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The CryptPad team just published their 2025 recap, and the project has come a long way! For those unfamiliar with it, CryptPad is an open source collaborative suite with built-in end-to-end encryption: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, kanban boards and more, all encrypted before anything leaves your device.

What actually matters

The Document and Presentation apps (built on OnlyOffice) are now available to everyone, including free accounts. The OnlyOffice 8 upgrade also brought real-time undo during collaboration, right-to-left language support and a built-in spell checker.

The main CryptPad.fr instance was starting to struggle under growing user numbers, so the team began rewriting the backend to spread the load across multiple nodes. At the same time, the old Rich Text editor (based on CKEditor 4, unsupported since 2023) will be replaced by BlockNote, a more modern block-based editor. Both projects are funded by NLNet through the NGI Zero Commons Fund program.

The team has also started exploring post-quantum cryptography using the Crystals algorithm suite, selected from those standardized by NIST. Results are still early, but the work has already delivered so-called crypto-agility, meaning the ability to easily swap cryptographic libraries in the future.

The UN and the open letter against Chat Control

Among the most notable developments, the United Nations used CryptPad Forms to collect endorsements for their open source principles. Not a bad reference to have!

CryptPad also signed, alongside parent company XWiki, the open letter against Chat Control promoted by Tuta and Proton among others. The EU proposal would require client-side scanning of encrypted messages, effectively gutting end-to-end encryption.