CryptPad: An Alternative to the Google Suite

rodolphoarruda · 2025-05-09T23:59:30 1746835170

I have been working on an essay about 'Personal Digital Infrastructures,' a concept of infrastructure that seeks resilience and durability for personal data at a level we typically only see in banks or state institutions. In other words, an infrastructure that can protect your personal data in the face of disasters such as big tech account cancellations, fund blocking, imprisonment, bankruptcy, death, etc. The flagship instance of Cryptpad is the service that comes closest to this idea of infrastructure. The free plan gives you 1GB of storage for files, which is more than enough to store essential data for the continuity of businesses, families, communities, etc. E2E encryption plus zero trust in a free tier is something that should be valued and used to our advantage. Cryptpad is a very powerful resource and should be more appreciated.

hoerzu · 2025-05-10T00:09:15 1746835755

Is there a Google Keep alternative?

rodolphoarruda · 2025-05-10T00:16:54 1746836214

In the Cryptpad service? No. Not with the same UX. But you can keep simple markdown notes in it.

eointierney · 2025-05-10T00:15:20 1746836120

https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/crdt.html

is much more fun and, obviously, vastly more powerful.

righthand · 2025-05-09T14:41:16 1746801676

Cryptpad is all right though it locks you into Cryptpad. If you want to extract your documents you have to use their UI to decrypt them. What I am looking for is a document interface that works with Syncthing. Let syncthing handle the syncing and encryption.

ldubost · 2025-05-10T00:22:30 1746836550

I'm from the CryptPad team.

We hope to be able to give an API in the future but there are a few concerns to allow sync tools to operate:

- server load and volume of data when syncing large volumes of data, especially for our flagship instance. CryptPad is currently used for realtime editing not for large data sync. We already host 6TB of data and it's unclear were that would lead us. - version compatibility with apps not upgraded to the latest version of the API

These are similar reasons that kept us away from federation.

Our team is small and already a lot of work. Hiring is limited by our funding.

Ludovic

jraph · 2025-05-09T22:50:04 1746831004

Synching is for syncing your files across several devices of yours. CryptPad is for working with other people, possibly at the same time on the same document.

The tools donc comapte, the needs are very different, and you might find them both useful in different situations.

It seems to me syncthing simply doesn't need anything more, you just use the desktop application of your choice for editing your documents.

And yes, you are kinda locked into CryptPad if you don't export your documents as you go. The server not having your documents at a central place and all the documents having different decryption keys means it's hard to provide a simple "take out" zip export. I guess some automation tool accessing your browser profile could be built to help with this.

nout · 2025-05-09T18:53:22 1746816802

One option for you that's half way there is to use Obsidian on top of markdown files and sync those with Syncthing.

Obsidian has many of the rich editing capabilities, especially when you install plugins. For plus points the files are very portable and there is (almost) no "vendor lock in" because it's all markdown textfiles.

dtkav · 2025-05-09T21:54:04 1746827644

I'm building a plugin for Obsidian called Relay that makes Obsidian real-time collaborative [0].

It isn't end-to-end encrypted (yet), but you can self host the document collaboration server on a private network (like tailscale).

If you're like me and you need real-time collaboration and privacy but e2ee isn't a strict requirement for your collaborative docs then you might enjoy it.

I also use Obsidian sync for e2ee device sync -- it is a fantastic product.

[0] https://relay.md

SkyMarshal · 2025-05-09T21:35:49 1746826549

Or just use Obsidian's built-in E2E encrypted syncing.

https://obsidian.md/sync

But yeah, since it stores everything as flat markdown files, you can sync or archive your Obsidian docs folder with anything.

sillyfluke · 2025-05-09T16:10:56 1746807056

I came across cryptpad as cryptpad.cz but couldn't figure out who was behind it at the time. At least with this link you can get to at least one seemingly legit dev, which makes me take it more seriously. Is cryptpad.cz a fork of this or vice versa?

jraph · 2025-05-09T22:06:49 1746828409

cryptpad.cz seems to be one of the many instances of CryptPad. I don't know who is behind.

CryptPad.org is the official website of the project (and cryptpad.fr an instance maintained by the original devs).

Tomte · 2025-05-09T16:19:57 1746807597

CryptPad is developed by XWiki as a side project.

jraph · 2025-05-09T22:16:52 1746829012

I feel like side needs to be precised a bit. Although it admittedly doesn't generate nearly as much revenue as XWiki, several people are paid full time to work on it, and it receives public grants. It is an important project for XWiki SAS.

