Is Nextcloud enterprise software?

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I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

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I’ve been privately using Nextcloud for years. It’s (mostly) fine to sync photos from my phone to my homeserver and store my contacts. On my instance I am alone and I own like 250 files, mainly PDF that I have to keep but never touch. Nextcloud is the perfect system for that. I have plenty of friends who run Nextcloud for family and friends where people store their photos and occasionally a movie.

But more than that? It is hard for me to believe, that anyone is using Nextcloud for work.

I have to admit. I fell for it. When I started my new job two years ago, I discovered a 500 GB SMB Share running on some SuSE with north of 4.000 days of uptime. When the RAID controller finally failed and the OS went into read-only, the question arose, where to move the files to. It is a mix of papertrail we have to keep for legal reasons, bookkeeping, employee records and a lot of product documentation and certification stuff.

I spun up a Nextcloud, moved all the files there via the horrifying php-webdav-adapter. All Files belonged to the importer account, i set up groups for the different rootlevel folders and shared the folders with the groups. We have like 11 employees and they use the Nextcloud client in Windows with vfs enabled.

First quirk I stumbled upon is the sharing feature. If I have a folder “CustomerA” and a folder “CustomerB” and both contain folders named “Drafts”. And I want to share those folders with a Group, they don’t inherit the folder structure. So for a user it looks like they have to folders named “Draft” in their root folder. What?! On the other hand I can not just share “CustomerA” with them, because Nextcloud does not allow me to let them see “Draft” but not “Finances”.

This basic flat-hierarchy sharing might work for Bob sharing his holiday photos with Alice, but how can any company seriously manage access like that? Am I missing something?

The next problems arose days after the move. Our bookeeping software has an automated import of PDF from a given folder. It moves the PDF, indexes it, renames it, and moves it again. Nextcloud can’t keep up with that. Regularly it deletes files from the server, instead of moving them to the new location. I can restore them from the Trash Bin manually, but then they have the old filename and the bookkeeping software gets all confused.

And it gets totally downhill from here. Moving files between shared folders. I moved some sub-folders from one shared folder to another (in the web-interface, to circumvent sync related problems). When my colleagues came to work next morning and started their clients, they randomly started deleting the files, instead of moving them to the new structure.

The github issue tracker of the desktop app has nearly 100 open issues for the searchterm “deleted”. People experience deleted files in all kind of moving and renaming scenarios, even in single-user instances. I am not going to report my bugs and redact logfiles and stuff, when the same stuff gets reported for years and issues just staying open. (* I will much rather spend my time venting in a forum, oops.)

Other things seem minor, but … why does Nextcloud not have fulltext search? I installed the elasticsearch app, but it silently failed. Never even told me, it needed the fulltextsearch core app to even be activated. I could have gotten this from the extensive manual, of course. I am just kidding you. The “manual” of the elasticsearch app is this github wiki [1]. It has some wget to get some kind of servlet, but I already run my own elastic instance. Not sure if I still need the servlet, but the app does not work with the current elastic version anyway.

Was I tricked by some shiny presentation videos with background music and some buzzwords around digital sovereignty? Is this more of a hobbyists project for people running it on their pi? I don’t have anything against that. I love opensource and I love hacking into half-backed projects and make them “just work”. But either the Nextcloud marketing or I am off about what this is …

Would be interested to hear, if someone is using this in business context other than “sharing five files with a customer”. My mind is very open to be changed. I am really not in the mood to move fileservers again. :sweat_smile:

[1] Home ¡ nextcloud/fulltextsearch_elasticsearch Wiki ¡ GitHub

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I don’t have any firsthand experience managing software like Nextcloud on an enterprise scale. However, I worked at a large company where SMB shares were migrated to on-premises SharePoint. The migration took roughly two years to complete across all departments, and performance issues and file synchronization problems were common during that time. Microsoft’s response to these issues was usually to add more hardware resources. :wink:

Of course, that doesn’t help with your particular issues, but it may help put things in the proper perspective.

Nextcloud can definitely be operated on a very large scale, just like SharePoint. However, once you reach a certain size, it’s no longer something you can set up on Monday and have ready for production on Tuesday. Like other enterprise-grade on-premises solutions, it requires thorough planning, testing, and probably consulting, too, if you don’t have a team of specialists in-house.

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Nextcloud has hundreds of customers and runs on incredibly large instances with millions of users. So yes, it is enterprise software.

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You should definitely have a look at the Team Folders app :slight_smile: With this app you get more control over permissions for groups of users.

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For the flat structure issue:
add ‘share_folder’ => ‘/whateversharenameyoucare’, to your config.php file.
All shared folders will be available in there, and keep file-folder structure.

