“As we come to the end of another extraordinary year, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our customers, partners, community and of course the awesome team at Collabora Productivity.
“We’re focused on making Open Source rock by creating beautiful, intuitive tools that work online and off, and keep you firmly in control. We love to work alongside a vibrant global community that believes productivity should be open, secure, and designed for users. We are most grateful to our partners and customers who ultimately fund every document we liberate and line of code we write – thank you!”
Michael Meeks
Collabora Productivity CEO
And what a year it’s been! We’ve shipped some of our most ambitious projects yet – from a beautiful new user interface refresh, to a brand-new desktop suite. We’ve grown in reach, thanks to partnerships with French ministries offering Collabora Online to 1,000,000+ teachers, or German states choosing open, sovereign productivity solutions they control and can trust, and it was the year we reached the end of support for Collabora Online 22.05, showing the strength of our LTS offering.
So let’s dive in and take a look at what your support made possible, starting with the headline release of the year: Collabora Online 25.04.
COOL 25.04
Collabora Online 25.04 was our biggest step forward in usability, performance and document rendering in years. This release wasn’t just about adding features – it was about making everyday work smoother, faster, and more intuitive for millions of users. Just a few highlights include:
Smoother, more polished editing
One of the less visible improvements was the work on performance. With updates such as viewport-based preloading aiming for a 60fps smooth editing experience, documents now feel noticeably more responsive. Scrolling and typing are snappier, zooming more fluid, and larger documents load with far less waiting around. A huge quality-of-life win.
Smarter writing tools: Autotext & Custom Dictionaries
Writer gained powerful new productivity helpers this year.
Autotext speeds up repetitive writing and helps teams standardise phrasing, while Custom Dictionaries make it easy to ensure technical terms, product names, or organisational jargon are treated correctly. Small features, big dividends for anyone who works with words all day.
Combined with central management capabilities, these are serious features for organisations big and small looking to level up their language use and consistency.
Clearer, easier collaboration with improved comments
Commenting saw significant enhancements too. Updates across the UI make discussions smoother, more reliable, and easier to follow – especially important in documents with multiple collaborators. These improvements continue our ongoing effort to make collaborative editing as simple as possible.
Modern PDF support and digital signing
The introduction of PDF 2.0 compatibility and built-in digital signatures thanks to an integration with eID Easy brought a major boost to organisations with modern document-signing needs. Users can now create, read and sign modern PDFs directly within Collabora Online – no more need to share your sensitive documents with 3rd party document signing companies.
A Presenter Console built for impressive presentations
Impress gained a fully-featured Presenter Console, giving speakers everything they need: upcoming slides, timers, notes, and navigation tools. Whether in the boardroom, classroom, or conference hall, Collabora Online now offers a far more complete presentation experience.
Improved Interoperability - The work that never stops
Alongside the headline features, COOL 25.04 continued our constant, meticulous work on interoperability. Hundreds of small fixes and refinements across Writer, Calc, and Impress to make sure documents open cleanly and behave as users expect – whether they are edited in our software, or shared with collaborators in a different editing environment.
COOL Days 2025 — A Bridge-Building Blast in Budapest
June brought the Collabora Online community back together for COOL Days 2025 in Budapest, where contributors, partners, developers and community members gathered for three days of talks, workshops, demos, fun and hacking.
The programme mixed technical deep dives with hands-on hacking time as well as some fun excursions around Budapest, allowing contributors, partners and engineers to all enjoy the time together. From sharing new features and performance improvements, debugging tricky issues or sharing feedback on roadmap directions, the in-person conversations and shared sessions proved invaluable.
If you couldn’t join us, you’ll find the full write-up, photos, and talks on our blog here. And we’re already looking forward to welcoming you to COOL Days 2026 in Hamburg!
Major UI/UX Refresh
This year we delivered our biggest UI/UX refresh yet. The simple aim was to use the data we’ve gathered to reduce friction, make powerful features more discoverable, and let users move faster with less training. Some of the updates include:
Context-aware design: controls when and where you need them
Selecting text now triggers a compact, contextual toolbar right next to your cursor – so common formatting tools (bold, italic, font, colour, etc.) are instantly available without hunting through menus.
Smart tabs
Instead of overwhelming toolbars, we introduced contextual tabs – for example, auto-switching to the Table tab when you’re editing a table, or the Picture tab when an image is selected.
