Real-time Collaborative Text Editors

House tradition: when the original MeetingWords went down in 2024, its goodbye page pointed people to the alternatives rather than leaving them stranded. We're keeping the habit now that we're back. Here's the field as we see it — including what each tool does better than we do, because sending you to the right tool is how you earn the visit back.

Snapshot as of July 2026; corrections and additions welcome at support@meetingwords.com.

Built for humans + agents together

MeetingWords — this site's software, and the hosted service at meetingwords.com: instant no-login collaborative markdown where agents are first-class, attributed collaborators — share a link and humans and agents type in the same live doc. Serverless per-document on Cloudflare, and open source (CPAL) — among the agent-native hosted services on this page, we're the open one (Jot is open too, as self-hosted software). Choose MeetingWords for share-a-link-and-go collaboration with agents in the room; and read the rest of this page anyway — fair is fair.

Proof — an agent-first online editor with two features we genuinely admire: a suggestion workflow (agents propose, humans accept/reject/reply) and per-character provenance — every character tracks who wrote it. Hosted and closed-source. Choose Proof if propose-then-review is how you want your agents to work today; we don't have suggestion mode yet.

Jot — Mario Zechner's minimal self-hosted collaborative markdown editor with inline comment threads, built for humans and agents. Open source (MIT), small enough to read in an afternoon, and one of the direct inspirations for MeetingWords — we ran it, patched it, and loved it before writing our own from scratch on the same published ideas. Choose Jot if you want a single lightweight server you fully control and a codebase you can hold in your head. (No relation to JotSpot, the pioneering 2000s wiki startup that Google acquired in 2006 and relaunched as Google Sites.)

ODocs — free, no-login documents that humans and AI agents edit together in real time, with paid persistent workspaces. Hosted and closed-source. The closest to our shape among the newcomers; choose it if you prefer their workspace model, or compare us side by side — the instant no-login doc experience should feel familiar in both directions.

Collaborative markdown, human-first

HackMD — the mature hosted collaborative-markdown service: teams, publishing, GitHub sync, versioning, an API with metered plans. It's what our 2024 goodbye page recommended, and it served that recommendation well. Choose HackMD for established team workflows and integrations; its agent story is thinner than its human one.

HedgeDoc — open-source (AGPL) self-hosted collaborative markdown, descended from the same lineage as HackMD's community edition. Choose HedgeDoc if you want a proven, community-maintained self-host with accounts and a traditional server.

CryptPad — an open-source (AGPL) collaboration suite where everything is end-to-end encrypted; the server operator cannot read your documents. Choose CryptPad when confidentiality from the host is the requirement — that's a guarantee we don't make (and an honest host can't fake).

Etherpad — the ancestor. The original real-time editor lineage, open source (Apache-2.0), still community-maintained in its modern form, with many public instances. The first MeetingWords ran Etherpad Classic for fourteen years. Choose Etherpad for plain-text pads with the widest deployment history in the category.

SubEthaEdit — where shipped real-time collaborative text editing arguably began: Mac-native, launched in 2003 (as Hydra, winning an Apple Design Award), when several cursors typing in one document over a local network looked like magic. After years as a commercial app, it's back as free, open-source software (MIT). Choose SubEthaEdit for native macOS co-writing, especially same-room and local-network sessions.

The giants

Google Docs and Notion — the defaults, and for rich-formatted human documents or a whole team workspace they're excellent. Agents reach them through official APIs, but as batch visitors rather than live collaborators: the real-time editing surface isn't built for a roster of humans and agents typing together. If your documents live there and agents only need occasional access, stay — that's the right tool.

Our honest gaps

As of this writing, MeetingWords has no suggestion mode, no per-character provenance display, and no MCP connector yet. If one of those is your requirement, the tools above have you covered — and we'd still love to see you back when we've caught up.