While large international corporations such as Microsoft maintain a steady hold on the cloud collaboration software market, this open-source software has found its way to users such as Siemens and the French Ministry of Interior. Can Nextcloud become the foundation of your company’s office? In this article, we will review the key offers of Nextcloud, see how it compares to its open-source and proprietary competitors, and look into the vital question of deployment.
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If you’re already familiar with Owncloud, an open-source cloud storage & file sharing platform, you may have heard of Nextcloud as well. In 2016, some of the Owncloud developers joined forces in a new project that took a slightly different direction and released Nextcloud.
The main feature of Nextcloud is file storage and sharing, similarly to familiar products such as Google Drive or OneDrive. While something like OneDrive is a proprietary product hosted on Microsoft servers, Nextcloud is completely open-source, highly customizable and focused on self-hosting. This makes it a popular choice among companies and organizations that want to retain more control over their data and the hardware that it’s stored on. While the SaaS products offered by large corporations are easier to implement, it’s understandable that not every business wants to fully rely on a solution that offers little control over management. In addition, Nextcloud’s corporate users have a say in the development roadmap and direct access to key figures in the project; this significantly reduces the chances of unpopular one-sided decisions by upper management, which is a serious risk for users of proprietary software.
Another advantage of Nextcloud is that the free (Community Edition) versions are perfectly usable for organizations. While the official website notes that the free version supports around 500 users, this is not a hard limit and is mostly a matter of optimization. Even with this limitation in mind, Community Edition might be an attractive option for small and medium businesses looking to retain independence and implement cost-effective software on hardware platforms of their own choice, whether it’s on-premises or outsourced to a trusted provider.
While basic cloud storage (Nextcloud Files) is the most common use case for Nextcloud, especially among home users, the project also offers a fully integrated package of software for remote collaboration under the umbrella of Nextcloud Hub. The products offered by the developers include Nextcloud Groupware, Nextcloud Talk, Nextcloud Office and Nextcloud Assistant. Let’s look into what each of them do in more detail compared to Microsoft products.
Similarly to Microsoft 365, Nextcloud Groupware offers a suite of remote collaboration tools, such as a calendar in the cloud, kanban-style task management, an email client, synchronized notes and more. As is the case with all Nextcloud products, Groupware is fully integrated into the ecosystem and has clients for all major platforms, including mobile.
This software offers chatting and videoconferencing features like those offered by Microsoft Teams. While the Community Edition supports up to ~20 simultaneous users in a call, the Enterprise version can be used for videoconferencing with thousands of users.
Nextcloud Office is a collaborative document editing tool based on a product by another open-source project, Collabora Online. This software supports a full range of documentation, from simple text files to spreadsheets and diagrams. It is also compatible with all major formats, such as ones used by Microsoft Word.
With the growing popularity of AI-based tools, Nextcloud introduced its own assistant that can be compared to Microsoft 365 Copilot. This AI offers a chat feature, text summaries, audio transcription and direct interaction with other Nextcloud tools.
While products such as Microsoft 365 might seem like the safe choice due to familiarity and popularity, Nextcloud’s products can be considered a solid replacement without sacrifices in terms of ease of use or the set of features. Moreover, plugin support allows you to customize the platform to your own preferences. Combined with complete freedom in terms of deployment options, this makes Nextcloud a much more flexible option for your business. However, it’s worth noting that implementing, maintaining and optimizing Nextcloud for your company will take more technical expertise than would be required for a Microsoft-based setup.
Nextcloud can be considered a branch of Owncloud, which is why it offers much of what Owncloud does. However, since then Nextcloud has focused on a broader range of software for online collaboration, while Owncloud has remained focused on its core file sharing offer. In that regard, Nextcloud has made a name for itself with better performance and free extra features (such as document editing), but the basic functionality is largely the same. Let’s look into the differences between these projects in more detail.
Free offers (advantage over Owncloud) Both Nextcloud’s and Owncloud’s main products are available for free; however, Nextcloud also offers free builds of many of its collaboration software modules.
Commercial offers (similar to Owncloud) Owncloud and Nextcloud have enterprise offers with direct access to developer assistance, extra features and support for large-scale deployment.
Wide range of clients (similar to Owncloud) Just like Owncloud, Nextcloud has apps available for all major platforms, such as Android and iOS.
User-friendly and modern layout (advantage over Owncloud) You can manage your Nextcloud easily. A modern, uncluttered layout makes it easy to access your data and work with the settings. In our opinion, the overall layout is a little more user-friendly and modern than Owncloud's.