This keeps the UI cleaner, less intimidating, and more relevant to the task at hand.
Cleaner layout, responsive toolbars, better discoverability
The UI now adapts gracefully to different window sizes: controls re-flow, related functions group when space is tight, and horizontal scrollbars are eliminated – giving a smooth, consistent experience, and improving function discoverability whether you’re on a compact screen or a large monitor.
We also improved iconography, and added more graphics for commonly used layout settings so all users can find the settings they need
Data-driven design – built from real usage patterns
This overhaul wasn’t guesswork. Behind the scenes, we collected feedback from customers, partners, community, and internal usage data: more than 1,000,000 data points from real editing sessions. The result? A UI shaped around how people actually work, balancing simplicity, power, and flexibility.
New Collabora Office
One of the most exciting moments of the year came right at the end: the launch of the new Collabora Office our desktop suite bringing Collabora Online to the desktop. For the first time, users can enjoy a genuinely consistent UI and feature experience across browser and desktop – the same fast engine, the same collaboration-ready foundations, the same modern UX direction – all wrapped in a beautifully polished native app.
Whilst only an initial release, we are looking forward to further integrating and supporting both worlds in 2026. Organisations can run Collabora Online in the browser, offering the desktop app for local work, and enjoy the same feature set, file handling and behaviour across platforms. This will dramatically reduce training overheads for Collabora Online users, will simplify deployments, and opens the door to a more unified future for productivity.
The new suite is already elegant and secure, but as we iron out the initial early-release hiccups, we’re exited for future development and deeper convergence in the years ahead.
If you haven’t read the full announcement yet, we highly recommend it – it’s one of the biggest steps we’ve taken in making open productivity seamless across every device.
Community
Collabora’s mission to “Make Open Source Rock” continues to thrive thanks to our incredible and diverse community. Every bug you reported, every string you translated, every patch you submitted and every insight you shared has helped make Collabora Online better for millions of users around the world. Thank you for being such a wonderful force behind our progress.
This year our community grew stronger than ever. We welcomed over 100 new contributors across code, translations and documentation. From first–time patch authors to long-time translators, you all reflect the healthy, global momentum of the project. We resolved 251 community-reported issues on github so far this year, showing how active collaboration continues to shape the roadmap. We also created 85 new Easy Hacks, and with 72 still open, there are plenty of approachable ways for newcomers to get involved.
Our translation community was equally impressive in 2025, reaching 92 supported languages, with more than 100 translators who completed 88,683 translated strings and nearly one million translated words. Two new languages joined this year as well, expanding accessibility for even more users.
Engineering
This year our engineering team delivered quality improvements across performance, usability and new features. With 4,486 commits merged into the master branch, 368 more than last year, and more than 300 customer tickets resolved, Collabora Online is evolving faster than ever.
Performance improvements also paid off. From the document parsing, caching and rendering improvements in the 25.04 release, we estimate to have dropped 2-3 seconds from document load times since 2024. For the same 500-user organisations, that might have shaved off 600-900 hours of document-loading time, or approximately 100 working days.
In our crash testing, this year in partnership with Adfinis, we supervised the loading of more than 30,000,000 test documents, resaving to different formats and checking for errors. In addition we maintained a huge number of code fuzzing tests, as of early December this was 2,798,607,405,444.
As well as crash testing, our thorough file-format-interoperability testing (which checks for errors when converting the ~250,000 problematic documents we keep on record) ran through more than 4,000,000 tests this year, with resulting interop improvements resolving in excess of 10,000 reported issues. In just two impactful updates of our XLS to XLSX conversion filter for example, over 13,000 previously misbehaving documents were fixed.
Combined with the refreshed UI/UX, performance and accessibility upgrades, and major new features in the 25.04 release, this year we took our engineering excellence to the next level.
Conferences
But not only fast-paced development, 2025 was a year of planes, trains and presentation clickers – with the team attending 25 conferences around the world. From the romantic streets of Paris, to bustling Tokyo, to busy, colourful Bangkok, we were thrilled to meet our partners, customers, developers and open-source enthusiasts wherever they were gathering.
