Nextcloud vs. TrueNAS

While searching for tools to satisfy a quickly scaling online startup, we found Nextcloud is well suited for today's remote collaborative team. Nextcloud has just the right toolset for a collaborative workspace including video, chat, many file formats accepted, and intuitive user interface. Comparatively other popular tools like Trello were distracting with more features than functionality. Working with Nextcloud is much like having a workspace with all your content and tools available anywhere on any device, without the ads, distractions, and irrelevant functionality. We will continue to utilize Nextcloud as a remote workspace for evolving and scaling teams.

Incentivized

We have many TrueNAS units deployed and they've served us well everywhere. Our most common use case is using it as storage backing for virtual machines. We have Proxmox talking to it, as well as having it acting as the hypervisor. We've never lost data with it, even when faced with multiple disk failures. We've also always found the performance to be robust and able to handle the needs of our clients. Our clients range from libraries, to medium sized enterprises and we've always been able to make it work, and work reliably.

Incentivized

• File sharing (internal, public or federated).
• One software, many activities (files, address book, calendar, chat, edit, email) ...
• Groupware, sharing between users or groups is really easy and finely controlled.
• Integrations and many apps.

• iSCSI Datastores for virtualization.
• NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking.
• Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS.
• The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility.
• Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage.

• Slow in comparison to other solutions
• May be complex for the start since there are lots of apps and features
• May be not focusing on core topics

Incentivized

• more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better
• allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares.
• some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares .

The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?

The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login

I never needed support as everything always worked fine. The documentation on Nextcloud website is extensive and clear. The community is very active on the forum and should support you if you don't already find what you are looking for.

The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.

The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.

PIM and file sharing are the same as you get in Google's Drive/Calendar. With extensions, you can also implement web meetings (e.g., by using Jitsi), but this comes with more administrative effort. In the end, this comes down to how big of a user/customer base you are supporting. For small enterprises, Nextcloud stacks up very well against its big competitors. At a large scale, you will have increased maintenance and resource costs which you need to check against licensing fees for the cloud providers.

I chose TrueNAS (upgrading from FreeNAS) because of the small footprint, ease of use, and reliability of the ZFS file system. The file sharing protocols supported as well as the intuitive interface all make TrueNAS a great choice for business and hobbyists alike.

• It allowed us access to our files from any device over the internet.
• It helped manage and organize our file sharing with third parties.
• It provided a secure wrapper for accessing files.

• Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware.
• Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives.
• The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing.