Major annual release marks ten years of Collabora Online and includes optional integrated AI assistance, richer document comparison and review workflows and advances in document interoperability

COOL 26.04 featured image

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom and HAMBURG, Germany, July 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Collabora Productivity unveils the enterprise-ready release for Collabora Online, the open source collaborative document editor with professional service-level agreements (SLA) and technical support.

Collabora Online, part of the Collabora Office product portfolio, is the culmination of a year of development and refinement based on partner and user feedback. Collabora Online celebrates ten years of development this year with over 115 million downloads worldwide.

Organisations integrate Collabora’s office suite into their existing infrastructure, while partner platforms can integrate Collabora Online into their products for powerful, secure and compliant collaborative document editing.

This 10th anniversary release pairs Collabora Online's established strengths with substantial new capabilities. Leading the way is optional AI assistance across Writer, Calc, and Impress, helping teams draft and refine documents, analyse spreadsheet data, and shape presentations. Importantly, customers retain full control over the use of AI as well as the model and infrastructure behind it.

This is complemented by richer document comparison and review workflows for complex documents, new filter, functions and formatting in Calc, more reliable collaborative presenting, continued improvements to file format interoperability (in Microsoft OOXML and Open Document Formats), and significant accessibility work reflected in Collabora Online's successful BITV 2.0 accessibility audit for Writer.

“Across Europe and the world, Collabora Online is the trusted, robust, open source office suite for businesses and organisations seeking digital sovereignty for their document collaboration. We deliver a beautiful, secure and compliant document editor through our partners to joint customers combined with enterprise support from our global team of expert engineers.

“Collabora Online 26.04’s highly customisable and tightly controlled AI assistance enables users to safely accelerate their document related tasks. Likewise, the new editing and review features, improved accessibility and greater document interoperability will smooth the everyday experience for all users, making it more intuitive and flexible.”

—Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity

Feature Highlights in Collabora Online 26.04

Built-in AI Assistant

Based on customer feedback, integrated AI-assistance is now available across Writer, Calc, and Impress. AI support is built directly into the editing experience to assist with drafting, spreadsheet analysis, formula troubleshooting, and presentation preparation. Critically, this integration is entirely under the customer's control and is off by default. Organisations choose which AI capability to enable, if any, and can safely connect their preferred commercial API provider or deploy a custom, self-hosted LLM within their own infrastructure. There is no mandated vendor and no requirement to send data outside an organisation's chosen environment, keeping AI adoption aligned with existing data governance, security, and compliance policies.

Smarter Review & Document Workflow

Document review workflows also see substantial gains for organisations handling contracts, policy documents, and other high-value documents. For instance:

Compare & Merge: A significantly enhanced document comparison tool highlights insertions, deletions, moved content, and formatting changes as clear, colour-coded redlines together with author and timestamp details.

Restricted Review Mode: A new mode that enables administrators to grant reviewers the ability to accept or reject tracked changes without exposing broader editing permissions.

Markdown Support: Writer now supports Markdown import and export, making it easier to move between document editing and documentation-oriented workflows, as well as AI generated styled text.

Accessibility Enhancements

Accessibility remains a core focus for enterprise and public sector deployments. 26.04 has extensive improvements to screen reader support, keyboard navigation, and dialog labelling across apps. The Accessibility features in Writer have passed a BITV 2.0 audit, based on Germany's federal accessibility authority’s guidelines, reinforcing its suitability for organisations with strict compliance obligations.

Document Interoperability Gains

Interoperability with Microsoft (OOXML) file formats has significantly improved. Ongoing rendering and validation testing across hundreds of thousands of test documents has improved document round trips when files move between Collabora Online and proprietary office suites, such as Microsoft Office. For organisations migrating away from proprietary platforms, this translates into fewer formatting surprises and a much smoother transition.

Productivity Improvements

Beyond AI, there are many productivity gains across the suite. Calc adds new modern spreadsheet functions, and ready-made table styles. Impress gains more dependable collaborative presenting with Follow-Me Slide shows, which includes the ability to independently scroll back during a live presentation. Users benefit from a new in-app Options dialog for easily customising dictionaries and less hunting for document signing and interface changes. Administrators have the ability to set documents to open in view-only mode by default, reducing the risk of unintended changes across large deployments.

READ: the Collabora Online 26.04 announcement blog for the FULL list of features
(available at midday (12:00pm GMT) on July 23, 2026)

Try Collabora Online 26.04 Now

Username: press1, press2, press3, press4 and press5
Password: C0llabor4!
Demo: https://demo.eu.collaboraonline.com/

Note: Demo builds are pre-release versions and may include unstable features. They are not representative of final production performance.

