Nextcloud is the improvement.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Owncloud seems to be pretty much over IIRC.
The company behind it got bought be some american company in 2023, that promised that everything will "stay as open as it is" - you won't believe what happened next ;)
Then recently many of the developers left to join OpenCloud, which seems to be a fork of owncloud, lead by a german open source veteran.
NextCloud already forked from owncloud?
Well, yes, but...
nextcloud forked owncloud back when there was only the php codebase.
opencloud forked owncloud ocis, which is a rewrite in go.
So while both forked "owncloud", or "something named owncloud", i doubt they'll have any code in common.
I really would like to switch to them, it seems way more responsive than Nextcloud and I only really need a Web/CalDav server and don't want to have that in two different services
Be aware there are basically two different things called Owncloud. There's still the original php version, which is similar to nextcloud but worse (not open source, smaller plugin ecosystem I think)
On the other hand is owncloud "infinite scale" (or ocis). This is the thing entirely written in go. But as others have pointed out, it's little more than a file server at this point.
IMO the self-hosting community is really missing a self-contained "all the DAVs" server (files, calendar, contacts). Baikal etc seem like a great start, but it would be great to have somewhere to get those parts pre-assembled. Until then, nextcloud works for me.
Yeah, I thought that as well. Just give me a headless Dav Server and have people create frontends for it
In the beginning, there was ownCloud. They were a good FLOSS offering that decided to start catering solely to corporate customers in the hopes of juicy support contracts. The community who had been contributing the majority of the code gave them a mighty "Fork you" and created NextCloud.
That was about ten years ago. I haven't looked into ownCloud for the last seven or so, but it had stagnated pretty badly by that point. Maybe they've gotten some fresh blood since then, but you'll likely find it to be quite lacking in features and plugins comparatively.
I like that they are using Go instead of Php
That's interesting that they refactored it. Maybe there have been some improvements made over the last seven years.
It wasn't refactored. It was totally rewritten
That doesn't mean it is actually good though
I had heard they had rewritten it in go and got a lot more performant, not sure what else they have done. I don't care much about the politics as long as it's still open source (is it?).
That said, I'm a happy nextcloud user and I don't see a reason to switch (after moving both data and db onto SSDs it's much faster, so maybe php wasn't the bottleneck).
Tried it but couldn't get the Linux client to connect to it no matter what I tried. I went back to NextCloud. But as I only ever used the file sync I ultimately switched to Seafile
If you're looking for a good Nextcloud replacement I recommend Seafile. Been using it for years, very solid.
I can second that, I've been using seafile and Baikal for about a year now coming from next cloud. The systems are so much smoother and less resource hungry. Next cloud is good when you have a small company, which I don't think applies to many self hosters. I have everything inside a docker compose setup, so everything from backups to updates is much easier, and with a nginx proxy and proper network isolation I don't have security concerns with running smaller tools such as Baikal on my machine.
That's just for files though. I'm looking for calendar and contact management as well
have you looked into baikal?
I'm playing with it now. So far so good, after a rocky setup.
Like others, I started with owncloud but when Nextcloud forked I switched within a year. I haven’t looked back and is working without any issues and is performant.
I don’t really care about the enterprise shit since it’s not being shoved in my face 🤷🏼♂️
I used to but had issues with it. Switched to Nextcloud.
I am using Owncloud OCIS now. A much leaner version and provides just the file sharing and doc editing feature.
Hosting with docker with just one container is fairly straight forward and easy if you don't need document editors.
So far has been very performant.
Yep. I like next cloud much better.
Yeah I just need to clean up my install so it isn't so bogged down.
How is it set up? What are you running it on?
My Nextcloud instance doesn't use a ton of resources. But I'm on a somewhat beefy machine (16GB RAM, 8-core CPU), so YMMV.
You running it on bare metal? Much better that way vs docker in my experience
I've been using a docker stack for Nextcloud for years without issues, after switching to postgres it also got a lot faster
I have yet to install it, but I plan to run it "baremetal" in a Debian VM, would that be better than in a docker, or do I actually need to run it baremetal, in parallel/ on a different system than proxmox? (Or it's own LXC container)
I might switch to AIO. Maybe podman if I get inspired. Bare metal is just way to hard to maintain. I could automate it with Ansible but at that point I might as well use containers.
AIO is performant and much easier to maintain. If there was a method to try to run Nextcloud in the last decade, I probably tried it, and nothing has compared to the AIO.
I've had no problems with the normal nextcloud apache container for the last couple years. I lock to a major version and let it update itself on the minors until I feel like like changing the yaml to the next major. I've gone from 24 to 30 this way without issue.
Actually, I do have to install the contacts and calendar apps from time to time but that's only when I want to use the webUI for them, caldav/carddav has always worked.
I have the docker AIO going for about a year after every other form of install exploded itself. So far so good.