Better than paying for OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or AWS! More secure, better privacy, way more professional
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Nextcloud to share files with clients and internally keep track of documents. It was incredibly easy to setup, instructions are very clear to every user, easy to customize for our corporate theme and generally offered much more security, data privacy, cheaper pricing (self hosted, self cost) as well as most importantly: modularity. We could grant a user terabytes of cloud storage if they needed to, give specific users less, etc. All previous NAS could be integrated through quick plug-ins and SMB, additionally the apps for it already being supported on every operating system was helpful. All in all, a 10/10 experience from a security, data privacy and user experience perspective.
Pros
- Fast up/download speeds
- Self-hosted
- Free and Open Source
- Easy to install and setup
- Easy to use for coworkers and users
Cons
- Client side end-to-end encryption like CryptPad
- Gallery sync pause on Android/iOS (sometimes I do not want pictures to be synced, there is no option to stop it on iOS or Android, but there is for Desktop)
- Disable allowing every user to see every other user by default (you need to edit the HTML of the start page of Nextcloud in order to disable a feature that allows you to see every other user registered on that platform, for privacy reasons I find this questionable)
- Be able to change user-tags, so far you are just able to change usernames, but not your tag. Every Nextcloud user should be given a UUID which represents their Nextcloud tag, this way users can change it more easily.
- Dark mode not as an experimental feature, but fully integrated and not hidden away under "accessibility features"
Return on Investment
- Spent money once, was able to have a good and reliable cloud for three years, if I had gotten a Google Drive for Business or OneDrive, I would've been dependent on huge corporations (which suffered major outages during the last years), but I wasn't and hence was able to continue delivering to my customers despite most global businesses not being able to.
