Lifehacker: “Face it: with the competition spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it, Google’s recent foray into AI isn’t going to stop anytime soon. While you can hide Google Workspace’s Gemini buttons and prompts for now, you can’t actually stop the company from continuing to build its apps around a technology that revolves around getting its hands on as much data as possible. I rely on Google Docs for collaboration, but the company’s AI push has got me looking for alternatives, even if Google currently denies using your data to train its models. On that note, these are the best AI-free, encrypted alternatives to Google Docs.

If you’re looking for a seamless switch from Google Docs to an AI-free encrypted writing app, then Proton Docs is what you want. It’s part of the Proton Drive cloud storage service, which has a generous free tier for you to get started, so trying it out is easy. Proton Docs lets you store up to 5GB of files for free, which is good enough to work on hundreds of documents, and its collaborative features are also good enough for most people. You can create documents and give others viewer or editor access easily, and when others are editing, you can see a cursor with their names on the screen to see who’s working on what. You also get end-to-end encryption by default, which means that your documents are secure and cannot be read by the company. In my experience, Proton Docs is fast and reliable. The Proton Drive app is also able to load documents quickly, and you can even open shared documents in mobile web browsers, which is a big plus. The only major downside is that this service lacks any apps to handle spreadsheets or presentations, which may be a dealbreaker for some…”