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Nextcloud has the most confusing versioning of any software I have ever used.
Nextcloud Hub 26 is Nextcloud 34 and follows Nextcloud Hub 9 which is Nextcloud 33.
And I could be off on those exact numbers.
When numbers are confusing, it's usually just a recalibration.
Hub 9 aligns with cloud 33. But they are switching Hub to a dated numbering scheme because it's intended to be timestamped. It's not "Hub 26" its "Hub 26 Spring" -- it's not a version number, it's a time.
The underlying Nextcloud keeps an incremental semver release version so it can be based on features rather than timeline. Because the Nextcloud version and Hub version aren't tied to each other.
This would be like saying that iPhones have a confusing naming scheme because iPhone 17 uses iOS 27 and has 2 different numbers. If next year's iPhone was called "iPhone 2027" and used "iOS 29", we'd still understand that.
Nextcloud is great, I self-host an instance at home. I mostly use the calendar, address book, and file sharing with links a la Google Drive. It's probably heavier and slower than it should be for what it does, but it works.
Just like Home Assistant, it is a "must have" tool for self-hosters.
What's your experience like?
Lot's of people say that's a mess to maintain and too broken to actively use.
I often doubt if that's due to actual problems, or mix with that and bad decisions on the setup. Is dockering, keeping the data handling itself outside of it and a few other easy (or not so much) precautions enough to have a somewhat smoother sailing?
Also, how much time do you need to keep things from failing apart?
NextCloud Notes is frustratingly broken for offline use. The UI bricks itself with its own error messages when it can't phone home to the server. Even notes which are marked in the app as "Make available offline" don't work offline!
The iOS applications also are quite poor. For example the home screen widget has never shown me any of my favorited items even though it should, I have many favorited items, it is fully synced when I'm on my home network, yet it says "no favorites".
Considering the size of NextCloud and how long they've been around I wish they would fully complete more of their offerings before launching a dozen new ones.
Worse are the clients which, in some error states, make regular login attempts, triggering Nextcloud's login lock, locking out users who have no clue what's going on. I like Nextcloud overall, but I wish it was more stable.
This is a niche use, but I use the PhoneTrack app[1] with Nextcloud. It allows me to track my phone without relying on a third party service. It saved my ass already when I lost my phone in the park one night, and it's a nice way to track long hiking trips or road trips too as it saves the gpx and lets you export it:
I now use Nextcloud both for a family server and an academic lab. It has become such a daily part of my life, and I am really grateful for it. I just wish the network effects were stronger so I could benefit more from the federated features, and people didn't think it is so weird to get a Nextcloud link.
Lab use: https://git.medlab.host/MEDLab/Handbook/src/branch/main/docs...
Personal use: https://nathanschneider.info/2026/06/toward-a-durable-writin...
I love nextcloud and have been using it for years. However recently I've considered taking my instance offline or at least behind a VPN because even if only 10% is true of what AI folks are claiming about LLMs finding exploits left and right, it seems super risky to be hosting your private data on nextcloud.
How do you folks deal with these massively increased threats to self-hosted open source apps?
I host my entire homelab in my home and use tailscale to access it. You just connect your nextcloud instance to tailscale. Then you connect each client to tailscale. Works on iOS and android (and of course any desktop). When you're on you're home network (LAN), tailscale _should_ use the LAN IP for routing. And then when away, you'll route over derp servers usually.
You could also use tailscale for auth, but i like to enforce separate authentication so that you have to be authenticated to the tailnet and have to go through the normal authentication to app.
> I've considered taking my instance offline or at least behind a VPN
The practical downside is that you won't really be able to use all the features of Nextcloud that way, such as file sharing with people outside your LAN, or Nextcloud Talk (a Zoom substitute).
That being said, I don't store sensitive documents on my Nextcloud instance exposed to the Internet. For that, I have a Samba server on a LAN.
I ban almost the entire world using iptables.
Or rather, I drop all traffic other than that coming from my geo.
This has dropped my „rattling the door handle“ rate to 1/week instead of 1/second.
