So the last month or so I have started the slow transition of deGoogling and other efforts… its scary because I’ve been using Google for 20 years. But I have jumped into the deep end with NextCloud and I cannot believe this is free. My only wish is that it was easier so that everyone could do it. It’s pretty complicated but at the same time, so worth it to learn how!
If you have a web server and any experience managing hosted tools like Wordpress at all I highly recommend NextCloud. It’s free software (you’d pay for hosting though…) and can replace all your Google producs and more: Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, Meet, Docs/Drive, Photos, Keep, Contacts, Google forms, Doodlepoll, Docusign, and more. It’s even got a pretty cool self-hosted maps tool, but I haven’t really played with the viability of replacing Google Maps with that yet. It’s also got a self-hosted password manager, a recipe keeper and bookmarks manager if you want it (and more.)
Self hosing NextCloud has a steep learning curve if you’re a beginner, but you can do it. The support community is pretty responsive and engaged. If you don’t want to do it yourself, there are service providers who will host and support it for you with little effort from you, but that would remove the self-hosted data benefit (although most are data privacy centered).
I do use nextcloud for my small consultancy team but I dislike it immensely, mostly due to personal preferences.
I think I pretty much just don’t like having one platform that does everything. I want to self host my own cloud, I don’t want to self host a thing that provides a cloud.
Additionally, and this really is just a personal preference, I dislike php projects almost as much as Java.
Primarily I use nextcloud’s file sync. This aspect is IMO extremely well implemented. It seems to work very reliably.
We do use contacts and calendars. If there were good alternatives I would switch to them but sabreDav et al lacks a good UI. I’m aware you can disable this functionality in nextcloud.
Anything else that can potentially be integrated is better hosted separately IMO.
It’s definitely a bit of a behemoth, and the dated php codebase doesn’t really help either. I set up OpenCloud last week and aside from the struggle getting it working with a single compose and Authentik for OIDC, it’s been exactly what I’ve been looking for. Simpler, faster, and only does the things I need it to do.
I’m also eyeing at oxicloud that uses rust, haven’t tried yet, and it’s still in development for extra features
Oh this is the first I’m hearing of this one. I’m liking OpenCloud so far but the setup process and bizarre OIDC implementation don’t leave me too confident in it. I’ll keep an eye on this one.
I don’t remember if it was next or owncloud, but one of them was making a rewrite in go. I’m I’m no rush to jump into it, but keep a eye on it.
Owncloud had a rewrite called oCIS (Owncloud Infinite Scale). Then it was bought by Kiteworks. Then many of the core devs switched to a new product/company called Opencloud. There’s been quite some history over the past few years
I agree that the file sync is good. They (and owncloud afaik) are the only ones supporting virtual files on windows where you only download files when needed, saving storage space.
I suppose these fancy file features (bidirectional syncing, advanced conflict resolution etc) are targeted to the enterprise, not home users. So it’s natural they’d include it with a bunch of bells and whistles that are half as good
I agree about separating the services. In the past I had problems upgrading owncloud/nextcloud with too many plugins. It was difficult to keep all data between the versions.
Now I’m using Baikal for calendar/contacts, Silverbullet for notes and Linkding for bookmarks.
Currently I use these services by VPN only, so file sharing isn’t really useful. I could reach all my files there by SMB and I don’t dare to provide my services openly. For that alone Nextcloud was great, but I don’t trust my setup enough to share it with the world again.