I am using it for quite a while now. I'd like to mention a few things that differentiates it from other solution and made me using it:
1.) Instead of providing a full featured app for the etesync environment on your pc or smartphone, it provides proxies / adapters for the encryption layer that make you use your native tools! What does that mean? I do not need a dedicated etesync calendar app, neither on my smartphone, nor on my desktop. I can add calendars using the etesync adapter to thunderbird and the mobile app provides the calendar natively to android (like davdroid etc).
2.) Light-weight. Compared to e.g. the fully blown Nextcloud, it is very lightweight and does what it does very well.
3) Open source and easy to self-host.
4) Traceability / History. Etesync provides a journal so you can see who added a calendar item.
5) Easy to use. This corresponds with 1) since you don't have to learn a "new" app. You just install it and the rest falls in place :-)
I used radicale for my calenders and tasks before but it neither provides encryption nor the functionality to share your calendars with others. I had to create soft-links on my docker by hand if I wanted to share a calendar. I used nextcloud for this, too - but it always felt clumsy.
Putting it together: I can highly recommend trying it!
My name is Tom, and I'm the lead developer of EteSync. EteSync is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars, tasks and notes. You can think of it as sort of an end-to-end encrypted NextCloud, that also keeps a fully history of your changes.
EteSync launched in March 2017, but we just released version 2.0[1] and so much has changed since then! Some of the things that changed: we now support notes and tasks, we now have clients for Android, iOS, the desktop (a DAV bridge) and the web, and more than 400k downloads on Docker hub.
We have also released our backend as a separate open-source project (and SaaS) called Etebase[2]. Etebase makes it easy to build end-to-end encrypted applications by taking care of the encryption and its related challenges. Our hope is to enable a new generation of end-to-end encrypted applications. I don't want to use any non-encrypted applications anymore. :)
Anyhow, I'm just super excited about this release and what the future holds, so I wanted to share it. It's great to look back and see how far we've gone. :)
Would love to hear your thoughts, and if you have any feedback. Especially regarding Etebase.
The Nextcloud comparison seems weird, given that Nextcloud is foremost a file hosting/sharing thing, which your project doesn't seem to have, or at least doesn't present as the main thing. Why compare to a product that does something different instead of about what you do?
Huh? Nextcloud has mobile and desktop clients, including end-to-end encryption, lots of features around sharing files (both publicly and inside organizations),...
They don't have end-to-end encryption for their contacts, calendars, tasks and notes, which is what EteSync does...
Anyhow, I changed the title.
Regarding the comment you were replying to: the NextCloud clients, for all I know, don't actually sync with your filesystem, they just have a UI for accessing your files.
I am using it for quite a while now. I'd like to mention a few things that differentiates it from other solution and made me using it:
1.) Instead of providing a full featured app for the etesync environment on your pc or smartphone, it provides proxies / adapters for the encryption layer that make you use your native tools! What does that mean? I do not need a dedicated etesync calendar app, neither on my smartphone, nor on my desktop. I can add calendars using the etesync adapter to thunderbird and the mobile app provides the calendar natively to android (like davdroid etc).
2.) Light-weight. Compared to e.g. the fully blown Nextcloud, it is very lightweight and does what it does very well.
3) Open source and easy to self-host.
4) Traceability / History. Etesync provides a journal so you can see who added a calendar item.
5) Easy to use. This corresponds with 1) since you don't have to learn a "new" app. You just install it and the rest falls in place :-)
I used radicale for my calenders and tasks before but it neither provides encryption nor the functionality to share your calendars with others. I had to create soft-links on my docker by hand if I wanted to share a calendar. I used nextcloud for this, too - but it always felt clumsy.
Putting it together: I can highly recommend trying it!