Collaboration

NocoDocs is made for teamwork. Many people can edit the same document at the same time. All people see the changes of the others immediately. Nobody waits for a turn, nothing is locked, and you cannot overwrite the work of a teammate.

Two collaborators editing the same document with named cursors

Editing Together

Open the same document as a teammate and start to type. You can both edit at the same time, anywhere on the page, also in the title. Edits merge automatically and without conflicts. Changes made at the same time never cancel each other, and you do not need to refresh the page.

Collaborator Cursors

Each collaborator has a color-coded cursor in the text with their name. Thus, you always know who writes where. Cursors move live when people type or select text.

Presence Avatars

The avatars in the document top bar show all people who have the document open now. The color of each avatar is the same as the cursor color of that person in the text. Hover over an avatar to see the person and the document that they view.

Document top bar showing collaborator presence avatars with a name tooltip

Offline Edits

If your connection stops while you edit, continue to write. NocoDocs stores your changes locally. When you connect again, it merges your changes automatically with the changes that your collaborators made in that time.

What Stays in Sync

Real-time sync is not only for the text. While a document is open, these items update live for all people:

The document title
Comments, comment threads, and comment counts
Sub-pages created or removed in the document tree
The document's sharing state
Restores from Version History: when a person restores an earlier version, all open editors change to it immediately

Roles and What Collaborators Can Do

The project role of each person sets what that person can do in a shared document. You assign roles at the workspace or project level. To learn how roles are given and inherited, refer to Roles & Permissions.

Role	In a collaborative document
Viewer	Reads the document and sees the edits of all people live, but cannot make changes. The server enforces read-only access, not only the editor.
Commenter	All that a Viewer can do. Also adds and replies to comments.
Editor	Edits the document in real time with other editors, with a live cursor and presence avatar.
Creator	All that an Editor can do. Also creates, moves, and deletes documents.
Owner	Full control, including managing document-level permissions.

Document-Level Overrides

You can restrict access to a single document more with Document Permissions (Enterprise):

Document Visibility controls who can open a document.
Document Editing controls who can change it.

A collaborator without editing access still sees live updates from others. That collaborator joins in read-only mode.

Version History with Multiple Editors

Collaborative editing and Version History work together. NocoDocs records the editing session of each author as a separate version entry. It never merges edits from different collaborators into one version. Thus, the history always shows who changed what.

Self-Hosted Deployments

Self-hosted administrators can disable the real-time collaboration layer by setting the environment variable NC_DOCS_REALTIME=false. The editor then falls back to single-user auto-save; documents remain fully editable, but changes from others appear only after a reload.

Availability

Real-time collaboration is available in all places where NocoDocs is available: on all NocoDB Cloud plans and on self-hosted deployments.

Comments: Inline comments, threads, and reactions.
Document Permissions: Control who can view and edit single documents.
Version History: See earlier versions, compare changes, and restore.
Roles & Permissions: How workspace and project roles are assigned and inherited.