What is Nextcloud?

Nowadays, storing, organizing, sharing and securing all sorts of documents is a necessity for many users. 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 an innumerable amount of services built on top of the cloud, each of them having their own interfaces and functionalities to make storing files online easier. This article focuses on Nextcloud and its many unique features.

Choose your nextcloud plan

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. What this means, is that 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. You thus have full control over your cloud server and its configuration.

To add more functionalities on top of Nextcloud’s already powerful file-sharing capabilities, you can install many add-ons designed for specific purposes. For example, you may integrate other file-sharing platforms into Nextcloud’s interface to allow for easier interactions and improved centralization.

Because Nextcloud has been designed with collaboration in mind, its large community regularly releases new plugins. Among those plugins, you may 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 nowadays, they’re two very distinct products offering different services. While ownCloud is an open-source project edited by its community which also offers a different, proprietary Enterprise Edition, Nextcloud provides the same core code to both its free and paying users.

It’s when you compare ownCloud Enterprise Edition to Nextcloud’s Industry Solutions that 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.

Nextcloudのインストール方法

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 (meaning installing Nextcloud on your own web server) should only be done by those with the sufficient knowledge to properly secure their instance. For everyone else, Saas should be prefered, which you can benefit from by subscribing to a web hosting offer such as Gandi’s Simple Hosting.

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