this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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As Nextcloud advanced with progresses making it competitive in fully integrated government and corporate workflows, OpenCloud is getting more and more attention.

The fact, that both are collaborative cloud plattforms, designed to be selfhosted and mainly developed in/around Berlin from FOSS-Community-Surroundings, makes one ask about the differences.

The main difference I see, is the software stack

  • Nextcloud, as a fork of ownCloud, kept the PHP code base and is still mainly developing in PHP
  • OpenCloud, also a fork of ownCloud, did a complete rewrite in Go

Until know, Nextcloud is far more feature complete (yes I know, people complain, they should fix more bugs instead of bringing new features) than OpenCloud, if we compair it with comercial cometitors like MS Teams.

I like Nextcloud!

I deploy it for various groups, teams, associations, when ever they need something where they want to have fileshare, calendar, contacts and tasks in one place. Almost every time, when I show them the functionality of Nextcloud Groups an the sharing-possibilities, people are thrilled about it, because they didn't expect such a feature rich tool. Although I sometimes wish it would be more performant and easier to maintain, so non-tech-people could care for their hosting themselves.

Why OpenCloud?

Now, with OpenCloud, I am asking my self, why not just contribute to the existing colab-cloud project Nextcloud. Why do your own thing?

Questions

So here I expect the Go as a somewhat game-changer (?). As you may have noticed, that I am not a developer or programmer, so maybe there are obvious advantages of that.

  • Will OpenCloud, at some point, outreach Nextclouds feature completeness and performance, thanks to a more modern approach with Go?
  • Will Nextcloud with their huge php stack run into problems in the future, because they cant compete with more modern architectures?
  • If you would have to deploy a selfhosted cloud environment for a ~500 people organization lasting long term: Would you stick to the goo old working php stack or see possible advantages in the future of the OpenCloud approach?

Thanks :)

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[–] ApplyingAutomation@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It is unclear to me what the license of OpenCloud is. Are they open source? They reference a "trial license" on their site.

Server is Apache 2.0, and frontend is AGPL v3, which seems to be the same for ownCloud OCIS, which they seem to have forked from.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Looks okay to me. Not sure how important the last two are to be honest, but I included them for completeness

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/web/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/web-extensions/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/desktop/blob/main/COPYING

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/reva/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/rclone/blob/master/COPYING

The marketing statements on the website say the right things too, but they are secondary to the above, obviously:

Openness

OpenCloud is and remains open source software. This means that you can download and use the source code free of charge and without obligation. We welcome and encourage any kind of participation in the work on OpenCloud in the spirit of open source collaboration.

OpenCloud GmbH also offers paid builds of OpenCloud for use in environments where support, professional services and other services are required.

Who are we?

OpenCloud GmbH is a young company founded under the umbrella of the Heinlein Group and employs a team of developers who are familiar with the project code.

The combination of the Heinlein Group's many years of experience in the open source business and the unwavering enthusiasm of the developers, most of whom have many years of open source experience, provides the perfect foundation for an active project. And we warmly invite everyone to join us!

The foundation

The basis of the project is a fork of a widely used open source project whose components are co-developed by developers from the science organization CERN and other active participants. OpenCloud is now being continuously developed independently by the OpenCloud community and published under the Apache 2.0 and AGPL-3.0 licenses.

In the spirit of reusability of code under free licenses, we are grateful for the strong foundation on which we are building.

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[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

While I dont see OpenCloud replacing Nextcloud anytime soon, I always welcome new projects, especially like this to the open source community!

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I'm not the biggest fan of Nextcloud but there currently isn't a lot of good alternatives that have the same features and polish.

The issue with Nextcloud is the PHP junk it comes with. Writing something in Go is much better and it is silly to me that Nextcloud puts code in docker volumes. If they could separate out the code and data they would be in a much better position.

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[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

NextCloud being so slow forced me to migrate to Seafile.

Seafile being less one-stop-shoppy made me not use it so much, but whenever I do it is always fast and responsive (unlike nextcloud, where 80% of the time I was looking at the loading indicator). Looking it up now though, it looks like it has a lot of new features I haven't yet tried so I'm probably gonna start using it more now.

Only downside with Seafile is it's deduplication (for me), because it stops me from easily accessing files directly (always gotta use a client). Likely a benefit for most though and I do rarely need to access a file directly on disk, just when I do, it'd be an easy shortcut for whatever I'm doing.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Why use OpenCloud instead of ownCloud Infinite Scale, which it was forked from? What's the value proposition?

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[–] idriss@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

NextCloud is straight up unusable to me no matter how much resources I was throwing at it.

OpenCloud seems promising. I would definitely like to play with it a little. I would also like to check check how can I help with a thing or two there.

This seems like a similar story with matrix Synapse vs Dendrite.

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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

i keep having issues and bugs on nextcloud. maybe i should try opencloud

[–] Scope1684@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Shame Opencloud only officially supports docker. Thats a no go for me.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago

Docker is way more simple to setup and run. You can use a docker-compose file instead of trying to install something locally by hand.

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