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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Cryptpad is E2E encrypted. At a first glance, this is not.

Which also means its features won't be constrained by the E2EE architecture.

At a first glance, it seems the suite numerique wants to be simpler than full traditional office documents. It seems to compare itself with notion and outline.

CryptPad has very simple modules and also more complex, OnlyOffice based modules.

Ultimately, if the suite numerique's frontend is able to send editing patches as JSON, it should not be too complicated to make it work on a CryptPad server and make it E2EE, which is exactly what the CryptPad team did to OnlyOfficr (the "why not both" option)

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I'm from the CryptPad team.

It would not really make any sense to try to take all Docs in CryptPad, as Docs is both client and server code. The client has both and editor but also sharing features.

CryptPad integrates editors.

However Docs is based on BlockNote for the editor and this editor has been on our watchlist to replace our aging CKEditor which is used in CryptPad. This would make sense to integrate in CryptPad.

As it was said CryptPad is e2ee which is a LOT of work. Then it has 9 types of document files (Docs has 1). CryptPad also has a drive. It also has shared folders, team drives, import and export features and finally also a Survey Tools with e2ee protection. There are many more little or larger details.

Ludovic

Thank you for the reply!

Of course as a part of the Cryptpad team you have a bias, but if I'm looking to replace Google Drive and its functionality, is Cryptpad a good replacement, or is there another one, maybe Nextcloud(?), that could do it better (just user interaction etc wise, not E2EE)?

Would you have a list of things Cryptpad can and can't do compared to other solutions? It would make choosing the best replacement easier.

The choice depends of what you use and how you use Google Drive.

Nextcloud is great. It has the highest coverage towards the Google suite without e2ee.

I believe we at CryptPad have the highest with e2ee. If you go cloud e2ee is an important privacy and security factor.

If you self host it can also be depending on how you are able to protect your server.

CryptPad is more scoped around editing documents. I believe it's a simpler package around the pure google docs functionnality.

Nextcloud is better for storing many docs, photos etc.. And has file sync to your computer and a mobile app.

We don't have comparisons.. But maybe we should.

Here is an independent review of CryptPad: https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/07/cryptpad-r...

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