Hosting an Open Alternative to Google Docs for Digital Sovereignty

TLDR: we are self-hosting a LaSuite Docs instance, an alternative to writing tools such as Google Docs and Notion for small agencies that often collaborate with clients. We would be really interested to hear your feedback, use cases, and impressions - and you can have a look and try it out here.

Motivation

At our software engineering agency isselthal industries, we write a lot. We write summaries of our meetings, maintain a work log to coordinate long-running projects, make notes about topics we discuss in our weekly plannings, and write and share documents with clients. The standard approach - or at least what I did when I was freelancing in 2019 - was Google Workspace, mostly to get access to Google Docs. Even back then I often felt Google Workspace was overkill for a small agency. I permanently got emails about admin settings I had to configure for my “company”: emails that said, as an administrator, I could now allow people in my “company” to do something or another, and I would need to manage my “company”.

That was permanent overhead, and I felt like I was renting a solution that was way too much for me and required too much mindspace compared to what I was actually getting from it. Additionally, fast forward to 2026, and the world looks like a different place - the question of how healthy it is to bind your business’s success and its data to American hyperscalers such as Google has become a lot more important.

LaSuite

From my PhD work, I was already aware of a French-German cooperative project to create an open-source Google Workspace alternative called LaSuite. We went back and looked at how the project had evolved. I was surprised to find it was really hard to just get access to a hosted LaSuite instance to try out, even if you were willing to pay. The hosted instances available to the French government require a French government ID. Other hosts linked from the LaSuite site either required you to apply and ask for beta access, or were hosting the tools exclusively as part of a digital cooperative for their members.

I have a high opinion of digital cooperatives, but I just wanted to use the tool in exchange for money, without any ideological overhead. So we did what any reasonable technologist does: we decided to self-host an instance for ourselves (part of the product ideas we are working on). We figured other small agencies and professionals that write a lot might find this interesting too - so the instance is open for everyone to try at docs.diffforge.com.

Georg wrote a much more technical deep-dive into the realities of getting to a good setup on his blog at https://georg-schwarz.com/blog/from-kubernetes-demo-to-production-platform/. In short, there is still a lot of work that has to be done to get a hosted instance running, even though the underlying software is open-source and encourages self-hosting.

As a disclaimer, this is beta software, so if you want to use this for your agency or for production setups, please quickly shoot us an email at philip@heltweg.org and let’s talk about your use case. In general, we would love to hear from people working in a similar space, or anyone that might find this useful.

The Product

LaSuite Docs itself is really nice. It seems like a very modern product compared to a lot of other open-source alternatives - probably the closest thing to Google Docs that has actually come this far. Collaboration works well, and I really like the markdown-inspired syntax for creating new blocks: type a hashtag and you get a headline, and so on.

I also really like how LaSuite has integrated AI into the writing tool. There is an unobtrusive “Ask AI” button in the UI that you can feed text as context, which then automatically routes to an external AI backend. For now we are using Mistral’s models to have a European alternative to the American frontier models. With an open model ecosystem, this could be a real step towards digital sovereignty - especially if you implement a bring-your-own-key flow where every customer can wire in their own private AI API. We are working on it and are in the process of proposing a contribution to the upstream repository.

Things I will need to get used to: the block-based structure, where you create blocks of text, headlines, etc, and you don’t have a completely free-form page to write on. Also, LaSuite Docs is a docs-only solution - there is no file-based view of everything like in Google Drive. Instead you have documents that can be nested, so you build a tree of documents as your organizational structure. That is unusual to me, but not necessarily bad.

The Business

Our current assumption is that we are not the only small agency that writes a lot - collaboratively inside the agency, but also with customers and clients - and wants a professional environment to do that in. Based on this, our ideal customer is a small professional agency or independent professional that does a lot of writing, needs more than basic tools for it, and is willing to pay a small amount of money for it in larger chunks rather than a monthly subscription.

Coming from an academic background, we also thought about agencies that work with grant-based or project-based workflows, where you have to budget tools for the duration of a grant. So we offer packages with that in mind: a specific number of seats for a fixed time period that often aligns with grant cycles. Of course these are all assumptions, and I am genuinely uncertain about them - we will try to figure out more details about what kind of use cases this tool is useful for.

In Summary

We were looking for a Google Docs alternative that doesn’t bind us closely to Google and Google Workspace. We found LaSuite as a well-designed, modern tool for professional writing in a small agency context. We are self-hosting an instance with open account creation, so you can try it out directly.

If you need professional support or production quality hosting, please reach out and we can talk. And I would be really interested in any experiences you have setting up a similar tool, or if you see a need for this kind of writing software for your use case.