Etherpad
by Etherpad · Self-hosted real-time collaborative editor with full authorship history
BenchRank score
Screenshots of Etherpad
Homepage
Overview
Etherpad is a self-hosted, real-time collaborative text editor released under Apache 2.0. Every keystroke is attributed to its author and every revision is kept, so the timeslider can replay a pad's whole history. The core ships small and is extended with plugins for comments, images, tables, drawing, code highlighting, OAuth/LDAP/OpenID auth and AI.
- Best for
- Teams and institutions that must self-host collaborative editing and keep full authorship history.
- Pricing
- No prices are shown; Etherpad is open-source software under Apache 2.0 that you install and host yourself.
- Runs on
- Self-hostedCLI
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Self-hosted under Apache 2.0, with no telemetry and full data export
- Character-level authorship and a timeslider for full revision history
- Large plugin ecosystem covering auth, comments, media and AI
- 105 languages, and runs on hardware from a Pi to a data centre
Trade-offs
- You run the server yourself; no official hosted service is offered
- Maintained by a small volunteer team that is actively seeking maintainers
- Features like comments, tables and images require installing plugins
- Install needs git and Node.js 24 or newer
How Etherpad markets itself
A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Etherpad’s captured homepage.
Homepage capture
“Etherpad — the editor for documents that matter.”
- Angle: Open source / ownership
- Hero: Product screenshot
Pricing
Published plans and prices from Etherpad’s own pricing page.
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
MCP support
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
API quality
Public API surface: machine-readable spec, official SDKs, documented auth, errors, rate limits and versioning.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
Maintenance
Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.
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Where this comes from
The Etherpad pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.
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Is this your product?
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