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 :)
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.
You can enable the POSIX driver on OCIS and get a more traditional filesystem layout.
I actually did not know this. Thank you! That was one of my more major gripes.
Looks like it's the new default in OpenCloud.
Yes OCIS (owncloud infinity scale, a complete rewrite of the owncloud project) has a convoluted file structure and I guess OpenCloud has the same way of storing files.
This is the main drawback I see as well, but it isn't a deal breaker for me. The way they handle the files allows OCIS and friends to work without a DB, in a stateless way I guess? This means that the entire setup is fully deterministically defined from a single file. This makes rollback very easy. So my rationale is that the files remain accessible even if a particular version decides to implode.
You can enable the POSIX driver on OCIS and get a more traditional filesystem layout. It still retains the "everything is in the filesystem" model as well.
Thanks for pointing that out!
https://owncloud.dev/ocis/storage/storagedrivers/
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.
Ocis/OpenCloud can integrate with Collabora, OnlyOffice but don't currently have things like CalDAV, CardDAV, E2EE, Forms, Kanban boards, or other extensible features installable as plugins in Nextcloud.
If you desire a snappy and responsive cloud storage experience and don't particularly need those things integrated into your cloud storage service, then Ocis or OpenCloud might be something to look into.
Ah I see, I guess at least that would help with the main UI, but I'm already using collabora through the collabora code server in next cloud so it sounds like I'll probably have the same document editing experience with OCIS/opencloud. I used to use onlyoffice but after I tried out their mobile app, it started blocking me from editing documents using the next cloud app (which seemed to use the only office web UI) so I was forced to switch unless I started paying for onlyoffice.