Collaborating in really real-time

Etherpad allows you to edit documents collaboratively in real-time, much like a live multi-player editor that runs in your browser. Write articles, press releases, to-do lists, and the like together with your friends, your fellow students or your colleagues, all working on the same document at the same time. You no longer have to send your stuff back and forth via email, just set up a pad, share the link and start collaborating!

Etherpad also provides access to all data through a well-documented API and supports import/export to many major data exchange formats. And if the built-in feature set isn't enough for you, there's tons of plugins that allow you to customize your instance to suit your needs.

You don't need to set up a server and install Etherpad in order to use it. Just pick one of publicly available instances that friendly people from everywhere around the world have set up. Alternatively, you can set up your own instance by following our installation guide

Download

Also, see our installation instructions.

Contribute

Etherpad is an open source project. And that means, that everything, from this website to the core of the application itself, has been contributed by passionate, helpful individuals (such as yourself) who liked what they saw and wanted to make something better of it. So if you like what you see, and want to make something better of it, we'd like to see your contributions. It doesn't matter how familiar you are with real-time applications, or whether you know how to write programs for Node.js. There are plenty of ways to be helpful! Just ask!

One of the first things you should do is actually use Etherpad, and get to know it, read about it, evangelise it, and engage with the wider community. Learn, how to write plugins or translate the user interface to your mother tongue. Be creative!

If you want to help, get in touch!

Development workflow

The main development happens on Github. To contribute, fork the main repo, branch off a feature branch from develop, make your changes and commit them, push to your fork and submit a pull request for ether/develop.

Once in a while we merge develop into master, which results in a new release. This means you will always find the latest stable version in the master branch.

Links

Get in touch

Thanks

Many individuals, companies and organizations have contributed to Etherpad Lite. We'd like to thank them all!

• Primary Technology built Etherpad Lite in 2010 to build an educational product called PrimaryPad
• Mozilla have made key contributions in nearly every area since 2012
• Wikimedia Foundation as an early adopter of Etherpad Lite have contributed to various aspects of bug discovery and resolution
• Google originally open-sourced the key libraries required to create Etherpad Lite after a purchase of Appjet
• PiratPartiet have been vocal in promoting collaborative writing
• Joyent funded the original NodeJS development which is now maintained mostly by the node community
• Software Freedom Conservancy helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

Additionally, our thanks go out to the tens of thousands of developers and organizations who have created all the modules we depend on or contributed in some way to our ability to provide Etherpad Lite as open source.

We'd also like to thank you. You, who've been making Etherpad Lite what it is, if you've been developing awesome features or plugins, whether you're runnning an instance or you're just one of our diligent users.

Thank you!