Desktop Editors and Docs are the same editors wearing two different coats - one free app on your PC, one server your team edits through a browser. This page tells you which coat your work actually needs.
New users land on the ONLYOFFICE website and meet two products with similar names: Desktop Editors and Docs. They are not rivals and you do not pick the "better" one - you pick by where editing happens. On your own machine, or on a server your whole team shares? This page separates them cleanly, including what "free" honestly means on the server side.
Same editors, different homes. The server buys collaboration with administration; the desktop buys simplicity with solitude.
Underneath, both are the identical document, spreadsheet and presentation editors - same interface, same format behaviour, same files. Desktop Editors packages that engine as an offline application. Docs packages it as a web service: the editing happens in the browser, powered by a server you host (or rent from ONLYOFFICE as a cloud). Anything you learn in one works in the other, and a file moves between them without conversion.
Install it, open files from your folders, work with no internet and no account. It is free for personal and commercial use, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it is the right answer for one person, one family, or an office where every desk minds its own files. Its limit is sharing: two people editing one file at the same time is not its world. It can connect to a cloud or server for collaboration - but then the server is doing that part of the job.
Docs is installed on a server - your office server, a VPS, or a NAS-class machine - and everyone edits through the browser. That is what unlocks simultaneous co-editing, comments and review workflows on shared files, usually plugged into a file platform like Nextcloud or into ONLYOFFICE's own DocSpace. If your office problem is "five versions of the same quotation file," Docs is the product aimed at it. The installation and connector side has its own guides in this channel's Nextcloud set.
Docs Community edition is free and open source (AGPL v3), and for a small team it is genuinely usable. The paid Enterprise and Developer editions exist for a reason: official support, admin and scaling features, and larger deployments - ONLYOFFICE positions the free server for small setups and steers bigger ones to paid plans, so read the current edition terms before building a 200-person office on the free server. The desktop app has no such fork in the road: free is simply free.
You will also meet DocSpace - ONLYOFFICE's ready-made collaboration space (rooms, users, files) with these editors built in, offered as their cloud or self-hosted. Think of it as the furnished flat versus Docs being the empty floor you furnish through another platform. It is a convenience choice, not a capability leap, and new users can safely ignore it until the desktop-versus-server question is settled.
Ask one question: who edits the same file together? Nobody - install Desktop Editors and stop reading. Your team, daily - you need Docs (or DocSpace) on a server, and you should budget a little admin time to run it. You only send files to people - desktop again; receiving and sending finished files is not collaboration. Most home users and many small offices discover the honest answer is the free desktop app, and the server stays a plan for the day teamwork actually demands it.
The video reviews the desktop suite in depth - the right starting point before any server decision.
Watch Full VideoNo. Desktop Editors opens and edits your local files completely on its own, offline and free. Docs is only needed when several people must edit shared files together through a browser.
Yes. They share the same editors and the same native formats, so a file edited on the desktop opens identically in the server editors. Many offices run desktop for personal work and Docs for team files side by side.
For a small team, generally yes - it is a real, open-source product, not a demo. Larger deployments, official support and some enterprise features sit in the paid editions, so check the current edition comparison before standardising a big office on it.