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 :)
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.
Syncthing also even has basic version control, just no “web file browsing” interface.
That’s basically my use-case as well, and it’s why I’m currently switching to OCIS/OpenCloud. And OCIS (and probably OpenCloud) recently introduced the POSIX driver, so the main complaint about files not being accessible w/o some extra tool is no longer an issue. I’m planning to hard-link the data directories elsewhere to make interacting with it a bit easier.