Cradlepoint NetCloud Engine vs. ownCloud

I have yet to have any situation where Cradlepoint NetCloud Engine was "less appropirate". It's easy to use and understand and extremely effective for deploying Cradlepoints and maintaining them. The control over the Cradlepoint devices is remarkable, absolute and the product is very well suited and feature rich for the task,

Incentivized

OwnCloud/Nextcloud is a great application for cloud storage of files, and makes sharing specific files or folders easy and fast. It also makes a great tool for real-time collaboration, including real-time chat and simultaneous editing of documents or spreadsheets. I have used ownCloud to assist clients in sending large files that could not be emailed -- for example, one of my clients is a Video Production agency. They produced a commercial to air, but could not email the file as it was 400MB. OwncCloud came to the rescue. I set up a temporary share and allowed him access to upload into that folder. Once the file was in the folder, I generated a share link that was then forwarded to TV stations for instant viewing in a browser. Each TV station then downloaded it and was able to add it to their scheduling system quickly. From the Photography side... I am able to deliver large amounts of files quickly and easily to my clients, and they can download or view on mobile devices easily. Since I use ownCloud on a daily basis, I cannot think of any reason why I would not use this software

Incentivized

• Support: They are always quick to respond.
• The NetCloud service: It has never gone down in the four + years I have been using it.
• Pricing is very competitive.

Incentivized

• 100% of our data is stored ONLY on our servers and workstation. No external hosting anywhere.
• Open source, no recurring fees for any amount of data we need.
• Feature rich browser based application.
• Mature desktop sync client for PC and Mac.

Incentivized

• Cradlepoint NetCloud virtual backplane bandwidth is improving but could limit some very large enterprise customers without creative network segmentation.
• Further improvements to simplify NetCloud Manager use would be appreciated.
• User license management and compliance tools need to be clarified and simplified.

Incentivized

• Requires you to manage the infrastructure, software updates, backups and security because it is self-hosted
• The picture viewer in ownCloud is not really snappy by default (You need to setup plugins or some kind of cache)
• No video viewer by default
• The web UI requires a cache setup to have reasonable load times (to be fair, it is recommended in the admin page)
• I stopped using the calendar and contacts plugins because after each update they would break

Incentivized

Device management is nearly the same as if you logged in locally, giving a familiar feel to the interface. Device group management can be cumbersome when pushing firmware updates.

Incentivized

OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.

Incentivized

Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.

Incentivized

Every time I have engaged support, it has been a satisfying experience. Because they cover such a wide range of applications, I do have to spend more time explaining our intended results and rationale than I would have to do with a more focused vendor, but it's a minor tradeoff for the value of saved time in every other aspect of the solution.

Incentivized

Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.

Incentivized

It is much easier to group your devices within NetCloud prior to deployment. We ran into issues of lost/changed settings when grouping devices that had already been deployed

Incentivized

Before Cradlepoint NetCloud, firewall transversal was a challenge for telemedicine and required extensive and lengthy cooperation with client IT professionals. Interface selection and failover required application-level software on the host that would become inaccessible should a failover event go badly. We used several tools, each with their own management consoles, licensing plans, and learning curves to enable solutions. Much of that is a thing of the past with NetCloud.

Incentivized

ownCloud is better than Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. I have not used Google Drive in some time now, so it may have improved. OneDrive has become better over time too, but my go-to is still ownCloud. Firstly, I prefer to have my data under my control. No other service can offer the level of control that ownCloud does. Setting that aside, in my experience Google Drive never quite got syncing right. Unless you have a very small collection of files and you're not synced across many devices, Google Drive fails to achieve a complete sync. The icon is always showing that Drive is syncing (and not up to date). I've had similar issues with OneDrive, but these days on Windows 10 OneDrive usually can achieve a complete sync across multiple devices, but it often hogs CPU and Network resources to do so, and it's still slower than OneDrive.

Incentivized

• TCO vs traditional WAN was over 1,000% less
• Increased connectivity improved security AND connectivity

Incentivized

• The company grew from 4 employees in 2013 when ownCloud was initially deployed to about 40 in 2017 and still using it with a very similar setting without any major upgrade on the same Linux VPS. 95% of all company data are stored and shared via ownCloud successfully. No clear data about ROI but clearly the perfect adoption rate by all people and its ubiquitous use makes it an essential part of the company workflow.

Incentivized