Introducing CryptPad

CryptPad is an end-to-end encrypted collaboration platform designed to give teams and individuals a private online workspace. By leveraging encryption in the browser, CryptPad ensures that no readable data leaves a user’s device, making it impossible—even for service administrators—to see the content of users’ documents.

What Makes CryptPad Unique?

1. Full Suite of Collaborative Tools

CryptPad offers a comprehensive office suite with everything needed for productive teamwork:

Rich Text for writing and formatting text
Spreadsheets for data organization and analysis
Code/Markdown editor for developers or technical documentation
Kanban board for project management
Slides for presentations
Whiteboard for sketching ideas visually
Forms for surveys and data collection

All applications run in the browser and synchronize changes in real time.

2. End-to-End Encrypted

All data on CryptPad is encrypted on the client side. This ensures:

No readable data ever leaves the user’s device
Even the CryptPad team or hosting administrators cannot read user content
Privacy is maintained at every step of document creation and editing

3. Private Collaboration

By design, collaboration in CryptPad remains private:

It supports features like team drives, calendars, and sharing links
Multiple users can simultaneously edit documents without exposing content to the server
The server simply sees random data (letters and digits) while collaborators view the actual text

Open Source and Community Driven

CryptPad is fully open-source under the AGPL-3 license, meaning:

Anyone can host their own instance
The source code is publicly available for audit and improvement
Subscriptions and support contracts are available for those who want ready-to-use, professionally maintained deployments

How Is CryptPad Funded?

Public research grants: Since 2016, French and European research grants (e.g., BPI France, NLnet Foundation, NGI Trust, Mozilla Open Source Support) have supported CryptPad’s development.
User subscriptions and donations: CryptPad does not sell user data or rely on investor funding. Its goal is to become fully user-funded.
No “exit strategy”: All code is open-source, so there is no venture capital pressure to monetize user data (which is impossible anyway, since everything is encrypted).

A typical funding breakdown might look like:

25% from subscriptions
8% from donations
67% from subsidies and grants

Backed by Research and Awards

CryptPad’s team has expanded its focus beyond just encryption to address:

Legal privacy frameworks such as GDPR
Societal impacts of surveillance
Threats facing diverse communities worldwide

Research from the project has been peer-reviewed and published at the 18th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. CryptPad is also a proud recipient of the NGI Award for Privacy and Trust-enhanced technologies.

Developed at XWiki

CryptPad is developed by the team at XWiki, a company based in Paris with more than 15 years of experience in open-source software. This expertise underpins CryptPad’s reliability, security, and commitment to user privacy.

To learn more or try out CryptPad, visit https://cryptpad.org/.