Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

Old school dinosaur that still advocates for private cloud solutions, here.

Swallow your pride or curiosity on rolling your own kit and accept the reality that OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box.com/et al are going to be better for your needs. The single biggest benefit of SaaS products are their flexibility to provide service when you can't or don't want to support the deployments yourselves, which is basically startup mode.

Once you're off your feet and have an honest-to-god Enterprise IT team with a budget, let us deal with it. They'll likely keep end-user storage in a Collab Suite (M365, GWorkspace) unless there's a specific advantage or requirement for your business needs in running it on-prem.

Everything is a tool, and the use-case of these tools is in freeing you to solve the really hard problems of startups, i.e. survival, success, and sale/solvency.

At our startup, we rely on nextcloud (self hosted on a root server from a German hosting provider) + libre office for all of the more „mundane“ parts of our business. To be fair though, we’re in a very niche market (offshore wind) running at a very different speed compared to your regular startup. It’s been a conscious choice to run everything on foss and self host as much as we can. Big plus for nextcloud: the sync client works reliably even on intermittent and extremely slow connections (offshore). The overhead of maintaining nextcloud ourselves is manageable (yet another docker container) and it’s been astonishingly reliable ever since we got started. For us, maintaining control over data is paramount, so it matters greatly to us. If one day the overhead should become too much, I’d probably move our nextcloud over to a nextcloud provider.

When I worked at a smallish company, we were upgrading our email calendaring system from a homegrown thing to some better.

In my young year I was pushing for something like this, an off the shelf self hosted system. I was worried that slinging it out to a thirdparty would be both expensive and bad for my career.

However I was wrong. Much as it was a dick to set up, migrating to Google (workspace? fuck knows what it was called) was totally worth the money.

At newer companies I've look at self hosting, but I just don't want to be on the hook for securing the stuff, or dealing with the email deliverability when some marketing prick does something stupid.

Do you want to spend your time building your product, or spend your time managing something you get for $10/mo from Google?

All you have to do is read the commentary here to know this probably isn’t a good idea in a large work setting unless you have dedicated IT staff to support it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41615102

OwnCloud is popular in the /r/selfhosted scene on reddit, and is worth doing a search there: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/search?q=owncloud

OwnCloud and such wouldn't be considered a mainstream resume skill, and comes with its own upkeep and maintenance, along with ownership of the entire backup/restoration process.

Driven by my ideals and my previous horrendous experience dealing with Microsoft and Google support, I've been a strong advocate for self-hosting in my organization. I do not think companies should put something as valuable as their collaboration and communication in the hands of a company as inconsistent as Google or Microsoft.

However, ideals aside. In many large companies, using Microsoft or Google products can also be a compliance headache (that is, if you're outside the US). A larger corp is more likely to be hit with such issues than a small startup.

Also, self hosting of course requires resources. I'm not talking about compute, in my experience that is very negligible. It of course requires people to keep stuff up to date and learn how to use it to its fullest extent. A larger enterprise can more easily afford this effort than a small startup. Even considering my idealistic stance, it is hard to ignore the low cost of entry as well as the ease of getting started with the big cloud offers.

do not spend “innovation points” on anything that isn’t your core competency, period.

that doesn’t only apply to google workspace, it also applies to things like payment processing, auth, etc.

Well... An IT startup should have no need of NexCloud/O365/Google suite and so on, simply because techies know how to share files and produce documents in way much better ways.

Staten that, as a POOR solution to collaborative works on documents NexCloud/O365/Google suite might be "good enough" for some, NextCloud is not on par, but near, the burden for IT is simply the fact these products are monsters alone, essentially impossible to really knows entirely in codebase terms, complex to heal when trouble happen etc.

So yes NextCloud could be used in professional settings, and owning their own infra is better than living on someone else computer, but the real point is if your employees really need such tools/paradigm or not. Someone in IT could collaborate with a shared repo, notes, makes slides in org-mode and so on. Someone much less skilled could still use BookStack and alike. Only end-users already trained on office-like stuff could like these monsters.

Hardly any "devops" work needed to keep it chugging along. My installation is ~10yo and don't remember a failed update or serious mishaps, then again it's just the family using it, so very standard usage.

It really depends. At my first job it was used with some success, but we were a PaaS, with few employees and a hard limit on costs (at least the two first years, then we were profitable enough to probably upgrade but it was integrated enough). It was just after they forked themselves too, so it wasn't as feature-complete as now.

Now, I would not use it unless you have to follow ISO norms/get governmental agreements for any company with enough money. If you're a three-person startup with one client barely paying two salaries, trying to find a bigger market though, go for it.

I have used both Own- and NextCloud in professional environments and it works fine. I had less issues getting it to work than a Domain-attached SMB storage. It's really important to know what you expect from it, but for a cloud storage & sharing solution it doesn't really have any drawbacks. As with most self-hosted software, you need someone to keep an eye on it and back it up from time to time. If that justifies paying Google to do it for you, that's also a reasonable proposition.

In my opinion it’s not a good alternative if you or your team members expect exactly the same quality of service. When you switch to Nextcloud you’ll have to expect more bugs, less reliability, less performance and obviously more maintenance (since it's typically self-hosted) compared to Google Drive, Dropbox or One Drive. So you'll have to go into this with a different kind of mindset. What you gain is independence, privacy and extendability due to a rather big platform ecosystem.

