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 :)
So really your only reason for possibly not liking next cloud is that it’s PHP, correct?
What is the problem with PHP? I keep asking it and until now every response has been near me worthy. “Don’t like PHP because some function calls are not consistent.”, “don’t like PHP because 20 years ago it had Manu unsafe practices!”, that sort of nonsense.
What is the problem with PHP, for you?
PHP apps always feel old.
So does your comment, what’s your point? Are you really trying to tell me that an app developed in PHP 15 years ago still feels old? Because doh.
Next cloud feels old to you?
Nextcloud really does feel old.
Nextcloud is more featureful (more apps like notes and hardware 2fa support). That is currently holding me to NC.
OpenCloud (fork of OCIS not original OC) is very similar when it comes to core functionality, but is missing those few apps I do not want to let go of.
Also note that nextcloud stores files in a very natural manner, where your file names and directories are stored the exact same on disk as on the interface. Opencloud does not do that. This is particularly handy if one day the app just explodes and refuses to run. With NC, you can just copy the files off the disk. Not so easy with OC.
What are the apps that you would miss? I basically only use my NC as a Google drive and docs replacement, so all it has to do is store docx files and let me edit them on desktop or mobile without being glitchy and I’ve really wanted to consider OCIS or similar.
That second requirement for me seems hard because of how complex office suites are, but NC is driving me to my wit’s end with how slow and error prone it is, and how glitchy the NC office UI is (like glitches when selecting text or randomly scrolling you to the beginning).
While I do not make heavy use of these two, I like having my contacts and calendar synced and accessible on both my PCs and phone.
I actually use the notes app, and have a yubikey. For notes, I could just use the regular markdown editor, but I like way the app lays everything out. For the yubikey, NC by default uses yubikeys for passwordless login. I use an app which uses them for 2FA instead. I also use apps which allow me to view hashes and metadata from the files tab.
All that makes me not want to switch yet. We’ll get there eventually since none of the features I want are ultra complex or super uncommon.
OCIS, last I tested it (a while ago), also lacked the ability to right click files, requiring you to select it with the checkbox and then select the operation at the top of the screen. I sure hope that they’ve added that feature by now.
Gotcha thanks for the info! It looks like I would be fine with ocis or opencloud, but since my main use case and pain points are with document editing which is collabora, it probably wouldn’t change much besides simplifying the docker setup (I had to make a gross pile of nginx config stuff pieced together from many forum help posts to get the nextcloud fpm container to work smoothly). But it already works so unless it breaks there’s little incentive for me to change.
It is unclear to me what the license of OpenCloud is. Are they open source? They reference a “trial license” on their site.
This is what you’re really looking for:
https://github.com/owncloud/ocis
Full rewrite in Go. Lots of features. Much better performance. More stable than nextcloud.
Deployment of NC on kubernetes/docker (and maintenance thereof) is super scary. They copy config files around in dockerfile, e.g., it’s a hell of a mess. (And not just docker: I have one instance running on an old-fashioned webhosting with only ftp access and I have to manually edit .ini and apache config after each update since they’re being overwritten.) As the documentation of OCIS is growing and it gets more features, I might actually change even the larger instances, but for now I must consider it as not feature complete (since people have expectations from nextcloud that aren’t met by ocis and its extensions). Moreover, I have more trust in the long term openness of nextcloud as opposed to owncloud, for historical reasons.
Tried OCIS a while back and its way faster than NC syncing files, even the initial sync was so fast I didn’t trust it was fully done (but it was).
That being said, OCIS is missing several key features I daily use: namely proper DAV support (contacts, calendar, todo, journal, etc) as well as integrations for stuff like SeedVault for mobile backups.
I only use nextdoor for the file storage. Like Dropbox type of thing. Too get files to different computers when I need them. I don’t use any other feature.
Should I switch to opencloud?
Have you tried Synching? If you only need transferring files back and forth and no version control or snapshot-like backups, that might be even simpler
I do want the browser interface image I can’t sweep syncthing, like on a work computer, public computer, fault friends whatever.
I think that was my 1 hang up for syncthing.
Shame Opencloud only officially supports docker. Thats a no go for me.
Why?
deleted by creator
Question for the OP or anyone who uses OpenCloud: How does it size up in an enterprise? NextCloud has known capacity for corporate use with SSO, a desktop app, integrations…but it has all the pitfalls of PHP (granted I run it with Nginx/FastCGI and a lot of resources). The thing is, anything not PHP can be run for less overhead in terms of actual cloud costs, so I see a benefit to OpenCloud. But the features have to be there. I know a desktop app is coming soon, and thats just one of many needs.
+1 that question, I’ve also never installed/used OpenCloud, simply because I didn’t see the benefit of it until now.
Based on the comments given so far, I have some hope that over time, the Go-approach could give us a more resource saving, but feature full alternative to tangle with, so I will stay tuned :)
For now I will stick to Nextcloud, because it gives me all the features I need and the maintanance, at least for the couple-hundred-user-instances I maintain, is not that bad, as I often read around the web :) But I also can understand, that people wish to have less maintenance struggles and therefor try sth else, wich is good for me, so I can hope for more experience reports in the near future :p
i keep having issues and bugs on nextcloud. maybe i should try opencloud
Evaluation of the product no longer required.
deleted by creator
