Collabora Online Impress
Presentations United Kingdom
Self-hostable collaborative presentation editor built on LibreOffice. Alternative to Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Details
Collabora Online Impress is the presentation editor inside Collabora Online, the self-hostable web office suite from Collabora Productivity in Cambridge, built on the LibreOffice Impress engine. It runs in a browser against a file backend such as Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile, and handles .odp, .ppt and .pptx.
It is one app of one product, not a separate purchase. The server’s WOPI discovery endpoint declares writer, calc, impress, draw and math as apps of a single binary, and Collabora sells a single per-user-per-month business subscription covering all of them, alongside a free self-hosted Development Edition for home and testing use.
The 26.04 release is current. Master pages, slide transitions including 3D and automatic ones, speaker notes and a Presenter Console with notes, upcoming slides, an overview and a timer are all first-class, the console having arrived in 25.04 along with font embedding in .pptx. Presenting is built for the way meetings actually run: Present in Window opens the deck in a popup so you can screen-share it and still reach your other tabs, and 26.04’s follow-me slideshows step every viewer’s screen along with the presenter’s, with viewers free to detach, look back and re-sync.
The animation layer is the weak spot and Collabora’s own source says so — the dedicated Animation tab in the Impress ribbon is disabled pending a core change, leaving the custom-animation sidebar reachable but awkward. PowerPoint’s subscription-gated features, Morph and Designer, have no counterpart. Slide sections work in ODP but not PPTX. And Collabora tracks its own open .pptx defects in public, including an export bug where comments added in Impress make PowerPoint repair the file, a transition PowerPoint has and Collabora does not, and coloured underlines arriving black. The vendor describes its OOXML validity programme as aiming to get to zero, which is the honest position: very good, not finished.
About Collabora
Collabora Ltd is a British open-source software consultancy headquartered in Cambridge, founded 2005. It is a major upstream contributor to LibreOffice and the company behind Collabora Online — the commercially-supported, self-hostable web office suite derived from the LibreOffice codebase.
Privately held in the UK; no US/CN parent or PE owner.
