Gonna throw in EtherPad. It's been like ten years, since I properly used it, but I believe, it's relatively minimal, so pretty much just Markdown.
There's also lots of publicly hosted instances you can use: https://scanner.etherpad.org/
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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HedgeDoc also seems like an option that could do some of this. Self-hostable and open source (last I checked).
I tried the hedgedoc demo.
As far as I can see it supports latex and has some change revision mechanism. Unfortunately no bib file support, but I guess that's ok.
However, I can not find a way to add comments to the rendered text. Is that possible on the self hosted version?
That would be a deal breaker, most of what I need is actually reading documents written by other people and ask for clarifications or improvements.
How about Git?
It is an option. However the ability to have comments on the text is really important.
And I don't want to have through GitHub PR process to get that comments capabilities.
I personally like Cryptpad. It can be self hosted, but you can also make an acount elsewhere considering you don't want the hastle of maintaining.
Overleaf can be self hosted too
Nextcloud + collabora online works pretty good for me.
Years ago, we used to use Etherpad for that. Don't know if that's still a thing.
If you're looking for something hosted, ProtonDocs is fine, however you'll need an account for each collaborator which could get expensive.
Lots of mentions of HedgeDoc, but it's only for Markdown.
Collabora sounds more in line with what you're looking for. Nextcloud Office might be a bit lacking.
Markdown is fine. I'll take a look at protondocs, pricing is not really an issue - but since this is public money I very much prefer to spend it on actual experiments.
Don't know about collabora, I had tried it a few years ago and found it very slow and finicky. Moreover maintaining the whole nextcloud setup would be something I'd gladly avoid.
I would go for hedgedoc if the team can switch to markdown, otherwise Cryptpad to stay in an office-like suite.
If you already have nextcloud then that + collabora should be good enough. Otherwise installing the whole nextcloud suite just for collaborative editing seems like a lot imho.