(I work for XWiki, on XWiki though)

sillyfluke · 2025-05-09T16:31:25 1746808285

Do you know of any publicized auditing done on the E2E aspect of it? Curious about that since it's part of the name and a prominent publicized feature.

misterdata · 2025-05-09T14:59:38 1746802778

So, basically any local productivity tool, saving files in a synced folder.

While this works, Syncthing does not really provide anything for fine-grained collaboration or sharing (you only share full folders). Encrypted peers do allow storing files on a machine that you don’t have to trust.

righthand · 2025-05-09T15:08:20 1746803300

I don't need anything from Syncthing for fine grained collaboration, the text editors do that.

andai · 2025-05-09T16:27:20 1746808040

What are you looking for? I used to use Notational Velocity in an encrypted volume hosted on Dropbox, but I ended up switching to Obsidian for the mobile support.

righthand · 2025-05-09T16:39:22 1746808762

I’m not actually looking, Syncthing solves 90% and I’m hard pressed to believe anyone needs live document collaboration outside of an office context that screensharing doesn’t already solve. Most of the time when everyone “collaborates”, only 1-2 people of the group are doing the typing.

lysace · 2025-05-09T19:03:49 1746817429

I've been a heavy Google Docs/Sheets/etc user since they launched almost two decades ago (2006).

I've exported to structured formats a handful of times, out of thousands of documents.

CryptPad really should build this though.

bjelkeman-again · 2025-05-09T20:58:15 1746824295

I had to export all of our documents and sheets out of Google Drive. I used something called Google Take Out, that packages everything and puts it somewhere where you can download zip files. It took a few days for it to be available. Except it didn’t do what it said it did. It didn’t export even half the files. I unpacked and compared with what was online.

In the end I had to download folders by hand. Took me half a day. And make sure they weren’t too big, because then it wouldn’t include everything.

colordrops · 2025-05-09T15:41:12 1746805272

Also no easy way to import everything from Google drive.

aaravchen · 2025-05-09T17:43:39 1746812619

You have to download everything in your Drive to your local system first, then unzip it all, but then you can upload the entire folder to CryptPad.

Google isn't going to make it easy for a competitor to transfer content, and I'd rather the CryptPad devs work on the product and not a feature users will each only use once at most.

The only annoyance I had was "converting" the uploaded files to the "native" CryptPad format. It doesn't actually have a different native type, it just seems to be a registering with the CryptPad internals which of its predefined types the file is (E.g. Document, Presentation, etc). And you don't have to do it for the file to open and edit just fine. But you have to open each file "as " from the right click menu, then save it back out and delete the "original" to convert it.

j45 · 2025-05-09T18:45:11 1746816311

Onboarding is a big one time feature to get users to first value.

Fire-Dragon-DoL · 2025-05-09T22:22:00 1746829320

I tried cryptpad and it was good, with the main issue being inviting new users is really complicated. Users needed to register and then send their own "invite me" link, because the system encrypted their email address, so you can only use the link to invite them. This turned out too complicated for normal people (ok for computer users)

jraph · 2025-05-09T22:54:51 1746831291

The normal way to invite people to a CryptPad document is to give them the shared link. No need to register or involve emails. Then, they just need to follow the link and it should just work. CryptPad is specifically designed with nontechnical users in mind, because if you want something to be secure, it needs to be simple, and it is not desirable for privacy to be limited to technical users only.

What did you want to achieve?

Fire-Dragon-DoL · 2025-05-09T23:01:31 1746831691

Sorry I should have been more specific, I was trying to invite a user to a team (can't remember the right terminology) so that they could read and write into a directory, creating as many document as they wanted.

We are a small team of 5, but I'm the only tech-able person, other older users felt extremely disoriented.

Which is frustrating, because to me Cryptpad did everything we needed in a very, very secure way (all encrypted)

ldubost · 2025-05-09T22:56:13 1746831373

Hi,

I'm from the CryptPad team.

This is an interesting feedback.

Note that you can also invite people by sending them a link to a document and then connect to them from the user sidebar. They don't really need an account to access documents.

The main reason for the lack of simpler invitation using email is that we don't really want users to give us the mail of other users to invite. This goes against the "privacy" we are promising users.

Ludovic

Fire-Dragon-DoL · 2025-05-09T23:04:57 1746831897

Hi! Thank you for answering this.