User management (same as Owncloud) As with Owncloud, you can create and manage hundreds of users in your Nextcloud. For example, each user can have their own storage space.
Sharing, access from anywhere and data synchronisation (same as Owncloud) Sharing content with all internet users, accessing it from anywhere and synchronising data with multiple devices. All these features are also available to Nextcloud users.
Stability and reliability (similar to Owncloud) The founders of Nextcloud promise more stability and reliability. Over the years they seem to have delivered on this promise in regards to the file sharing tool, but Nextcloud also has considerably more modules to manage than Owncloud.
Documentation (advantage over Owncloud) Nextcloud was clearly lagging behind when it came to documentation, but a lot of progress has been made since. We have found that Nextcloud's documentation is often more comprehensive and helpful (e.g. for server configuration). However, some of the documentation is locked behind an Enterprise subscription.
Integration with other software (same as Owncloud) Both Nextcloud and Owncloud develop their products to work with software such as Microsoft 365 and offer integration assistance for enterprise clients.
Additional features (advantage over Owncloud) Nextcloud already offers some useful features in the free version. For example, it is easier to collaborate on documents in Nextcloud even without Nextcloud Office.
Overall, it’s important to consider that Owncloud takes a “less is more” approach, while Nextcloud offers a full suite of collaboration software with the file sharing module as the foundation. If you’re looking to get a full package of corporate software from a single developer, Nextcloud is the better choice.
Simply installing Nextcloud on your preferred platform is easy, as you can see in our guide. However, extcloud is a software vendor and doesn’t offer hosting, which is why the question of implementing Nextcloud starts with IT infrastructure. The basic system requirements and recommendations are easy to look up in the documentation; however, every company’s needs are unique, and the setup is going to depend both on scale and the range of chosen software. This is why support and assistance with deployment are one of the main draws of Nextcloud’s Enterprise package.
On-premise deployment is a popular choice among home users, and it’s even possible to create a basic Nextcloud setup on Raspberry Pi. However, on an organizational level this option might produce complications. Deploying and optimizing Nextcloud for your company is going to require involvement from your IT team, and adding hardware engineering to their workloads is going to take more time and resources. Reducing reliance on third-party providers is a good argument for choosing Nextcloud in the first place; however, no business can do everything at once, and we believe that for many businesses it’s better to find a middle ground.
In addition, on-premise deployment generally limits flexibility not only in terms of spending, but also technological capabilities. For example, if Nextcloud is going to be the main tool your employees use to access their work-related documents, communicate and work on projects, constant availability is a must. At a minimum, this requires RAID, reserve components, a backup server and a system administrator on standby. However, you may also want to build a high-availability cluster with load balancing to be safe from any hardware failures: in addition to the required engineering expertise, this will multiply the maintenance requirements.
Opting for deployment with a reliable IT infrastructure provider will both free up your resources by delegating hardware management and expand your options in terms of technological platforms for your setup. For example, SIM-Networks builds practically any engineering solutions on-demand based on the client’s practical requirements, including large-scale Nextcloud deployments. We design such projects with the client’s preferences, Nextcloud’s recommendations and our own experience in mind. The freedom of choice we offer ranges from the architecture, whether it’s cloud- or server-based, to specific CPUs or hard drives.
If security and increased control are your main considerations, note that unlike SaaS providers such as Microsoft or Google, IaaS providers do not scan or monitor the data stored by clients on their hardware, whether manually or automatically. Furthermore, SIM-Networks get ISO 27001-compliant security measures in the data centers, hardware-based encryption, DDoS protection and other on-demand data protection options, which are considerably harder to implement on-premises for most businesses. It’s important to consider the pros and cons of deployment in professional data centers, as the benefits of physical access to your hardware might not outweigh the sacrifices in other aspects of security.
If you’re looking for a reliable hardware provider to implement Nextcloud, don’t hesitate to reach out to the SIM-Networks team. Our experienced engineers will provide a free consultation and answer any questions you may have. If you’re satisfied with what we have to offer, we will design and build a platform tailored to your exact specifications and provide our full support 24/7.
As a copywriter for SIM-Networks, Illia is passionate about delivering high-quality, accessible content in the industry of IT infrastructure solutions and helping readers deepen their understanding of the field. His main interests lie in the business aspects of IT infrastructure and how its application helps companies achieve their goals. Illia’s other interests include literature and linguistics.
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