What is Nextcloud?

Nowadays, storing, organizing, sharing, and securing all sorts of documents is a necessary aspect of work for many people. The cloud provides a flexible solution to these needs by allowing the user to access their files from any location and from many types of connected devices.

While the cloud offers an effective environment for this purpose, there is also a wide variety of services built on top of the cloud, each with a unique set of components designed to make storing files online easier. This article focuses on Nextcloud and its many unique features.

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What are the features included in Nextcloud?

Nextcloud allows you to securely store various types of data on the cloud via web hosting. Among these data types are:

• Files (documents, audio, video, photos, etc.)
• Contacts
• Calendars
• To-do lists
• Favorites

Nextcloud is a free and open-source software solution that distinguishes itself by being self-hosted. This means instead of having to subscribe to a cloud service that’s hosted on a company’s servers, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, and many others, you are free to host your Nextcloud instance wherever you please. Therefore, you have full control over your cloud server and its configuration.

To add more services on top of Nextcloud’s already powerful file-sharing capabilities, you can also install many add-ons designed for specific purposes. For example, you may integrate other file-sharing platforms into Nextcloud’s interface to help centralize and integrate your file management strategy.

Because Nextcloud has been designed with collaboration in mind, its large community regularly releases new plugins. Among those plugins, you can find a complete video conferencing solution, a password manager, a software suite, and so on.

OwnCloud vs Nextcloud: what’s the difference?

Nextcloud started out as a fork of ownCloud. But, today they’re two very distinct products offering different services. While ownCloud has both a free-to-use open-source project and a separate proprietary Enterprise Edition, Nextcloud provides the same core code to both its free and paying users.

When you compare ownCloud Enterprise Edition to Nextcloud’s Industry solutions, Nextcloud comes out on top, with features such as:

• Integrated audio calls, video calls, and text chats
• Groupware (calendars, contacts, emails, etc.)
• Video verification
• Accessibility features (WCAG 2.1, dyslexia-friendly fonts, etc.)
• Whitelists
• Real-time notifications

And much, much more.

How to install Nextcloud

Thanks to Nextcloud’s WebDav protocol, accessing the cloud server is done via the file manager, be it on Windows, Mac OS or GNU/Linux. These platforms, as well as the mobile operating systems Android and iOS, also feature synchronization software that may be used to mirror the contents of your cloud server onto your physical device.

Self-hosting (installing Nextcloud on your own webserver) should only be done by those with sufficient knowledge to properly secure their instance. For everyone else, we recommend SaaS, which you can get from a regular web hosting offer such as Gandi’s Simple Hosting.

Once set up, you can access your Nextcloud instance using any modern web browser through a dedicated URL, using your unique username and password. You may also use software to synchronize your cloud web hosting with your local files to access your files directly on your computer.