We kicked off the year at the Univention Summit and FOSDEM, before heading into a spring packed with community events, cloud summits and developer meetups. Summer brought our own COOL Days in Budapest, shortly followed by the LibreOffice Conference also in Budapest, which our colleague Gábor Kelemen led the organisation of, helped by a team from Collabora Productivity and members of the local community.
Autumn carried the momentum through Copenhagen and The Hague, before a snowstorm of events in December. Wherever we travelled, the message was the same: organisations everywhere are looking for beautiful, smart, secure, sovereign office solutions – and they’re genuinely excited to discover what Collabora Online can offer.
We hope to see you at one of next year’s events – and especially at COOL Days 2026 in Hamburg!
Marketing Stats
2025 was also a big year for marketing and outreach, with our blogs, videos, social media and press activity reaching a wider audience than ever. We also launched French, German and Spanish translations of our website to help even more organisations learn about open, secure, sovereign document editing. Here are some of the highlights:
2025 saw us kick off a new #FeatureFriday video series, to introduce new features of Collabora Online. One of the more popular videos in the series featured some of the collaborative features in Collabora Online: Collaboration Features in Collabora Online #FeatureFriday.
2025 also saw our new Open Matters podcast introduced, exploring open source news and topics. Why not have a listen here to our December episode exploring some of the history, struggles and progress of open source projects in Denmark: Open Source for Citizens: Denmark’s Bold Experiment.
Press coverage grew dramatically in 2025, with 178 articles and blog posts published by year’s end — up sharply from 59 mentions in 2024 — reflecting both increased momentum and rising recognition of Collabora Productivity’s role in open, sovereign digital infrastructure. November, marked by the launch of Collabora Office, was a particular highlight: in just one week, the announcement generated 36 articles, including coverage from Heise, MSN and ZDNet (which was localised and syndicated across multiple countries with a recently updated title “Not enough people are talking about this free Microsoft Office alternative”) Overall sentiment was strongly positive at 87%, and we expect coverage to continue growing as further updates land.
This year we also hosted a number of webinars outlining our product lineup, new features, integrations with our partners, and of course the new Collabora Office.
Speaking of which, our new Collabora Office release blog attracted some serious attention in November, you can read more about that here.
And finally, our new comic, “The Open Road to Freedom” (or TORF for short), took a more light-hearted look at the world of FLOSS software communities.
New Integrations, Partners & Team
2025 saw growth not just in users and deployments, but in people, partnerships and the wider ecosystem around Collabora Online.
Our team grew by 24 new colleagues, including 13 former allotropia team members and 4 interns, strengthening our engineering, design and community efforts. Behind those hires sat a remarkable level of interest: 3,669 applications, 73 interviews, and a recruitment pipeline driven largely by the open-source community itself – 36% via community channels. A clear sign that people want to work on open, meaningful technology, many thanks to all who applied even if we couldn’t host everyone (yet).
At the same time, our ecosystem continued to expand. We welcomed 34 new partners this year, including more than 15 OEMs and deep integrations, spanning hosting providers, collaboration platforms, consultancies and sovereign cloud offerings across Europe and beyond.
We also saw a broadening integration landscape, with new and ongoing work around WordPress, Odoo, Imixs and Plone (only Odoo and WordPress are supported by us currently), making it easier than ever to use Collabora Online wherever documents are created and shared.
Collabora Productivity is growing, and so is the opportunity to be part of it! If you’re looking to integrate, partner, or deploy, there’s never been a better time to get involved.
Thank you for joining us on this whirlwind tour of 2025! It has been a year of big releases, bold UI changes, deep technical improvements, and major wins for open standards and digital freedom around the world. Thank you again to our customers, partners, community contributors, testers, translators, and everyone who helps push Collabora Office and Collabora Online forward.
If you want to stay connected or get more involved, here are a few easy ways to dive in:
- Try CODE and experiment with the very latest Collabora Online features
- Download the new Collabora Office desktop and see just how far it’s come
- Join the community forum, and maybe try out some easy hacks!
- Subscribe to our newsletter for monthly updates
- Follow us on social media for releases, deep dives, and behind-the-scenes posts
- Reach out to sales if you’d like to integrate Collabora Online or join our partner ecosystem
We’re excited for everything 2026 will bring – and we can’t wait to keep building an open, secure, user-focused future together.
But for now, from all of us at Collabora Productivity marketing,