Host it in your home an use a vpn to connect to your home network when you are outside, that way it isn't exposed to the internet but you can still access it.
> How do you folks deal with these massively increased threats to self-hosted open source apps?
I throw everything behind Cloudflare ZeroTrust SSO or whatever it’s called with a whitelist of Github accounts, and Cloudflare Tunnel to network the containers/VMs without exposing any ports to the outside (except SSH), enforced by both the cloud firewall and iptables/ifw.
Same. Solving it by moving complex and sensitive data to an offline desktop app https://document.bot that support offline (self hosted) AI models (and optionally EU/ US AI providers).
However, it doesn't integrate yet with shared (org) drives.
I use nextcloud all the time, my private instance works great and does everything I need it to. But I keep it behind a VPN. It’s got a lot of parts, and thus a lot of surface area. It may be secure but I just assume it isn’t. I rely on the VPN to be the security boundary.
Yeah definitely would put behind a VPN. I run mine on my desktop at home and use Tailscale (Headscale for self-hosting) to make it accessible when I'm out of the house. Blazing fast speeds when at home, and reasonable when not.
I think moving it offline is part of the solution, but the main one is to actually find/fix the issues. So I guess this will require more involvement from us in open source.
Putting everything behind a VPN seems like the solution selfhosters have landed on. That way you have some control over how quickly you have to respond.
I only use my ownCloud instance behind Tailscale...
I left nextcloud because how slow it felt even on my beefy server. I switched to opencloud.eu, it might have less features but it's just what I needed
Seriously. I ran it on a server with two Xeon CPUs and 128GB of RAM. The web interface took minutes to do anything. Browsing a large photo library was just completely unworkable (and that was before they ripped out all the sorting and filtering features from the photo library).
My instance killed itself somehow, likely a failed auto update. I was, of course, using the default docker setup with the watchtower instance etc etc. I never got it to come back up, and I haven't missed it at all.
Even opening the damn login page took a good 30 seconds to load, there's no excuse for this kind of performance on a real-deal enterprise server.
I love Nextcloud but I feel like they should really completely redo their UI. It just doesn't look like something from this decade.
Wait, you don't feel so?
I have maintained a Nextcloud server for a small business for the last 6 years. I agree when I started using it early 2020 that the ui felt less modern, but after some updates down the road up until now it looks completely like it is from this era. Am I missing something? However, I never complained about the UI neither then nor now.
That is not a compelling reason to overhaul a UI (which is something that should rarely, if ever, be done). If it works and is pleasant to use, what it looks like is of no consequence.
Wha-huh?
This is the decade where every company bought into flat design, monochrome, chonky whitespace, extremely radiused corners everywhere. Pulling up my instance, Nextcloud apes that to a tee. You'd be hard-pressed to find any "modern" UI trend that they haven't shoe-horned into their design somehow.
The _did_ completely redo their UI a few years back, and for the worse in my opinion. The Calendar in particular is far less usable and (and much more buggy) than it was around the time it was forked from OwnCloud.
Upgraded yesterday, I only use a small amount of features (files, memories, calendar, tasks). It sucks that tasks isn't compatible yet (but I mostly use DAVx⁵/Tasks.org as front-end), and it sucks that the landing page still pulls close to 20MB or so, but besides that, nothing to report one way or another.
Is Memories working for you after the 34 update? I remember it took a long time for the community to update Memories to work with 33, and that experience has me holding off on updating to 34 with the hope that app updates come quickly.
Oh man, tasks isn't compatible yet? Thanks for mentioning that, I guess I'll wait a bit to upgrade.
Maybe I'm alone but nextcloud has gone from being kinda flaky and annoying to really great the past few years.
I don't think I really push it, but I find it just right for self-hosting my calendar, contacts, photos, and files.
I'd agree that it has gotten better over time. I'm glad we have Nextcloud around.
I always had terrible trouble keeping it (and before it, Owncloud) updated and in sync with available dependencies on my Debian host. A few years ago, when I built a new NAS, I installed a snap, and that's been the ticket. It's pretty close to flawless now.