E.g. here are some specific things and examples of things you'll have to deal with, in no specific order. These are just some things I've had to deal with recently.

- You'll have to educate people in your group that there are at least 3 different ways to share files among each other and that they can all coexist in parallel (Individual Shares vs. Group Shares vs. Group folders vs. Circles/Teams) (I did a german blog post on this: https://bitbetter.de/blog/nextcloud-freigabe-chaos/)

- Handling of file/folder names with special characters is a mess e.g. if you have Windows and Linux clients there will most certainly be conflicts. (Luckily this has been fixed recently by the `forbidden_filename_characters` config option – which is not enforced yet via the Web UI) see https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2802

- Creating Nextcloud users with spaces in their names, will break CalDAV on iOS Devices (https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/15641)

- Nextcloud (aka Collabora) Office is very slow if you want to actually work collaboratively with it (no matter the power of your Collabora server) – unfortunately it's no match for Google Docs or Office 365

Don't get me wrong: It's still a fantastic Open Source project with tons of talented people and it's a beacon of hope in the GAFA world. Everyone should try it out (and help it evolve) so it can be better than the commercial alternatives. But going into this and expecting to get the same kind of product quality like Google Drive/One Drive/Dropbox will lead to disappointment.

I find it’s when you build customizations that break in a version change where this will shoot you in the foot. Make sure it’s well supported for whatever plugins/customizations you need and out of the way and everyone will love whatever self hosted solution you introduce. Don’t go plugin crazy you’ll trap yourself when you need cross functionality of some sort.

There are companies that will host and support Nextcloud for you, so it does not necessarily mean any additional burden on Dev-ops than any proprietary Sass solution. And if your provider doesn't meet expectations (or stops meeting them) you can migrate to a new one with less difficulty than changing software completely, as you would with proprietary Sass.

Has anyone used Perforce Helix for this?

If you're already using it for large file version control for, e.g., gamedev, and don't mind the cost, how well does it work to store all other company documents? I'd assume it has better scalability and permissions management than Nextcloud (not to mention the version control on par with git).

If you are going by the Nextcloud route, they have an enterprise solution[0] and you can pay a bit to them to avoid some worries.

IMHO, having the diversity in storage and computing would help the current tech world a lot.

[0] https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/

I think so but there are generally two competing philosophies. One is that startups should leverage cloud services as much as possible because of their relatively low resources required to get off the ground.

I think selfhosting open-source services is more useful for niche SMB's that specifically require on-prem data.

I see a lot of comments shying away from self hosting, to keep focused on your own product, or wanting the ability to shift blame onto the big providers when things go sideways. There are hosted Next Cloud options, has anyone had experience with these good or bad?

Hetzner has an affordable hosted offering of Nextcloud which we use at our company: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

It is great to have a Drive-like user-friendly UI to your shares (web, mobile apps). But don't do the syncing with it, there are more mature/robust solutions like SyncThing or rsync.

Self-hosting is no big deal but NextCloud -- from what I've seen -- is not very good. Used by the German government is not the recommendation you might think it is.

I was reading about this. It depends on a lot of things, however if you want end to end encryption, only cryptpad and seafile seem to have this capability.

For just storage try Hetzner’s Storage Box. It’s very simple and does exactly one job.

Running a service is one thing. Keeping it reliable and secure is another. Especially if you are a start-up. You have limited capital and even more limited developer time. Don't waste either on building your own infrastructure.

If you are worried about someone stealing your ideas, don't be. First, nobody cares about what you have until you make it big, which is going to happen a long time from now if ever. Second, the major services all provide enterprise deals that ensure privacy, enough that the largest companies in the world and many governments rely on them. You are far more likely to be hacked if you try to roll your own than if you use a popular service - especially if you aren't an experienced IT admin.

If you are in a start-up you want to put your full focus on your product - don't waste time on infrastructure. Use popular online services, use popular brands for hardware, use popular languages and popular libraries. Use anything you can to get you going as quickly and as painlessly as possible so you can focus on building your product and your business. That's going to be hard enough.

I say this as someone who worked with a start-up from inception to being acquired 10 years later. I was the guy building the networks and the servers and the desktops. We cobbled together our own systems from white box parts and using free software that required lots of setup and maintenance. I spent a lot of my time maintaining that stuff instead of working on our products. When we got acquired, the first thing they did was throw all that stuff out and switch to their existing systems that were all the well regarded name brands that you know. Since then, everything just works.

No it really is not. Just pay for Microsoft Onedrive for your users.

Consider owncloud as well

I've worked at multiple small companies now where all our document storage and organization needs were met exclusively by GDrive.

I won't say it's a good solution for everyone. If you have strict documentation needs for industry reasons, it's going to be hell for your workers. Good luck finding anything you need. Good luck getting people to follow a consistent format, or hell, even a compliant format.

> Does it put too much maintenance work on DevOps

... DevOps shouldn't be deploying, administering and maintaining something like NextCloud.

And honestly without any additional input this question sounds like "I worry what I would be in a position when NextCloud wouldn't be able to support the needs of 10000s users. BTW currently it's me myself and my dog in this startup".