DINUM — the French state
Rutba Office vs La Suite numérique
The French government’s own open-source workplace suite, built by its interministerial digital directorate with Dutch and German counterparts. Docs for collaborative documents, Grist for spreadsheets, plus Tchap, Visio, Messagerie and Fichiers. Used monthly by more than 500,000 civil servants across 15 ministries.
Ours is the free one, so read this knowing whose page you are on. What follows starts with where La Suite numérique beats us, because on this page that is the part you cannot get from them.
First, honestly
Where La Suite numérique wins
Not a courtesy paragraph. Each of these is a real reason to choose them over us.
Sovereignty is the product, and it is not a marketing word here
A public administration built it for its own use and published it. The governance, the hosting and the roadmap belong to the institutions using it, which is something no commercial vendor can offer at any price — including us.
Collaboration and structure, which we have none of
Real-time editing with live cursors, comments, subpages and a document hierarchy, granular access control, search across everything. Docs is closer to Notion than to a word processor, and for a team writing together it is the better shape.
MIT, and self-hostable
A more permissive licence than our AGPL, deployable on your own Kubernetes or Docker Compose. If you intend to modify and ship it without publishing your changes, theirs allows that and ours does not.
And ours
Where Rutba Office wins
It is a service; this is a program
La Suite needs servers, accounts and somebody to run them — reasonably, because it is built for an organisation of half a million people. Rutba Office is an installer on one machine, with nothing to administer and nobody to add you to it.
A .docx here is the document, not an import
Docs imports and exports DOCX, ODT and PDF around its own block model — a genuine and useful conversion, and still a conversion. Here the .docx is opened and saved as itself, with the parts we did not edit returned byte-for-byte.
The old mail
La Suite has Messagerie for live mail, which we do not compete with. What it is not for is an Outlook .pst or .ost from a machine that no longer exists, which is the specific thing our mail app was built around.
Side by side
The seven structural questions
Asked of desktop office suites. A component and a desktop suite are not decided on the same seven, so each group has its own.
| Question | Rutba Office | La Suite numérique |
|---|---|---|
| FreeUsable in full, at work, without paying | Yes | Yes |
| Works offlineEverything functions with the network off | Yes | Partly |
| No accountUsable without signing in to anything | Yes | No |
| Microsoft formatsReads and writes .docx, .xlsx and .pptx | Yes | Partly |
| Mail includedA mail client in the same suite, not a separate download | Yes | Yes |
| Outlook archivesOpens .pst and .ost files | Yes | No |
| Source publishedYou can read and change the code | Yes | Yes |
These seven are the questions this project was built to answer, so of course it answers them. Feature depth, maturity, collaboration and support contracts are not on this table, and La Suite numérique beats us on at least one of those.
Verdict
Who should choose which
If you are a European public body looking for sovereign collaborative tooling, this is a better answer than anything we make and the governance is most of why. Take ours for the offline machine, the archive nobody can open, and the file that has to come back unchanged.
Model-level descriptions from DINUM — the French state’s published licensing and product structure, as of 8 September 2026. No prices are reproduced here — check lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr for those.
It costs nothing to find out
Install it beside whatever you use now — a normal per-user install, a normal uninstall.