Nextcloud

Long-term owners

I haven't touched my nextcloud installation in maybe 9 months and I've been running it for about 1.5 years.

Sep 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• SyncthingFree, open-source peer-to-peer sync that keeps files on your own devices without a cloud and runs reliably for years, though mobile support is awkward and devices must be online.212recommend
• OpenCloudRecommended as a lighter, faster, more stable self-hosted alternative to Nextcloud for file sharing; critics note it has fewer features.18recommend
• SeafileRecommended as a fast, reliable, open source alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive with versioning and sharing; the iOS app draws complaints.18recommend
• ownCloudRecommended as an easy-to-run, self-hosted file sync server that people say just works. Main caveats are update trouble and some features behind a paywall.9recommend
• MaestralFree, open source Dropbox-compatible client for Linux and macOS that people find reliable and use on low-end machines. Caveat: block-level sync is lost and the project appears unmaintained.6recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 361 comments. Each links to the original.

1. everybody I asked loves it. I also recently moved my personal data to Nextcloud from Google Drive and it's been extremely pleasant to use

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US”

2. Things work just fine elsewhere (Dropbox, Google Drive, Nextcloud, and Seafile are all solutions I've had good experiences with).

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data”

3. NextCloud uses its own updater* (which I don't like), and aside from some recent MariaDB snafu it's been very low maintenance.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

4. It certainly is good enough for active use and, given a well-maintained collection of apps hardly takes any time to maintain.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

5. It's too much of a beast for me to have any desire to try to manage package versions and fixing it if something breaks.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

6. If every aspect of Nextcloud was as clean, quick and light-weight as PhoneTrack this world would be a different place.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

7. currently looks that nextcloud is handling it well - I have upgraded it for 2 versions and it didnt break anything

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Opencloud – An alternative to Nextcloud written in Go”

8. There are features that are only available to enterprise customers, or require proprietary plug-ins like Sendent.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

9. A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Migrating to the EU”

10. It works for me really well, I can grab my files through my vpn with any of my computers when I am not at home.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

11. Nextcloud provides all 3 in a package that pretty much just works, in my experience (despite being kinda slow).

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

12. I haven't touched my nextcloud installation in maybe 9 months and I've been running it for about 1.5 years.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone”

13. This is combined with Nextcloud allows you to sync Nextcloud calendar and contacts with your android phone.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “DAVx⁵ – CalDAV / CardDAV / WebDAV for Android”

14. Nextcloud is fine if you use the native file system integrations and ignore the web and WebDAV interfaces.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

15. I run mine in hetzner cloud with 4vcpu, 8gb of ram. It runs very smooth, even when I access my photos

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

16. most of the 'slowness' which Nextcloud is known for comes from the sometimes sluggish web interface

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

17. it expected far too much maintenance (4 month release cadence) to make sense for individual use

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

18. I own my storage, I can do Google Drive stuff without selling my soul (aka data) to the devil

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

19. alternatives to email/cloud services like Proton and Nextcloud that are mature and work well

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley”

20. You sadly can't just install nextcloud on your vanilla server and expect it to perform well.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

21. migrating my company away from MS 365 to Nextcloud on Hetzner, which is going slow but well

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Trump orders US Government to cut ties with Anthropic”

22. It works reasonably well for our small company (about 10 ppl) and saves us from Microsoft.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

23. I would never recommend it as a general replacement to someone who can't tolerate "jank"

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

24. The Nextcloud EE codebase might contain EE exclusive (longterm support) security patches, plus the Guard app, that is not publicly available

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk”

25. The Calendar in particular is far less usable and (and much more buggy) than it was around the time it was forked from OwnCloud.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

26. The whole NextCloud suite seems to have this problem of too many offerings that don't get polished to completion.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

27. intentionally broke (at least twice by memory) on some updates, wanting me to run some oci command on the box

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

28. My Nextcloud constantly needs updated. One day I started getting some odd random error about the database.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

29. at one point it basically asked for re-log every day, at other it just corrupted data/didn't finish sync

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead”

30. whose "enterprise" pricing comes in at twice* the price MS365 does for fewer features, worse integration

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Why Nextcloud feels slow to use”

31. Is it still a pile of php files underneath, with file sync speed 50x slower than binary implementations

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

32. NextCloud and Dropbox have some very similar use cases. We have a line of NextCloud-based products (Storage Shares). Maybe it would be worth trying out.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good”

33. Most platforms like Nextcloud focus on file storage, email, documents and video conference but don't do anything similar to the identity management

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Danish Gov agency to ditch Microsoft software in push for digital independence”

34. run my own email, several game servers, Matrix instance, Nextcloud and other internal services on a retired gaming PC

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Don't rent the cloud, own instead”

35. I haven't heard any complaints about NextCloud, they've added some enterprise features, but all in a positive way

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone”

36. I love nextcloud and have been using it for years. However recently I've considered taking my instance offline

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future”

37. A good example of this would be Nextcloud who has multiple such contracts with different parts of Germany

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak”

38. there's Linux and going all the up in the stack, we've got stuff like Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “European Tech Alternatives”

39. I'm still on very old install (from somewhere barely after the OwnCloud split), so I saw some issues.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “I Don't Maintain My Homelab”

40. look into other projects like Nextcloud especially if you are interested in sharing files with people

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Mount Proton Drive on Linux using rclone and systemd”