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 :)
So really your only reason for possibly not liking next cloud is that it’s PHP, correct?
What is the problem with PHP? I keep asking it and until now every response has been near me worthy. “Don’t like PHP because some function calls are not consistent.”, “don’t like PHP because 20 years ago it had Manu unsafe practices!”, that sort of nonsense.
What is the problem with PHP, for you?
I’m not OP, but here are my reasons:
- needs a webserver to be configured properly, in addition to the application itself - most other projects handle the server itself, so I can simply reverse proxy to it
- recent security audit found a variety of vulnerabilities - PHP has been known to have a lot of security vulnerabilities, and it’s commonly targeted due to popularity and the prevalence of these vulnerabilities; using literally anything else reduces the likelihood that you’ll be targeted by script kiddies
- since it doesn’t run an active server, things like WebSockets are wonky - AFAICT, Nextcloud solves this by using a separate Rust binary, which is weird
- using the templating feature (i.e. the whole point of PHP) takes a lot of resources vs client-side rendering, so the main sell of PHP is architecturally suspect
- I don’t use it, so if I needed to fix a bug, it would be a lot of work; I’m a lot more familiar with other languages, like Go, Rust, and Python
There are a bunch of other reasons I strongly dislike PHP, but hopefully this is enough to show why I generally prefer to avoid it. In fact, Nextcloud is my only PHP-based app, and I’m testing out OCIS now (will probably try OpenCloud soon).
Question for the OP or anyone who uses OpenCloud: How does it size up in an enterprise? NextCloud has known capacity for corporate use with SSO, a desktop app, integrations…but it has all the pitfalls of PHP (granted I run it with Nginx/FastCGI and a lot of resources). The thing is, anything not PHP can be run for less overhead in terms of actual cloud costs, so I see a benefit to OpenCloud. But the features have to be there. I know a desktop app is coming soon, and thats just one of many needs.
+1 that question, I’ve also never installed/used OpenCloud, simply because I didn’t see the benefit of it until now.
Based on the comments given so far, I have some hope that over time, the Go-approach could give us a more resource saving, but feature full alternative to tangle with, so I will stay tuned :)
For now I will stick to Nextcloud, because it gives me all the features I need and the maintanance, at least for the couple-hundred-user-instances I maintain, is not that bad, as I often read around the web :) But I also can understand, that people wish to have less maintenance struggles and therefor try sth else, wich is good for me, so I can hope for more experience reports in the near future :p
I have no experience with Opencloud, but Nextcloud is borderline unmaintainable in my opinion. I welcome any new player in this space.
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.
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.
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!
Deployment of NC on kubernetes/docker (and maintenance thereof) is super scary. They copy config files around in dockerfile, e.g., it’s a hell of a mess. (And not just docker: I have one instance running on an old-fashioned webhosting with only ftp access and I have to manually edit .ini and apache config after each update since they’re being overwritten.) As the documentation of OCIS is growing and it gets more features, I might actually change even the larger instances, but for now I must consider it as not feature complete (since people have expectations from nextcloud that aren’t met by ocis and its extensions). Moreover, I have more trust in the long term openness of nextcloud as opposed to owncloud, for historical reasons.
I’m not the biggest fan of Nextcloud but there currently isn’t a lot of good alternatives that have the same features and polish.
The issue with Nextcloud is the PHP junk it comes with. Writing something in Go is much better and it is silly to me that Nextcloud puts code in docker volumes. If they could separate out the code and data they would be in a much better position.
PHP junk
So serious question: what,.in your mind, is junk about PHP?
It is not really a proper language. It is designed to run to generate HTML dynamically but uses outside of that are pushing it. It is also problematic that Nextcloud mixes code and data. It is also slower than compiled languages like C, Go or Rust.
I think Go is really good for web applications with lots of server back end code since it is fast and static while being memory safe and easy to read. The Go syntax is cleaner than PHP and less hard to maintain.
I have a bunch of other reasons elsewhere in this thread, but I just wanted to back you up here. Go is a lot easier to deal with than PHP in many ways, and it has a lot of tools to track down issues, while also have a lot better performance. And I don’t even like Go that much (used it for the better part of a decade, pretty much since 1.0), and I much prefer Rust. But Go is 100% a good option for this use-case, since it’s mostly short-lived requests with relatively simple logic, so the various footguns I dislike about Go aren’t particularly relevant (and are way nicer than the footguns in PHP).
