ONLYOFFICE 10.0: Free Office AI That Runs on Your Own Hardware

ONLYOFFICE just shipped version 10.0, and if your organization has been putting off switching to a self-hosted office suite because it lacked AI features, this is the update that changes the calculation.

What's happening

ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 arrived this week with AI built into every editor: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs each get a dedicated AI tab. The suite is open-source under AGPL v3, free to self-host, and this release ships with more than 50 new features and 1,000+ bug fixes.

The part that matters for a small team: you do not need a paid cloud AI service. Self-hosted installations can connect any model you choose, including free local ones. Install Ollama, pull something like Mistral or Llama, and ONLYOFFICE talks to it directly. Your documents never leave your server, and there's no per-query cost. The official release post also details four new free modular apps: AI Agents (running on MCP servers), Forms, Files, and Rooms.

Previously, getting AI into your office documents meant paying for a Microsoft 365 Copilot seat, roughly $30 per person per month, and sending every file through Microsoft's servers. ONLYOFFICE 10.0 changes that math entirely for any team willing to run their own instance.

Try this this week

• Spin up ONLYOFFICE with Docker: use the official Docker Compose file from onlyoffice.com; a basic installation takes about 20 minutes on any server or a local machine.
• Install Ollama: download from ollama.com, then run ollama pull mistral to get a capable local model suited for document tasks.
• Open the connection: set the environment variable OLLAMA_ORIGINS=http://* before starting Ollama so ONLYOFFICE can reach it, then point the AI Tools add-on at http://localhost:11434.
• Start with a PDF: ask the AI to summarize a supplier contract, a grant application, or any long document. You can highlight a section and ask a specific question about it directly.
• Spreadsheet help: describe a calculation in plain English (something like "sum all rows where column B is greater than 500") and let the AI generate the formula. Good for anyone who spends time hunting down VLOOKUP syntax.

The bigger picture

A few years ago, getting AI inside your organization's documents meant paying for a corporate cloud subscription and hoping your vendor handled sensitive files carefully. Today a community health clinic, a small accounting firm, or a volunteer-run charity can run a full AI office setup for free, on hardware they already own, with no ongoing per-query cost. The smallest working thing sometimes turns out to be: one Docker container, one free model, and then AI that works inside the documents your team uses every day.