We are essentially a group of people (home-owner association but for condos, in Canada). None of these are tech people, they also might not own a computer, but just a tablet and a phone.

The main issue was trying to invite them to a team. I had all their email addresses already, because our main form of communication is email, but I had to go to them one by one and ask them for a link (ID? I can't remember) to give to me so that I could invite them.

Essentially, I get the privacy concern, but I already had all their email addresses, so it was protecting data and making a workflow more complicated, for a use-case we didn't have.

hmsimha · 2025-05-09T14:48:42 1746802122

I think there are some issues with cryptpad, most significantly that documents which are shared via their share link (default way of sharing) will effectively be shared with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on. I think this is dangerous because some users may be under the impression that Cryptpad secures their documents from the prying of big tech's eyes, but since it's guaranteed that at least some document collaborators will be using those companies' browsers, and browser history is synced, the URLs (which contain the key to decrypt the document after the fragment) to any document which is shared with more than handful of cypherpunks will certainly end up shared with the main browser vendors

Additionally, they've failed to make some architectural and delivery decisions which would protect users from various attacks like a server compromise (for example, a server seized by an adversary may send malicious client code that conducts a document exfiltration), as well as document exfiltration via a malicious browser extension. Both of these can be mitigated somewhat by delivering the frontend as a desktop app or signed browser extension, and setting reasonable CSPs in the decryption modules. This is exactly the reason Signal doesn't offer a web app.

Cryptpad does offer the ability to additionally encrypt documents with shared passwords, and this offers a fair modicum of greater protection against document interception. But this isn't the default document mode, so I doubt most documents are password-protected in practice.

I did share all of the above with the Cryptpad team, and was told they don't intend to address the above issues, so I'd recommend against putting to much faith in them for the time being.

thecrash · 2025-05-09T16:49:55 1746809395

Your problem statement is effectively "I want to share access to my documents very informally with people who don't care to have any security practices, but still keep them secure"

There's another way of sharing in cryptpad though, which is for each user to create an identity/account. Once those you're collaborating with have accounts, documents and folders can be shared by granting access within cryptpad's UI. No secrets have to be circulated.

jraph · 2025-05-09T23:05:38 1746831938

> Your problem statement is effectively "I want to share access to my documents very informally with people who don't care to have any security practices, but still keep them secure"

Well, that's certainly what tools like CryptPad and Signal target: privacy for the non expert.

OP' points are right, and I hope they get addressed at some point.

hmsimha · 2025-05-09T18:36:35 1746815795

I've worked with a few orgs which have used cryptpad, and I'm sorry, but Cryptpad doesn't make it possible to share documents securely unless again, everyone in the org is able to follow security protocol to an exceptionally rare degree.

Even you seem to think sharing via identity somehow bypasses the problem, when in fact this just sends them a "notification" with a share link containing the same secret URL (not to mention, as far as I can tell, there's no way for them to add the document to their own drive, so if they want to access it later they either need to save the share link or find it in their notification panel under "notification history" which is super unintuitive).

And again, those secrets are stored in your browser history. In a group I was involved with, the workflow was to create documents and share them with others, or put the share link in a Signal group. Even if one were to try to tell everyone in the group that the link should only be opened in a browser that doesn't share its history with its vendor, clicking the link in Signal will happily just open it in which ever browser is configured as your system default anyway.

Cryptpad effectively gives you the rope and then ties it into the noose around your neck for you, while you're not looking.

Security theater is at best mildly dangerous in a more typical scenario where it's constructed around an application that isn't billed as a secure communication platform. When a tool advertised as user-friendly and privacy-enhancing is the subject of such theatrics, it's even more actively harmful because it instills a false sense of confidence. It would be like a safety helmet that explodes when the user grazes their head.

So to recap, if you care about big tech companies gaining access to your secure documents, the only way to use cryptpad in a remotely secure manner, in a group, is either by password protecting all documents with a strong password, or ensuring no one in your org ever opens a document in a browser with history syncing. And honestly, expecting the latter from 99% of groups that might use cryptpad is unreasonable, which is why I'm saying it's irresponsible of Cryptpad to even allow password-less document creation (without so much as showing users a glaring red danger notice beforehand).

The users are not primarily to blame for incorrect use of a software that's billed as privacy-preserving, when that software drops them off at the happy path and neglects to tell them, "by the way, we've booby-trapped the door to fire a footgun when opened unless you also turn the smaller knob on the far side with your other hand as you open it."

