Two years ago, I switched from editing documents I store on my Nextcloud with Collabora (Libreoffice) Online to OnlyOffice Online. The main reason: The self-hosted Collabora/Libreoffice Online server renders changes made in documents on the server side and then downloads the result into the browser. The unfortunate consequence: There was a noticeable delay between typing something and characters appearing on the screen if one is not close to the server.

Also, I had some problems with characters sometimes not appearing in the order I had typed them. And finally, I sometimes got drawing errors where parts of a line were missing. All of this together made me set-up my own OnlyOffice document server and connect it to Nextcloud. I’ve been using this setup for 2 years now and it suffers from none of these issues, as the document to edit is loaded into the browser and rendered locally. Changes made to the document locally are then sent to the server and from there to other people editing a document collaboratively. From my point of view a much better architecture. But it’s two years down the road now, perhaps Collabora Online has become better!? I decided to take a look.

Giving Nextcloud/Collabora Online another try is very simple, as Nextcloud AIO (All In One) comes with integrated Collabora Online support. It literally only takes 5 minutes to set up a complete Nextcloud installation and Collabora Online Office on a virtual machine. Have a look here for the details.

On the positive side I didn’t see the graphics errors anymore I had two years ago and I tried very hard but could not reproduce the character swapping anymore. Nice!

For the ‘character type/appear delay’ test I decided to give it a try with two setups: One setup was using the word processor with Firefox and Wifi over a LTE/5G link with a delay to the data center of around 35ms. The other setup was using my DSL line at home with a round trip delay to the data center of 16 ms. With both setups I can still see this slight delay between typing text and the characters appearing on the screen. It seems to be a bit more pronounced with the 35 ms delay but I would now deem it usable in both setups. Local editing in the browser as done by OnlyOffice still has a significant edge, however.

So even though Collabora Online has improved, I still prefer OnlyOffice. But I admit, it is more complicated to set-up. So if I would not have done it already, I’m not sure the delta is still big enough to justify the extra set-up effort.

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