Nextcloud
The self-hosted cloud platform: free and open-source Dropbox, Docs, and video calls on your own server.
About
Nextcloud is the open-source, self-hosted alternative to the entire Google/Microsoft stack: file sync and share plus calendar, contacts, mail, Deck kanban boards, Talk video conferencing, and office editing via OnlyOffice or Collabora — all on hardware you control. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed and free forever for the community edition, with around 37,100 GitHub stars and roughly 400 apps in its app store as of October 2026. Enterprise subscriptions from Nextcloud GmbH add support and premium features. Clients exist for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and the web, and it runs from a Raspberry Pi up to large enterprise clusters.
Honest limits: you are the sysadmin — updates, backups, and scaling are your job, and setup is genuinely moderate rather than one-click. Optional end-to-end encryption is still not fully implemented, so full zero-knowledge needs care; server-side encryption protects data at rest but the server holds the keys. Performance depends entirely on your hardware. No published independent benchmarks found.
What it can do
- Free self-hosted file sync and share with unlimited storage
- 400+ apps: calendar, contacts, mail, Talk, Deck, Forms
- Office editing via OnlyOffice or Collabora integration
- Federated sharing between Nextcloud servers
- Two-factor authentication and optional server-side encryption
- Desktop, mobile, and web clients on every major platform
- Enterprise subscriptions with support from Nextcloud GmbH
Setup
Install on your own server, VPS, or Raspberry Pi via Docker images or snap packages; or buy managed hosting.
Prerequisites
A server or VPS with PHP and a database (MySQL/MariaDB); or a managed Nextcloud host.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (VERIFIED tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: ~37,100 GitHub stars, AGPL-3.0 license, and active development (v33.0.10, Oct 2026) per selfhost.directory; feature set and E2EE status from cyberinsider's 2026 test. Strengths: the leading self-hosted cloud platform, fully open source, no storage caps, huge app ecosystem. Docked for: (1) you run the server — updates, backups, and performance are your responsibility; (2) end-to-end encryption not fully implemented yet. License: AGPL-3.0.
★ 37,136 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 10.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · ~37,136 GitHub stars on nextcloud/server (Oct 2026, selfhost.directory); ~22 stable releases in past year.
- · E2EE optional and not fully implemented (cyberinsider 2026).
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.