Comments here seem to suggest that Nextcloud isn't worth it. Later today I'm supposed to talk with some folks at IT looking for an in-house file-sharing/collaboration tool that Dropbox/GoogleDrive is (or was, because after GoogleDrive price hikes our institution ditched them). I was going to suggest Nextcloud as a possible option to investigate...
Nah, nextcloud is a reasonable enterprise file-sharing/collaboration tool.
What you are seeing here is a lot of people trying to use it as a file synchronization tool, and discovering that it's bloated beyond reason (because well, it's a file-sharing/collaboration tool) and the file sync functionality isn't even as good as you'll get from specialized tools.
The root problem is that nextcloud started as a file sync tool, and moved into other niche, and never bothered to communicate it.
NC is trying to do a lot, but it's not doing anything particularly well. It feels like their development resources are spread too thin to really polish any of the features. If you just need file sharing, there are some projects that focus on that that tend to work pretty well. I have also tried running NC with OnlyOffice, but that seems to break every two weeks. And even if it works, Google's tools are just so much better. I would even choose O365 over this.
Yeah, you need to run away from Nextcloud as far and as fast as possible.
I made the mistake of recommending it and setting it up for my 10 person team earlier this year and it has only been constant headaches.
Reporting bugs to GitHub is especially frustrating because the devs will just discard them, regardless of how well documented and reproducible they are. There was a mess with its Postgres connection pool where it would quickly run out of available slots if you used Collabora, the Google Docs clone, the devs rejected the bug reports without a second thought although there were many users who reported the problem.
This last hour I've been fighting it trying to reset a user's password, it says that it "cannot decrypt the recovery key".
I check whether the recovery key is enabled for that user, it says "Recovery key is not enabled".
I check whether encryption is enabled, it reports it as "false".
It's by far the flakiest piece of software I've used in 2023.
If you're going to do this, look for a proven stable Nextcloud solution. I followed one of the many guides on the web a couple of years ago to install Nextcloud on Debian, which worked, but the first major update broke it. I couldn't fix it because I didn't know why it broke. You wouldn't want to be in that situation with employees waiting for service to be restored.
Since then, I've been running an always-on Syncthing instance as a "cloud hub" and that's been great, though I doubt it would scale well.
I don’t know… the overall tone seems to be a bit too negative for me here.
I have used Nextcloud at home for years now without issues and we also used it at a large university where it worked just fine (from a user perspective; I don’t know if it gave the administrators nightmares). I do agree that they should invest more time in polish and stability and less in swanky new features that many won’t need, but that would not lead me to discourage anyone from using (or at least trying) Nextcloud.
It'll depend on your requirements. Keep in mind that Nextcloud is the largest on-prem collab platform out there, so more users means more complaints... It is used in huge enterprise and government installations so it can definitely work, but it needs a decent setup. For a small company, use the Nextcloud AIO container I would say. For a big one, get Nextcloud Enterprise (starts at 100 seats) to make sure you get any issues addressed quickly.
I have only been using NextCloud personally with a single user but every instance I set up, there are basic problems like apps freezing, (and GH issue seems to have stalled some 6 months or so ago) and non polished interface really puts me off but since there aren't a better alternative, I use it.
Seafile is a close call if it gets more attention to remove rough edges and a bit more feature but interface looks more polished.
I guess it's fine if you want a widely integrated solution that can do a lot of different things.
I'm using it only for myself, so definitely not representative of using it in a company but maybe my experience helps.
The just working part, at least for me, are the calendar and contact plugins. Never had any issues with those.
File sync with the desktop client works mostly fine on Linux where I use it most of the time. However, I've run into issues with it on Windows. Using the automatic bandwidth limit for example might cause Explorer to freeze. [1]
Also forget about the automatic upload feature in the Android client, I switched to FolderSync for a reliable experience.
I've managed to get OnlyOffice working, Collabora Office previously broke for some reason. However latest upgrade also broke OnlyOffice. The solution for this is to put the secret and authorization headers into config.php in addition to the OnlyOffice plugin settings. [2] No idea why, but that is a thing.
My Nextcloud runs as a normal PHP application and I haven't had any issues with upgrading yet. Going from, I think, version 23 on Debian 11 to 27.1 now on a different machine running Debian 12 since I started using it.
Maybe I should find something more focused on file syncing, but the all-in-one approach of Nextcloud and its various plugins makes trying some new services very easy.
Realize that many people who work for competitor products will bash it here. It is a best of class rather than best of breed solution tailored to organizations who want a secure on prem suite like O365. Some apps are best of breed, but you can find many better alternatives to specific apps. File sharing and collaboration is one of its strongest offerings. I think you will be amazed at all the sharing options available. When you need the tight integration between several apps and central administration, it is a great suite. It changed my life in a good way.
I'm using Nexcloud currently, but an alternative for you to check out for you might be Pydio.
It has a lot of the same features, and generally seemed a little more stable. However, it was a little more painful to configure, and has a few unique terminologies you'll have to get used to. Also it's UI does load faster than Nextcloud, but once loaded, it is a little less snappy.
For the user downloaded client, I found that it works, but is a little less convenient than Nextcloud (no Automatic pinning of the folder, no partial downloads to save space)
You should still investigate it. I've used it since the fork from Owncloud and used to curse how slow and buggy it was, turns out I just needed to admin properly. Its a DB heavy PHP application stack, you need to adjust and tune things appropriately. As to complaints about updates breaking things, you need to have a way to test updates prior to deploying to production, just like any other server based application.
If you are willing to spend some money, rather look at OwnCloud hosting or maybe self-hosting with professional support. While NextCloud just added feature after feature and IMHO bit off more than they could chew, OwnCloud started to rewrite things in Go and improved speed and stability. Also, I hear their support is better.
