who's on call at 02:00 when the upload volume fills.

BY INDUSTRY

HedgeDoc for specific industries

HedgeDoc fits some industries especially cleanly — the ones where rendered math matters, where SaaS contracts are blocked by procurement, or where the workflow looks more like a live pad than a wiki. Below are four where the fit is strongest, with the configuration choices each one tends to need.

HedgeDoc has a measurable footprint in German higher education — Universität Hamburg, GWDG Göttingen, TU München, Universität Augsburg, JGU Mainz, Heinrich-Heine Düsseldorf, and Universität Münster all run public HedgeDoc instances today, plus the multi-Hochschule md.fachschaften.org service. The stack works because KaTeX renders equations inline, slide mode handles seminar presentations, and SAML against an existing Shibboleth federation gives student SSO without standing up a separate identity provider.

On managed instances we pin the SAML attribute mapping to the institution's IdP defaults (CMD_SAML_ATTRIBUTE_USERNAME, CMD_SAML_ATTRIBUTE_EMAIL), choose the EU region closest to the campus, and configure semester-aligned snapshot retention. GDPR Article 32 applies; student data stays in-region; export to Markdown feeds the lab's GitLab or Zenodo archive at term end. At least seven .de university HedgeDoc instances run publicly today.
Open-source mandates in France (the Loi pour une République numérique), Germany (the Federal Sovereign Tech Fund and Schleswig-Holstein's migration away from proprietary office stacks), and the Italian Tre passi preference clause push public bodies toward stacks they can audit and host on-shore. HedgeDoc's AGPL-3.0 license satisfies most must-be-open-source procurement checklists outright, and a managed instance can be locked to a single EU region.

We typically configure OIDC against the buyer's Keycloak or Authentik, and scrape the /metrics Prometheus endpoint into the customer's existing observability stack. Common workflow: an inter-ministerial working group runs every meeting on a shared pad; the resulting Markdown commits to the ministry's GitLab repo for archival; nothing leaves the sovereignty boundary. A typical replacement displaces a per-seat office subscription at €6–13/user/month.
Engineering teams that already write RFCs in Markdown find HedgeDoc reads like the editor they wished they had during meetings. Six diagramming systems ship out of the box — Mermaid, PlantUML, Graphviz, vega-lite, abc-notation, and sequence diagrams — which means design docs don't need a separate diagramming license. The 1.10 line shipped a 60% frontend-bundle reduction for fast page loads.

The usual pattern is GitHub or GitLab OIDC for login, CMD_DEFAULT_PERMISSION=editable for the org, and a workflow where engineers draft an RFC live during a design meeting, copy the resulting Markdown into a PR against rfcs/ in the main repo, and link the historical pad URL in the PR description for an audit trail. The AGPL-3.0 license keeps the docs themselves clean if they ever get committed alongside AGPL-licensed code.
HedgeDoc descends directly from Hackpad and Etherpad — the GitHub README still cites the lineage — and the no-account-needed quick-pad workflow is unchanged. For events under 1,000 attendees we run anonymous edit on, sessions short, uploads disabled or limited to registered staff via CMD_ENABLE_UPLOADS=registered, and CMD_DEFAULT_PERMISSION=freely so a shared link works without ceremony.

Team pads are pre-staged before doors open and linked from the registration confirmation email. The instance is typically only billable for the weeks around the event itself — we spin up a fresh one for the next event rather than carrying state. A 48-hour hackathon with 600 attendees has been done on a single managed instance without resizing, with the closing-ceremony pad running in slide mode driven by reveal.js.

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

PostgreSQL handles concurrent writes cleanly and gives us point-in-time recovery; SQLite has the historical 1.9.6 migration-deletes-notes problem and no real backup story. For a single-user testing pad we can configure SQLite on request, but the default — and the recommendation — is PostgreSQL on every team instance.
Yes to all three. We commonly wire OIDC against Keycloak, Authentik, GitHub, GitLab self-hosted, and Microsoft Entra ID; SAML against Shibboleth federations for universities; and LDAP/AD against existing directory servers. HedgeDoc 1.x supports one provider at a time; HedgeDoc 2 will support multiple concurrently.
Today there's no 1.x to 2.x migration path; the HedgeDoc team has been clear about that. We track the 2.0 milestone (currently in alpha, last counted 88% complete), and when GA ships we'll offer a tested migration on a parallel instance — your existing 1.x stays untouched until you sign off. The eventual migration preserves note IDs as 2.x aliases.
Direct PDF export was removed from 1.x for security reasons — the headless Chromium had unpatched vulnerabilities. The workaround everyone uses today is browser Print → Save as PDF, which renders the same way slide mode does. PDF export is on the roadmap for HedgeDoc 2.1.
All in the base install. KaTeX or MathJax for math, Mermaid and PlantUML for sequence and architecture diagrams, Graphviz for graphs, abc-notation for music, vega-lite for charts, reveal.js for slides triggered by --- separators. No plugins to license, no client-side JS to ship from a CDN.
AGPL applies to the operator of a network service, not the user. We satisfy it by linking our running HedgeDoc tag and any local patches publicly. Your team's documents aren't subject to AGPL — only the HedgeDoc code itself.

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.

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 HedgeDoc for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.