Nextcloud do enforce enheritance. If you shares a folder with folders inside, then also those folders will be accessible to the users you have shared them with.

For full text search: There are several apps for this, but it is not available out of the box. The reason for that is excactly, enterprise customers. It make no sense to enforce a build-in resource hungry engine for full text search, considering Nextcloud is used by such a diverse range of consumers and bussinesses. As you said, you had 250 files (PDF files even), whereas other Nextcloud installations serves millions of files. Here we need flexibility. This is why there are several available apps for providing full text search. The caveat is that you need the elastic search engine to use the elastic search full text ofc. I cannot figure out how any build-in full text search engine would ever be a success, as it needs to be both auto-scaleable, customizable for adding modules to understand any kind of file type, tweakable for performance and still not eat basically all resources of the Nextcloud app AND database, for indexing. I cannot even imagine what hardware requirements would look like, for Nextcloud to be on the safe side. So no. There is no full text search out of the box, but there is support for adding them. Even as easy as apps, but it requires that you choose which you like, and setup your own indexing service alongside Nextcloud.

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Nextcloud has hundreds of customers and runs on incredibly large instances with millions of users. So yes, it is enterprise software. The says however not much about the quality of the software. Sharepoint, OneDrive, Windows, Teams, is all enterprise software. Does it work well?

It is hard for me to believe that people use Windows for work, or even worse, put critical infrastructure on Windows (looking at you Delta). Still happens all over the world :grinning_face:

Your issues sound like a setup issue, but we would have to look at them at a case by case basis.

But yeah, Nextcloud is a diamond with some rough edges. One of the reasons IMHO is that customers no longer expect just a Dropbox replacement. Instead it should be a Teams replacement, a Google Photos replacement, in short, a jack of all trades. Which makes any software product bloated and flawed and bug riddled. But people seem to want an all in one solution and are willing to forgive these flaws. That is why half of the world is using Teams.

If you just want a rock solid file share, plain old SMB is probably the better option :wink:

The main problem is this; you need people to get behind the migration to Nextcloud. Otherwise every single little flaw (that would have been ignored in the old solution) will be used against you. If you work against the employees, you will stand no chance. If your team is full behind the decision to make the switch to Nextcloud, it can work out.

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I second this. Apart from hosting multiple Nextcloud instances for the family, we use 2 instances at work and I have a customer who uses a large instance. For the permission thing they also suffered from the limitations and used Team folders.

However, regarding confusion and loss of data, I already experienced that in former places in Sharepoint. Neither Outlook works well - you can have loss of emails there either.

Unfortunately we live in strange times. You can have AI and on the other hand very basics are not working in a satisfying way. - And this is not just my opinion, I hear this from several directions and doesn’t either only apply to IT, but don’t want to get philosophical here.

I did not experience the particular problems mentioned here, but others, e.g. photos not synced from the mobile app, but there was a long discussion on that here on the forum (being not a Nextcloud problem).

I am really not completely satisfied with Nextcloud, but I feel way better than with other cloud services. Big tech companies are not a garantee that it works fine and that you get helped in case of data loss.

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Well, but then at least you can blame them. :wink:

But we also need to be careful not to compare apples and oranges. When people talk about “big tech” and "cloud” today, especially in the context of file sharing and groupware, many of them actually mean SaaS, i.e. a service that is 100% provided and operated by companies like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, or others. That’s something completely different from self-hosting, regardless whether you’re using proprietary software or open-source software like Nextcloud.

With modern SaaS offerings, you can generally say that the services themselves mostly “just work.”

With on-premises setups, however, you are responsible for the entire infrastructure and backend stack yourself. It starts with networking and server hardware, continues with services like web servers, load balancers, databases, PHP, and so on, and only then do you get to the actual application, which of course can also have its own challenges.

Managing all of this properly, planning, scaling, configuring, maintaining it, is not a trivial task. And it becomes significantly more complex the larger the company is. Just because you successfully run a Nextcloud instance at home on your NAS does not mean you can transfer that knowlege 1:1 to a company with several hundred or even thousands of employees. :wink:

By the way, on-premises enterprise solutions, including Microsoft and other proprietary solutions, were never “easy” to run and manage, which is one of the reasons SaaS became popular in the first place. :wink:

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SMB server seem to have worked quite decently, they didn’t share how much expertise this required.

Regarding Nextcloud, you can set it up quite easily for a few users. And even here the company with 11 employees and around 500 GB has trouble with a basic setup. One small configuration error can degrade the overall performance significantly. It is hard to say if this is the case here, but regarding the numbers alone, you’d expect a better performance.