> Your apps are now available via focused waffle menu for centralized access to all your apps. It reduces distraction and uses the interface space efficiently as your your library grows.
"your your" typo aside, I remember when Nextcloud moved from a drop-down menu for the apps to listing them all out separately on the header bar, to make them more visible and reduce the clicks to switch apps. I guess they've changed their minds again; I look forward to when they change them back.
Been using Nextcloud exclusively for probably 4 years now? Before that it was a mix of nextcloud + Google Drive. It works for me really well, I can grab my files through my vpn with any of my computers when I am not at home.
The Euro-Office project is the most interesting part of this announcement to me.
If I want to buy a small NAS that just runs Nextcloud and has a copy of my Google Photos library - what do I go with?
I don't have a ton of space so something that fits in the media center.
If you’re going to run your own NAS then consider swapping Google Photos out with Immich.
I know it’s not the question you asked but I feel not enough people know about it as an option and it’s really as good as Google Photos.
GMKTec G9. Four NVMe slots, plus some internal memory to deploy TrueNAS. It only has 12GB of RAM, but has two ethernet cards, acceptable cooling and performance and has a small footprint.
SSDs shall be single sided and gonna need heatsinks, but I believe it works well and is not tied to any manufacturer for anything.
If you want go all-out get ASUSTOR's Ryzen based systems. You can use the stock firmware or disable it without wiping it and deploy TrueNAS on it. It's a beast.
TrueNAS has containers and applications and VM support so you can run any service you want on it.
Google photos will become one way sync only in august. You can upload to cloud, but no sync to pc.
Is it still a pile of php files underneath, with file sync speed 50x slower than binary implementations and protocols of eg. Seafile?
Yes, it is still PHP. Sync speed is mostly fine though, most of the 'slowness' which Nextcloud is known for comes from the sometimes sluggish web interface. Point a fast WebDAV-compatible file manager [1] at a Nextcloud instance to get a better impression of backend speed. Point it at an image directory and you'll see as many php-fpm processes launched as there are thumbnails to process.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash is a good web-based example of such a thing, ignore all the guff about needing docker since you can just run the whole thing from a single self-compiled binary. By default it sends some telemetry to the mothership, you can remove that by commenting out the relevant code in server/middleware/index.go, look for the init() function and comment out the endless loop containing telemetry.Flush()
Is nextcloud the good one and owncloud the inferior one?
My biggest problem with Nextcloud is that it intentionally broke (at least twice by memory) on some updates, wanting me to run some oci command on the box. Remember that "for my family" also means "for my family when I'm gone." I never got round to having to find an alternative thanks to the divorce, but I'd consider Nextcloud a complete non-starter for this reason.
Find an alternative.
The breakdown as I understand is as follows:
- Owncloud: The 'original' platform, written in php, still developed today
- Nextcloud: A fork of Owncloud (php) by some of the people that worked on it, including the project founder over directional differences, now more widely used than the original Owncloud
- Owncloud infinite scale (OCIS): An implementation of the Owncloud server in Go, with the goal of making it faster and more scalable than the PHP version
- Opencloud: A fork of Owncloud infinite scale (Go) after an acquisition of ownCloud, the company.
I don’t know about owncloud, but I have been hosting a family Nextcloud instance for a little under two years and it works fine.
It’s boring. It works.
How is OpenCloud a serious competitor?
Am I the only one who doesn’t trust Nextcloud because they use Vimeo instead of a privacy-respecting CDN to showcase videos of their project?
I run Nextcloud at home with 1.5TB of files and 2 users, on a reasonably sized server. It is painfully slow. Still better than OneDrive, but only just: synscing takes forever, never reaching a fraction of available bandwidth. Upload from my phone is flaky, often hangs and needs manual intervention. It is a battery drain. The whole experience with add-ons and the general UI feels like a 2010 PHP app.
I am grateful Nextcloud exists, but no app deserves a vibe coded Rust rewrite more than Nextcloud. Literally nothing to loose