CryptPad

CryptPad is an Open Source, end-to-end encrypted, browser-based office software suite. It is developed by XWiki and is funded by public grants, Open Collective donations, and user subscriptions. To learn more, see their about page.

Why you should use CryptPad

CryptPad is, quite simply, very good software. It works well and keeps your work private and secure, and also it isn't made by Google or Microsoft. And fuck Google and Microsoft. But this isn't only a product that you can use to stick it to the man, it's actually good. Like really, genuinely good.

Features

Full free Office Suite

Cryptpad offers a full office suite of products and acts as a suitable replacement for G-Suite and Microsoft Office. It offers:

• Word Processing
• Spreadsheets
• Flow Charts
• Forms
• Presentations

And more. It is more than up to the task of replacing G-suite for most applications.

Collaborative work

One of the major reasons that people do not find LibreOffice a suitable replacement for their current tools is because of the lack of collaboration. CryptPad allows multiple people to work on documents at the same time, eliminating that problem.

Logged-Out Use

You don't have to have an account to access CryptPad documents. You don't even have to have an account to make CryptPad documents. You can create an encrypted document with no sign-up and allow other guests or users to access it without creating accounts of their own.

Ethos

Privacy

CryptPad does not do any more tracking of users than is mandatory for functionality. They keep limited logs and they do not have the ability to see what is happening in user documents.

Security

What user data there is is securely encrypted, and all of your documents are similarly encrypted. CryptPad uses a Zero-Knowledge Storage scheme, which means that the company storing the data doesn't have access to the data they are storing. They cannot access the files in your drive, and cannot decrypt anything you've made with their system.

Open Source

Open source software is good and people should use more open source software.

The Downsides

CryptPad isn't perfect, it does have a few issues that you should be aware of before using it. These are by no means dealbreakers but I don't want to pretend it's flawless or ideal for every user.

Very Limited Free Storage

Free users get 1GB of storage, which is going to feel limiting to people who are used to the 15GB of free storage offered by Google and Outlook accounts. A 5€ monthly payment increases that to 5GB total storage, which can seem like a lot to pay for not a lot of storage. But you're paying to not be the product and to ensure that you can host totally encrypted information that can't be taken down for violating a ToS. I write a lot of porn, and that 5€ a month is worth it to me to ensure that I won't lose access to my documents.

Very Limited Documentation

The small userbase and development team means that you are going to have a harder time finding answers to your questions than you would if you were using Gdocs or Office 365.

Occasional Downtime

CryptPad experiences more outages and service fluctuations than you might expect to see with Microsoft or Google. That said, I'm a fairly heavy user who has had a CryptPad account for two years; in that time I've experienced two service interruptions. One interruption lasted about an hour, the other was about ten hours; in both cases I was able to access documents but not add to them efficiently.