As Nextcloud advanced with progresses making it competitive in fully integrated government and corporate workflows, OpenCloud is getting more and more attention.
The fact, that both are collaborative cloud plattforms, designed to be selfhosted and mainly developed in/around Berlin from FOSS-Community-Surroundings, makes one ask about the differences.
The main difference I see, is the software stack
- Nextcloud, as a fork of ownCloud, kept the PHP code base and is still mainly developing in PHP
- OpenCloud, also a fork of ownCloud, did a complete rewrite in Go
Until know, Nextcloud is far more feature complete (yes I know, people complain, they should fix more bugs instead of bringing new features) than OpenCloud, if we compair it with comercial cometitors like MS Teams.
I like Nextcloud!
I deploy it for various groups, teams, associations, when ever they need something where they want to have fileshare, calendar, contacts and tasks in one place. Almost every time, when I show them the functionality of Nextcloud Groups an the sharing-possibilities, people are thrilled about it, because they didn’t expect such a feature rich tool. Although I sometimes wish it would be more performant and easier to maintain, so non-tech-people could care for their hosting themselves.
Why OpenCloud?
Now, with OpenCloud, I am asking my self, why not just contribute to the existing colab-cloud project Nextcloud. Why do your own thing?
Questions
So here I expect the Go as a somewhat game-changer (?). As you may have noticed, that I am not a developer or programmer, so maybe there are obvious advantages of that.
- Will OpenCloud, at some point, outreach Nextclouds feature completeness and performance, thanks to a more modern approach with Go?
- Will Nextcloud with their huge php stack run into problems in the future, because they cant compete with more modern architectures?
- If you would have to deploy a selfhosted cloud environment for a ~500 people organization lasting long term: Would you stick to the goo old working php stack or see possible advantages in the future of the OpenCloud approach?
Thanks :)
PHP doesn’t have a built in web server because it doesn’t need one, makes development a whole lot easier as each page is it’s independent process. No worries about memory loss, state corruption, or other issues. IMHO it adds to its security and ease of handling
It’s super fast and easy to setup and get going
Web sockets work just fine, I use them daily on dozens of servers doing hundreds of requests / sec all day every day
They did an audit and found issues? Great, I applaud people searching and finding issues. Shall we do the same for Rust, go, or chuckle JavaScript?
You’re unfamiliar.with the language. <<< Yeah, that is the standard reason for hating PHP, it’s not <insert my personal favorite language>