Eigen is a self-hosted alternative to Google Workspace that arrives as one product: mail, file storage, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, kanban boards, calendar, contacts and real-time chat, all sharing one API, one login and one interface. It is built by one developer, Reinder Nijhoff. The name is Dutch and German for “own.” The whole thing runs from a single Compose file, with per-user SQLite databases instead of a shared server database.
What is in it
The apps are not plugins bolted onto a core. Everything is built together, which is why collaboration is uniform: documents, sheets and boards edit in real time through CRDTs, with no external office server to run, and chat rooms live inside drives and inherit their access rules. Mail is stored in standard Maildir++ format and served by Dovecot, so any IMAP client works alongside the web UI, and there are CalDAV, CardDAV and WebDAV servers for native calendar, contact and file apps. The short version of the architecture: each user gets a directory, backups are a file copy, there is no PHP, MySQL or Redis in the stack. The admin app handles members, roles, quotas and team drives.
Running it
The install is one command, curl -fsSL https://eigen.is/install | sh, which pulls the eigen tool and runs setup. Setup asks for your address, whether Eigen handles HTTPS, and whether mail lives on the server. Everything runs in Docker: Caddy for HTTPS, the app itself, and Postfix, Dovecot and Unbound for mail. The same command updates, backs up and restores. The demo is a shared workspace of a fictional festival crew and resets hourly, so it is safe to poke at.
The honest parts
Eigen’s own README says things most project pages will not. It is pre-1.0, breaking changes are likely between minor versions, and you own your backups, which you should test. If data loss would be catastrophic, wait for 1.0. And on the obvious question: “If Nextcloud works for you, keep using it.” The project positions itself for people who want a workspace that feels like one product instead of a platform with plugins, and it is candid that it is early.
My read
The single-codebase bet is the interesting one: it is why collaborative editing works everywhere on day one, and it is also why the project is one person’s pace. As it stands, this is a workspace to watch and to run for personal things, not the thing to move a family’s mail onto this month. Rough edges are promised; take the promise seriously.
Source: the repository and the project’s backstory post.