Proton Docs is a privacy-focused answer to Google Docs and Microsoft Word

Proton Papers looks like a very like Google Docs: blank pages, formatting toolbar at the top, live indicators showing who’s in the document with their name attached to a cursor, everything. This isn’t especially surprising, for a few reasons. First, Google Docs is extremely popular, and there are many ways to style a document editor anyway. Second, Proton Docs largely exists to be everything that’s great about Google Docs — just without Google in the mix.

Documents is launching today within Proton Drive, as the latest app in Proton’s suite of privacy-focused work tools. The company that started as an email client now also includes a calendar, file storage system, password manager and more. Adding Docs to the ecosystem makes sense for Proton as it tries to compete with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace and it clearly seemed to be coming soon after Proton acquired Standard Notes in April. However, Standard Notes isn’t going away, Proton PR manager Will Moore told me — it’s just that Docs is borrowing some resources.

The first version of Proton Docs appears to have much of what you’d expect from a document editor: rich text options, real-time collaborative editing, and multimedia support. (If Proton can handle image embeds better than Google, it could be a success for that alone.) For now, it’s web-only and desktop-optimized, though Moore tells me it will eventually come to other platforms. “Everything Google has is on our roadmap,” he says.

Since this is a Proton product, security is everything: the company claims that every document, keystroke and even cursor movement is end-to-end encrypted in real time. Proton has long promised to never sell or use its user data, which could appeal to more people than ever now that there are so many questions about how its documents and information are used to train AI models. (For what it’s worth, Google says it also doesn’t use its content to train its models.)

Proton is just one of the companies trying to offer privacy-focused alternatives to Google and Microsoft, and so far, none have managed to chip away at those companies’ dominance. But Proton’s products have improved a lot in recent years and are getting closer to offering everything some users might need to switch. (One important thing missing? Spreadsheets. Good luck taking down Excel, Proton.)