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Sure. But SMB servers are hardly comparable with a software like Nextcloud. SharePoint would be a more accurate comparison if we’re staying in the enterprise space, which is what OP asked about. :wink:

Okay, but 11 employees does not constitute an enterprise. There used to be products like Microsoft Small Business Server for small businesses. SUSE was also quite popular because you could configure server services via a GUI like on Windows. :wink:

Today, though, there’s Nextcloud AIO. :slight_smile:

AIO includes full-text search, Office, Talk etc. Install the Team Folders app, and everything OP wants should work more or less out of the box and perform reasonably well for 11 users, unless it’s installed on a 20-year-old underpowered machine. :wink:

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Even better. I have a client with 10GBit/s fiber with excellent peering. Guess what upload speeds they get from Dropbox Enterprise? Around 100MBit/s. Yes 100MBit/s as in 13MB/s! :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Please do not compare apples with pears.

SMB is optimized for file transfer in local networks.

HTTP + WebDAV have completely different features and protocol-related overhead.

EDIT:
And it can offer a lot more functionality on local networks as SMB.

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The OP didn’t share more details about the setup. Just it didn’t work out like that in real life.

Sure, it is different. However, the OP got the impression that NC can do everything SMB can and even more. Or should we rather recommend, that if you want to work with data on a local network, it is better/easier to do this with SMB and just put a few things you want to share externally on Nextcloud.

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Yep, you’re right and I should probably have directed, at least the second part of my post diretcly to the OP.

@Peter_Pan Have you tried Nextcloud AIO? See the second part of my post here for an explanation.

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Just to add to the others, yes it can be “enterprise ready”. If you, and your hardware and your needs are ready for this, its a great thing. But its far more than just a way to ‘share files with my friends’ and its a true ‘cloud suite’. if all you care about is sharing files on your network, its way overkill.

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Hello Peter,

We also use Nextcloud, but often in a much larger context, and what you describe is not uncommon with Nextcloud. If you try to work with many users or external software, the limits of this software are quickly reached. We have learned this the hard way. For home users, it’s great, but in an enterprise setting, it’s not suitable because the software is not designed for that purpose. I’m surprised that this software has been around for years and, until recently, some basic things like uploading files larger than 5GB didn’t work. The list of things that don’t work is endless.

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sure. let’s confront magenta-cloud (german Telecom, t-online, etc) with that. They, alone, run nextcloud for MILLIONS of users.

I bet if NC was that piece of crap that you @MaxiW and @Peter_Pan claim it is I’m sure that deutsche Telekom was out of the game rather quickly. but in the contrary they run magenta-cloud for several years now.

So it’s always the same: ppl having wrong ideas and poor (sorry) knowledge and hence they run into problems. any sure enough it’s always the software they use (for free) that is the problem.
Well let me put it that way: most of the problems are siting in front of the screen (not mean as an insult nor personally).

So let’s just cool this rant down again for a bit.

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@JimmyKater So, at work, we don’t have the free NC version, we pay a lot of money for the enterprise version, and for us, it’s not a lack of knowledge, but rather the software on your end. You say that if we want to scale here, we should use Kubernetes, but then we have problems with everything, and then we get “Sorry, but we don’t offer support for Kubernetes.” When patching, more problems arise. Every time, all apps are deactivated. As a solution, build your own workaround like T -Online or Telekom does it is always a mystery to us, because when it comes to scaling, we are completely left in the lurch, and the fact that the nginx ingress controller is going out of support has also been known for a long time, and now they come up with the idea of looking for an alternative solution shortly before support ends, which is another thing. We always try to stick as closely as possible to your specifications, and in the end, they say that’s not our problem, even though we are enterprise support.

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@MaxiW it’s not “my” nextcloud nor “my” specifications. I’m just a volounteer to the forum with no connections to the company.

If you have paid support: great! use it.
Of course you can rant off here as well if it makes you feel better.

I can reassure you you have your point and have been heard.

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The thing is, here we talk about the community version without enterprise support. Most people have rather small setups, it would be interesting to know a bit more about setups on a larger scale. But unless people with such setups step up and share their experience, we don’t know.

Enterprise support is handled elsewhere. We don’t have detailed insight in that. We just know there are large setups with thousands of users, and we suppose with enterprise support they manage to get a decent performance.

Enterprise should normally help you to get the best performance possible. I don’t really know if you say

if you ask how to fix this, do they say that is not possible with Nextcloud? Or they are working on it?

How is it great for home users if you cannot upload files larger than 5 GB? What in the enterprise setting makes in unsuitable, what is perfectly fine for home users? Some backend-integration?