Collaboration Kit

Real-time collaboration in Vaadin apps

The simple way to add real-time collaboration to Vaadin web apps.

Real-time collaboration

What is Collaboration Kit?

Collaboration Kit is an integrated, simple way to implement real-time collaboration, such as simultaneous editing or a chat.

You can build collaborative features directly into Vaadin Flow applications: Don't rely on third-party tools, when you can directly integrate these features – giving you security, reliability, and complete control over all your sensitive data.

See who is there

Show your user avatar and see other active users in real-time.

View documentation

Edit a form together

Collaborate on the same form without delay and avoid conflicts when saving your work.

View documentation

Discuss

Chat, leave comments, and keep track of recent edits to any component or view.

View documentation

Collaborative UX is the future of enterprise applications!

Discover how Collaborative UX can accelerate critical business processes, streamline workflows, and foster seamless teamwork across your organization. Download our guide on real-time collaboration in enterprise applications and level up the way your end users work!

Download your copy

How does it work?

By providing integrated server logic, Collaboration Kit synchronizes user-state and data across multiple client instances of a web app in real time. It can be hosted on any on-premise server.
Ships with a high-level API tailored for specific use cases and low-level Topic APIs providing more fine-grained control over its features.
Fully supported with Vaadin's extensive free and commercial support services covering all aspects of the Vaadin platform.

Installs with just a few lines of code

Collaboration Kit is easy to set up and integrate into new or existing Vaadin Flow apps. Use the Collaboration Avatar Group component to display active users in a specific area of the application, and simply subscribe to any Vaadin Java UI component, view, or application to a collaboration topic, using the API to enable collaboration capabilities.

You can enable all the features in only 4 easy steps.

See examples

Fully secure with on-premise hosting

Collaboration Kit can be hosted on any on-premise or cloud server that supports Docker. Sensitive data never leaves your servers, making it easy to ensure regulatory compliance and data security.

Collaboration Kit is suitable for intranet or offline usage and supports a wide range of access control and security options.

Integrate with Vaadin components or build custom features

Collaboration Kit comes with a set of collaborative-ready UI components, and a set of 'managers' that help you extend their use cases to other components.

If our current or upcoming features aren’t an exact match for your specific requirements, then you can use the low-level Topic API to program them yourself.

Improved DX & Productıvıty

More great features to boost DX and productivity

Works with any Vaadin Component

Collaboration Kit comes with a set of collaborative-ready components. In addition, it and can be integrated with other Vaadin components and supports extending UI components to be made collaborative.

Unparalleled development velocity

Simplicity and DX are at the heart of Collaboration Kit. Robust documentation, tight Vaadin integration, and an intuitive API, afford unmatched development velocity

Developed and optimized for Vaadin

Collaboration Kit was developed with Vaadin in mind. It works, and provides exceptional performance, out of the box. No tinkering or architectural changes are required.

Shrink your maintenance overhead

We provide all the updates, bug fixes, and security patches necessary to keep your app running smoothly— compatibility with new Vaadin versions and browsers is ensured.

End-to-end support for your application

Our extensive free and commercial support services cover all aspects of the Vaadin platform— including Collaboration Kit. If something goes wrong, we have your back.

Excellent user experience by default

Pre-defined behaviors and UX patterns that are easy to tweak, provide a solid foundation for building market-leading collaborative solutions for employees and customers.

Now part of Vaadin Core

Free and Open Source

Developing with Collaboration Kit is free. Starting from V24.5, no additional licenses are required when taking your application to production.

Vaadin Core

Collaboration Kit included from V24.5

Start here

Have Questions?

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn the fundamentals of Collaboration Kit and watch a live demo with our introductory webinar.

Watch the webinar

Is Collaboration Kit a stable, feature-complete and ready for production usage?

Yes. It has been extensively tested and is ready to be used in production. It is also feature-complete, in that it enables collaborative editing, but additional functionality will be introduced regularly over the coming months. For more information, please see our roadmap.

Which servers support hosting the Collaboration Kit?

Collaboration Kit can only be deployed directly on the application server (in-memory).

We're currently working on a BYOB (Bring Your Own Backend) approach, which means you will be able to reuse existing clustering infrastructure to distribute data within a cluster.

What programming languages does Collaboration Kit support?

Collaboration Kit comes with a Java API, for Vaadin Flow.

Which Vaadin version should my application be built on to use Collaboration Kit?

Vaadin 20 and newer versions include Collaboration Kit as part of the Vaadin platform. It can also be used in Vaadin 14 as a separate package. This means that the relevant dependency must be added to the pom.xml file of the application.

To use Collaboration Kit for free, use Vaadin 24.5 or newer versions.

Does Vaadin host a cloud version of Collaboration Kit that I can subscribe to?

At this point in time, we do not offer a Vaadin hosted version of Collaboration Kit. You can deploy on your own cloud provider as part of your Vaadin application.

What impact does enabling collaboration features have on my application server?

We estimate that up to 100,000 users should have no discernable impact on the performance of your application server. Advanced performance and scalability testing is currently underway. More information will be provided as it becomes available.

Learn more about collaboration kit

Collaborative Experience Resources

Follow the links below to learn more about Collaboration Kit:

Documentation Demo app Release blog post Webinar recording What are collaborative experiences Collaboration for SaaS