La SuiteFrance built an open-source replacement for Teams, Zoom, and Google

Built on the Matrix protocol with end-to-end encryption. Already mandatory for all French state employees — 600,000 agents use it daily. It's a fork of Element, the most widely used Matrix client. Federated architecture means no single point of failure.

The video conferencing tool replacing Zoom and Teams. Built on LiveKit, an open-source WebRTC framework. Currently serving 40,000 to 60,000+ users and scaling to handle all 2.5 million civil servants by 2027. Hosted on SecNumCloud-certified infrastructure. CNRS is replacing 34,000 Zoom seats with it by March 2026.

Collaborative document editor built on BlockNote.js with Yjs CRDT sync for real-time collaboration. Over 15,900 GitHub stars. Not a full Word replacement — it's a modern collaborative editor for everyday government work. Django backend, Next.js frontend.

Collaborative spreadsheet and database tool. What makes this interesting: Grist Labs is a NYC-based company. The French government contributes code back and funds development. Government developers review code. Proof that sovereignty and international collaboration aren't mutually exclusive.

Large file sharing with multi-gigabyte support and expiration controls, plus cloud storage. Replaces Dropbox and OneDrive for government file sharing. All data stays on French-hosted infrastructure.

Single sign-on using OpenID Connect and SAML. The authentication layer tying everything together. One login for all government digital services.

When CNRS started migrating 34,000 researchers off Zoom in late 2025, the reaction was exactly what you'd expect. People had years of muscle memory built around Zoom's interface. They knew where the mute button was without looking. They had recurring meeting links bookmarked. Visio's interface is clean and responsive, and the call quality holds up well on French government infrastructure. But it's the small things that trip people up: the meeting invitation flow is different, the calendar integration with Outlook isn't as polished, and screen sharing requires an extra click. None of these are dealbreakers. All of them generate help desk tickets.

Tchap for messaging is the easiest win. If you've used Slack or Element, you already know how it works. The encryption is invisible to the user, and the fact that messages stay on French servers doesn't change the experience at all. Docs is where the gap shows. A policy analyst drafting a 40-page regulatory impact assessment will hit formatting limitations that don't exist in Word. Grist handles basic spreadsheet work fine, but a finance team running complex budget models with macros and pivot tables will feel the difference immediately. The honest summary: La Suite covers 80% of what most civil servants need. The remaining 20% is where careers get built in government IT.

DINUM's approach isn't to build everything from scratch. They assembled the best existing open-source projects: Matrix for messaging, LiveKit for video, BlockNote for documents, Grist for spreadsheets. Django backend, React frontend, custom UI kit. Everything MIT-licensed. The philosophy: combine proven components rather than writing a 100-million-line office suite from zero.

All the code lives at github.com/suitenumerique/. Yes, GitHub — owned by Microsoft. Commenters on Hacker News called out the contradiction. But the defenders have a point: Git is distributed, the code is fully portable, and there's no vendor lock-in. Hosting open-source code on GitHub doesn't create the same dependency as hosting confidential government data on Azure.

VLC (VideoLAN) started as a student project at École Centrale Paris. FFmpeg and QEMU were created by Fabrice Bellard, arguably the most prolific open-source developer alive. Both are used by virtually every device that plays video.

Docker was originally dotCloud, founded in Paris. Scikit-learn, one of the most important machine learning libraries in existence, was developed at INRIA, France's national research institute. OCaml and Prolog were also born at INRIA.

Framasoft has been running a "de-Google" initiative for 20 years, offering dozens of free services. CryptPad provides encrypted real-time collaboration. Lichess, the open-source chess platform, is French. The culture for this exists.

In February 2025, Macron announced EUR 109 billion in AI infrastructure investment — the largest sovereign AI program outside the US and China. Mistral AI, France's answer to OpenAI, has raised EUR 2.8 billion and is valued at EUR 13.6 billion. In January 2026, Mistral landed a framework agreement with the French Ministry of Armed Forces.

EUR 3 billion for sovereign cloud R&D through France 2030. Bpifrance deployed EUR 10 billion into the AI ecosystem. At the European Digital Sovereignty Summit in November 2025, European tech leaders pledged over EUR 12 billion. The cost savings are real too: Visio saves roughly EUR 1 million per year per 100,000 users by eliminating commercial licenses.

A New York City company deeply integrated with the French government effort. They build the spreadsheet component. The government contributes code back and funds development. Government developers review Grist's code. Sovereignty doesn't mean isolationism — it means controlling your dependencies while collaborating openly.

DINUM and Germany's OpenDesk have been sponsoring BlockNote, the document editor, for approximately 1.5 years. Germany runs a parallel project called OpenDesk at opencode.de. The Netherlands contributes through "Mijn Bureau." Four countries — France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy — formed the Digital Commons-EDIC.

The Matrix protocol behind Tchap is maintained by the Matrix Foundation. A French government official confirmed direct support. LiveKit, the WebRTC framework powering Visio, is open source. Speaker diarization and transcription come from Pyannote, a French AI startup.