Further Resources

Access the Press Release Resources folder for the release, feature blog and screenshots:
https://share.collabora.com/index.php/s/zRKm8BEPDapztW9

Password: COLLABORA-ONLINE-2604

Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity is available for comment, please email Marketing.

Community and Acknowledgements

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to all the historic contributors to the underlying technology upon which Collabora Online is built. This all contributes to our mission to “Make Open Source Rock”, while also being a sustainable, growing business.

All of our code is open source and available to the public on our Gerrit server. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Supporting Quotes

"Collabora Online is a core part of HCL Domino Workspace's modern, fully sovereign collaboration platform, and will be available in our first release as the office suite our customers use to co-author and share documents. This next 26.04 release continues to raise the bar for Domino Workspace customers who will be able to deploy it over the next few months on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a sovereign cloud of their own choosing. Our organizations are both committed to giving our customers full, uncompromising control over their data privacy."

Richard Jefts, Executive Vice President, HCLSoftware
www.hcl-software.com

“Nextcloud welcomes the arrival of enterprise support for the 26.04-based release of Nextcloud Office through our long-standing partnership with Collabora. Our customers who choose to upgrade will enjoy the great improvements in performance, accessibility, and interoperability as well as integration with Nextcloud’s privacy-first, sovereign AI.”

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and Founder, Nextcloud
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/nextcloud

"Our strategic partnership with Collabora is focused on digital sovereignty and interoperability. The 26.04 release is a strong step forward packed with new features that will enable organisations to benefit from more intelligent document workflows and increasingly productive document editing. Collabora Online reinforces our mission to provide secure, interoperable collaboration for organisations that cannot compromise on control, transparency, or jurisdiction."

Benjamin Schilz, CEO of Wire
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/wire

"It is great to see the continued progress Collabora is making on their fully open source, interoperable and ever-more intuitive Office suite. Collabora makes a really important contribution to digital sovereignty and the whole Open Source Ecosystem, and Univention has worked successfully together with Collabora for many years. With 26.04, the accessibility improvements and customer-controlled AI assistance, mark a major step forward."

Peter Ganten, CEO of Univention GmbH
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/univention

"Collabora Online helps our knowledge management customers gain fully-featured document editing without ever leaving XWiki. We are pleased to see 26.04's accessibility and interoperability gains making that experience even stronger."

Ludovic Dubost, Founder & CEO of XWiki SAS
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/xwiki

“We are delighted to see our integration partner Collabora taking this important step forward with Collabora Online 26.04. The enhanced performance and feature set drives an even more polished user experience. Collabora is a great partner for us with their excellent product and clear dedication to open source. That enables our join customers to take back control of their data!”

Klaas Freitag, CTO of OpenCloud
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/opencloud

"We value our partnership with Collabora and the innovation they bring in secure, open source document collaboration. With their latest release, we’re pleased to see extensive improvements in document interoperability, which Adfinis supports with server power for automated testing. Customers shouldn’t have to choose between the latest technology and full control over their own data. We’re proud to support solutions that deliver on both.”

Nicolas Christener, CEO of Adfinis
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/adfinis

“The latest release continues to demonstrate the best integration, feature set and stability for ownCloud users. Paired with the accessibility and interoperability gains in this release, it's a natural fit for the sovereign, federated collaboration we've built ownCloud around."

David Walter, VP, Open Source Program Office & Special Projects at ownCloud – a Kiteworks Company
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/owncloud

"Arawa is pleased to see Collabora incorporating feedback from our joint French customers in government, public administration and education into this milestone release. The new AI assistance, with customers firmly in control of their model and infrastructure, is something our clients from different sectors have requested. The accessibility and interoperability improvements will make an immediate difference for them as well and help increase end user adoption. We look forward to continuing to contribute to Collabora Online's future."

Guy-Christian, Head of Operations, Arawa
www.collaboraonline.com/partners/arawa

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity delivers Collabora Office, a business-hardened, open-source office suite providing seamless document editing and collaboration across web, desktop, and mobile platforms. By supporting all major file formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format, and integrating directly into your own infrastructure, it ensures total data sovereignty and GDPR compliance for modern distributed teams. Backed by the largest team of Open Source Office productivity engineers globally, Collabora Productivity, alongside a global network of trusted partners, offers a secure, high-performance alternative to big-brand solutions for organisations at scale.

Contact

Naomi Manvell, Head of Marketing
marketing@collaboraoffice.com

Chris Thornett, PR
chris.thornett@collabora.com

Collabora Productivity
St Johns Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge
CB4 0WS
United Kingdom

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b8dae5a5-3e50-47b5-9ee6-ba2de9adc13b

Collabora Online 26.04 celebrates 10th year with release adding richer document features and AI assistance