PHP feels like it “evolved” with hacks on top of hacks, and it’s sort of being cleaned up now. Go feels like it was “designed,” with conscious choices being made from the outset, so everything feels a lot more consistent. That makes it easier to spot bogs, performance issues, etc. Go is just the better option here, and it’s not close.
It is unclear to me what the license of OpenCloud is. Are they open source? They reference a “trial license” on their site.
Server is Apache 2.0, and frontend is AGPL v3, which seems to be the same for ownCloud OCIS, which they seem to have forked from.
This is what you’re really looking for:
https://github.com/owncloud/ocis
Full rewrite in Go. Lots of features. Much better performance. More stable than nextcloud.
OoenCloud is a fork of this.
From the website, i can’t see how it’d different than owncloud.
There isn’t any difference. The team who was developing OCIS left own cloud and forked OCIS into OpenCloud. They’ll continue developing OpenCloud.
Tried OCIS a while back and its way faster than NC syncing files, even the initial sync was so fast I didn’t trust it was fully done (but it was).
That being said, OCIS is missing several key features I daily use: namely proper DAV support (contacts, calendar, todo, journal, etc) as well as integrations for stuff like SeedVault for mobile backups.
I only use nextdoor for the file storage. Like Dropbox type of thing. Too get files to different computers when I need them. I don’t use any other feature.
Should I switch to opencloud?
Have you tried Synching? If you only need transferring files back and forth and no version control or snapshot-like backups, that might be even simpler
I do want the browser interface image I can’t sweep syncthing, like on a work computer, public computer, fault friends whatever.
I think that was my 1 hang up for syncthing.
That’s basically my use-case as well, and it’s why I’m currently switching to OCIS/OpenCloud. And OCIS (and probably OpenCloud) recently introduced the POSIX driver, so the main complaint about files not being accessible w/o some extra tool is no longer an issue. I’m planning to hard-link the data directories elsewhere to make interacting with it a bit easier.
Why use OpenCloud instead of ownCloud Infinite Scale, which it was forked from? What’s the value proposition?
Evaluation of the product no longer required.
NextCloud being so slow forced me to migrate to Seafile.
Seafile being less one-stop-shoppy made me not use it so much, but whenever I do it is always fast and responsive (unlike nextcloud, where 80% of the time I was looking at the loading indicator). Looking it up now though, it looks like it has a lot of new features I haven’t yet tried so I’m probably gonna start using it more now.
Only downside with Seafile is it’s deduplication (for me), because it stops me from easily accessing files directly (always gotta use a client). Likely a benefit for most though and I do rarely need to access a file directly on disk, just when I do, it’d be an easy shortcut for whatever I’m doing.
Check out the POSIX driver in OCIS/OpenCloud. It should keep the responsiveness of Seafile, while having a sane disk format.
Or you can try out the Seafile FUSE layer.
I’m in a similar boat, and I’ve been testing out Seafile and ownCloud OCIS, and I think I prefer OCIS. I’ll probably switch to OpenCloud though, since it seems a lot of the OCIS devs went there due to issues w/ management.
Some things I didn’t like about Seafile:
- complicated to set up - I wanted to throw it in a container, and that made it a lot more complex
- weird codebase - a lot of it’s in C, and some is in Go - not sure if they’re switching to Go eventually, or if it’s a one-off thing
- they only support MariaDB/MySQL, and I really want to avoid that - OCIS lets me just use the filesystem, which is really nice
But hey, if it works, it works, so don’t mess w/ it.
Thanks for your reply, I will definitely keep that in mind if Seafile fails to meet any critera moving on, but yeah your last point is also right, it would probably be a big pain to migrate out at this point with all my data for multiple users here.
It seems a lot has been modernising recently, I didn’t know they were also using Go, but hopefully they continue with it for new code.
i keep having issues and bugs on nextcloud. maybe i should try opencloud
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Shame Opencloud only officially supports docker. Thats a no go for me.
Why?
But it doesn’t, they have instructions for bare metal installs as well. Or you could use podman if you want.
Docker is way more simple to setup and run. You can use a docker-compose file instead of trying to install something locally by hand.
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