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 :)
While I dont see OpenCloud replacing Nextcloud anytime soon, I always welcome new projects, especially like this to the open source community!
I don't think it's trying to. If you need the features Nextcloud provides, you should use Nextcloud. However, if your needs are a bit more modest and you mostly just need something that stores and retrieves files, then OpenCloud/ownCloud OCIS is probably the better bet. It's a lot faster, scales a lot better, and it's recent, so it doesn't have all he baggage Nextcloud does.
My use case is very simple, I just want to store, retrieve, and edit files. So I just need to figure out Collabora or OnlyOffice integration, which should be pretty similar to how Nextcloud does it. If I end up needing the other features NextCloud offers, I'll either switch (unlikely) or find projects that provide those features (e.g. things exist for calendar, weather, etc).