The office suite market in 2026 has settled into a pattern. AI is on by default. The toggle is buried five menus deep. The assistant ships with a vendor model you cannot replace, and the document text goes to a third-party server with terms that most users never read. Open source suites have mostly copied that pattern, then added a settings panel to disable it. Collabora Productivity went the other way. The first major update to Collabora Office, the desktop build of the LibreOffice fork Collabora also ships as Collabora Online, ships with AI completely off. You have to flip a switch, pick a model provider, and paste in your own credentials before the assistant will do anything. That is the most interesting design decision in this release, and it is the reason I am writing this review.
This is also a quiet release beyond the AI decision. The shared rendering stack with Collabora Online means updates move fast between the two products, and CODE 26.04 (Collabora Online Desktop Edition, the in-house name for the editor side of the project) is what landed here. The version bump is mostly polish, but the AI default is the headline.
Three angles matter most for this release:
- The AI assistant is fully opt-in and user-configured; the vendor never sees your documents
- The shared rendering engine between desktop and online means feature parity is faster than LibreOffice’s slower tracker
- The flatpak and snap are the easy install path on Linux; the source is on Collabora’s Gerrit for the patient
- The version bump is mostly polish, but the AI default is the headline of the release
What the AI decision actually means in practice
When you open Collabora Office 26.04 for the first time, the AI assistant is not running. There is no background process scanning your documents, no telemetry sending snippets to a vendor, no opt-out buried in the settings panel. If you want to use the assistant, you go to the preferences, pick a model provider, and authenticate. You can plug in a local model running on your own hardware, point it at a self-hosted server, or pick a vendor you already trust. Collabora does not see your documents. The assistant does not see your documents unless you explicitly hand it the file.
That is the design choice that sets this release apart. Most office suites treat AI as a feature that should be on by default, even if the user has not asked for it. Collabora treats AI as a tool the user controls. For a privacy-first office suite, this is the right call. For a team that wants AI but is allergic to vendor lock-in, this is also the right call. For a sysadmin deploying across a fleet of workstations, this is the only safe default.
The trade-off is that the user has to do more setup work. If you just want a polished AI assistant that works on day one, this is not the office suite for you. If you want to choose your own model provider and prefer to keep your documents out of vendor hands, this is closer to what you want.
Beyond the AI decision
The rest of the 26.04 update is polish. The Writer rewrite is the most visible. Track changes now color-codes moves alongside insertions and deletions, with a side-by-side view that shows who made each change and when. The tracked changes panel is finally clean enough to use on a long document with multiple reviewers. Markdown import and export round out the Writer changes, which means you can pull a .md file through Writer without losing the structure.
Per-user sheet views land in the spreadsheet app, which is the headline feature for any team sharing a Calc workbook. Each person gets their own filters and layout, and no one stomps on anyone else’s workflow. The presentation app added a follow-me presenting mode that lets viewers scroll back through earlier slides on their own without jumping ahead of whoever is presenting. Beyond that, the spreadsheet features table design and new formulas, and the presentation app gets better font embedding across machines.
Version bump is mostly iteration. If you have been keeping Collabora Office current, the changes are welcome. If you have been holding out, the AI decision is the reason to install now.
The shared rendering stack
Updates move fast between Collabora Office and Collabora Online because both products use the same rendering engine. The desktop version uses a JavaScript, CSS, WebGL, and Canvas stack instead of the traditional VCL (Visual Class Library, the long-standing LibreOffice rendering layer) interface that LibreOffice itself uses. The trade-off is that the desktop build does not feel exactly like LibreOffice, but the upside is that features ship to both products at the same time.
Integration is not perfect. The visual styling is different, and muscle memory from LibreOffice does not always transfer. But the connectivity between the two products is genuine, and it is the reason the desktop version is interesting even if you mostly use LibreOffice. If your team uses Collabora Online for shared editing and you want a similar experience on your local machine, this is the closest thing available.
Installation and availability
The flatpak and snap are the easiest entry points on Linux. Both bundle the right GTK and Qt dependencies, so the editor does not conflict with your system LibreOffice install. The Windows and macOS builds are available through the Microsoft Store and the App Store, respectively. None of the distribution packages require root to install.
The source tree is on Collabora’s Gerrit instance, which is the same code review system Collabora uses for its own internal development. If you want to build from source, you can. The build is not for the impatient, but it is documented.
What is missing
Collabora Office 26.04 is a preview for enterprise support. The company says enterprise support will arrive in a few weeks, which means the polished packaging, signed builds, and SLAs are coming. For a personal install, the current build is fine. For a fleet deployment, wait for the enterprise support tier to land.
The other thing missing is offline AI. The model provider you choose has to be reachable from your machine, which means a fully air-gapped AI workflow is not in scope here. If you need that, you can self-host a model and point Collabora at it, but you are wiring that up yourself.
Trade-offs
The decision to keep AI off by default is the most interesting thing about this release. It is also the most polarizing. If you want AI everywhere and you want it on by default, this is not the office suite for you. If you want to choose your own model provider and prefer to keep your documents out of vendor hands, this is closer to what you want.
The other trade-off is the LibreOffice diverging. If you are used to LibreOffice’s UI and you are switching to Collabora Office, the visual differences will take some adjustment. Functionality is mostly the same, but the menus and the shortcuts are not always identical. If you want a more faithful LibreOffice experience, run LibreOffice. If you want the shared feature path with Collabora Online, run Collabora Office.
What I would tell past me: install the flatpak, leave AI off until you have a specific use case for it, and use the comparison tool in Writer for any document that has gone through more than two reviewers. The polish is real, but the AI default is the headline.