The strongest reason to choose ONLYOFFICE is not the price - it is that your documents can live on your own hardware, under your own lock. This page covers that privacy story, and the mobile apps, honestly.
Every cloud office suite asks for the same trust: give us your documents. ONLYOFFICE is built for people who would rather not - its server editions install on your machine, in your office, and its desktop app needs no account and no internet at all. Privacy claims are cheap, though, so this page separates the real structural advantages from the responsibilities that come with them - and grades the phone apps without romance.
Privacy here is geography: the same editors can keep files in your building or in a cloud - you choose which line of this table you live on.
When your team edits through ONLYOFFICE Docs on your own server, the documents travel between your staff's browsers and your machine - not to a data centre in another country, not through an advertising company's infrastructure. For offices handling client financials, legal drafts, medical or student records, that geography is the whole argument. Access control, backups and retention become your decisions, executed on hardware you can physically point at.
ONLYOFFICE publishes its code under the AGPL v3 licence - Desktop Editors, Docs Community and DocSpace included. Anyone with the skill can read what the software does, and a global community does exactly that; a hidden data-phone-home habit would not survive long in public code. Compare that honestly with closed suites, where privacy rests on policy documents and trust. Open code is not a guarantee of perfection, but it changes privacy from a promise into something verifiable.
Install Desktop Editors, and it opens your local files with no sign-up, no account, no activation server and no internet connection. Work on a train, in a basement office, on an air-gapped machine - the suite does not care. For a single user, this is the most private mainstream way to edit office documents that exists: the file starts on your disk and, unless you send it somewhere, it ends there too.
ONLYOFFICE also sells convenience: DocSpace Cloud, including a free plan, hosts the same editors on their infrastructure. That is a legitimate choice for people who value zero maintenance - but know what you traded: your documents now live on someone else's computers under someone else's policies, the same bargain as Google or Microsoft, from a smaller company. Privacy-maximal readers should self-host or stay desktop; convenience-maximal readers should at least make the trade knowingly.
The free ONLYOFFICE apps for Android and iOS open, view and lightly edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and connect to your portal or cloud so office files are reachable from the phone. For reading a quotation, fixing a figure or approving a draft on the move, they are perfectly serviceable. For building a complex spreadsheet or a formatted report, they are what every phone office app is: a small screen doing a big screen's job. Treat them as a companion, not the main office.
Self-hosting moves the guard job to you. An ONLYOFFICE server that is never updated, has no backups and uses a weak admin password is less private than a big cloud - it is a famous-brand target with an amateur lock. The honest deal: you gain full control of your documents, and you owe them patching, HTTPS, backups and strong accounts in return. Offices that can pay that small discipline get the strongest privacy story in office software. Offices that cannot should choose a reputable cloud with open eyes.
The video reviews the suite in depth - see the editors your documents would live in.
Watch Full VideoThe desktop app works fully offline on local files and needs no account. If you self-host Docs, documents stay on your server. Only the optional hosted cloud services store files on ONLYOFFICE infrastructure - and that is a choice you make, not a default.
Yes, the iOS and Android apps are free. They are best for viewing and light editing and for reaching files on your portal from the phone; heavy document and spreadsheet work is still better done in the desktop or browser editors.
Only if it is maintained. A patched, backed-up server with HTTPS and strong passwords on your premises is the most private option. A neglected server is worse than a major cloud - the control is real, and so is the responsibility.