I realize the data exfiltration issues I mentioned are non-trivial to address (though by no means an immense project either), but I can't interpret the link situation as anything other than willful negligence, or worse, a honeypot; consider that users whose adversaries might include nation-state actors (for example, undocumented immigrants sharing resources with one another on how to access services while staying under the radar) are perhaps more exposed, because data brokers are more likely to deny state requests for data that can be seen as overly broad, whereas one specific type of data (browser history) on one domain becomes a pretty tightly scoped request.

rkagerer · 2025-05-09T15:13:23 1746803603

...and any document which is shared with more than handful of cypherpunks will certainly end up shared with the main browser vendors

Can you suggest some best practices those cypherpunks can take to mitigate the weaknesses and use it in a secure fashion?

Eg. I don't sync browser history and tend to turn off other cloud-supported features (including "logging into" my browser).

hmsimha · 2025-05-09T15:23:26 1746804206

Regarding the URLs containing the decryption key, of course a strong password is a big benefit here, but if you're not syncing history that could perhaps eliminate big tech from the loop (though you may also need to turn off all telemetry by your browser)

Using a browser without extensions installed would prevent against extension-based exfiltration.

The only way to prevent against a malicious server would probably be to build the frontend yourself and use it with the server (I haven't tried doing this)

ldubost · 2025-05-10T00:12:52 1746835972

I'm the CEO of the company developing CryptPad.

Our main promise to our users is that server operators cannot read the users data.

About code alteration attacks, we have mentioned them here in an article exposing ways to use CryptPad in secure ways https://blog.cryptpad.org/2024/03/14/Most-Secure-CryptPad-Us...

I won't respond in detail, at least today, to all your criticism of our work but I will say two things:

CryptPad might not be at the level of privacy or security you want (which one do you want BTW ?), but with such discourse you are sending users to stay handling their data on Google which seems to be the opposite of what you seem to want. We will of course consider on our end that CryptPad greatly enhances privacy and security compared to the situation where everybody's data is in clear at Google or Microsoft.

You mentioned " I did share all of the above with the CryptPad team, and was told they don't intend to address the above issues". If you can dig out our response it would be helpful ? At least my position as CEO is that we intend to solve the issues we can solve with the funding we have. As an example, we have always been interested in finding a solution to the "code attack". However the desktop app or code signing does not fully solve the issue as you still need to trust who builds the desktop app or signs the code, even when signed. Full trust requires audit of the code at every change. Can you name me one app that you can fully trust ? Have you audited it ?

I'm not saying improvements cannot be done and we'd love to do a desktop app but we have to choose our battles. We would still have to see if people install and use it ? Signal is a mobile app.. How many have it on their computer ? How many use slack instead ? (When a billionaire gives 100M$ to CrytpPad, we'll be happy to have our choices challenged compared to those of Signal). If one is listening our OpenCollective is here https://OpenCollective.com/cryptpad

We'd love to do more both for privacy and security and ease of use, but for that we need more funding.

Our belief is that privacy and security will be won again on the Internet step by step by getting users to any non BigTech tools including CryptPad and then improve them step by step. If we have the users, we have higher chances to have the funding to improve the tools.

Your vision seems to be more extreme and would likely fail to bring anybody to such a platform as it would lack ease of use (at least with the level of funding we have).

Until now, your criticism is not helping getting the users out of Google or Microsoft.

Ludovic, CEO of XWiki SAS

aaravchen · 2025-05-09T17:46:57 1746812817

I really appreciate that the team hasn't rested on their laurels with just creating an encrypted cloud-based OnlyOffice wrapper and they've actively pushed I to the space of filling tool gaps. Their markdown files are a nice addition for a simple note that doesn't need to be a full Document.

weinzierl · 2025-05-09T15:40:17 1746805217

There are other free instances available, for example cryptpad.digitalcourage.de is used by many people I know.

See cryptpad.org/instances for a list.

emilfihlman · 2025-05-09T20:30:33 1746822633

How does this compare with the French/German https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs ?

jraph · 2025-05-09T22:39:07 1746830347

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)

ldubost · 2025-05-09T23:15:57 1746832557

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

ocdtrekkie · 2025-05-09T15:07:28 1746803248

Honestly my primary peeve with Cryptpad is the incredible load time... which is justified in scenarios of private documents, but completely unjustified in every single time someone shares a Cryptpad link with me which is certainly intended for public consumption.

AdolpheGMartin · 2025-05-09T21:26:39 1746825999

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