I have Filecloud and Nextcloud in use and want to share how both work.
Desktop Client
The Desktop Clients do similar the same. There are pros and cons and hopefully the Nextcloud client will offer the pros from Filecloud (will submit feature requests).
If you have a lot of folders and don’t want to sync all of the main folders to you disk. Nextcloud with the checkboxes for select has the way better system.
The Nextcloud sync client is way faster. After startup the NC client sync 1,5 GB until the Filecloud client begin to start
Web interface
Nextcloud with his app architecture offers a lot of different apps. Which is ok, cause I don’t use the web interface in general. But
If you want to open an office file, NextCloud Office is way better than the viewer (no edit available) in Filecloud.
No music player, no Workflows, no image viewer
The web ui from FileCloud is faster
The admin console from FileCloud is great
Mobile
The NextCloud mobile app is really great.
You can view and edit there files.
Autoupload is something in NextCloud mobile app I don’t want to miss (which isn’t available at Filecloud)
All together you see that Nextcloud is geting mature and feature rich. Sure I miss there things. Some stuff is super flexible, but done for coders, not end user. I with Nextcloud as much manpower as possible, but the direction of the project is great.
The reason why we switch from NC to FC was, that our desktop client unckeck folders (bug). Most of the time, there was no data loss, cause you could check the folder again and have the data locally, but you have to sync again > 30 GB on data (from the Home Office).
import/export settings
No import/export feature of the settings.
So if something was unselected, the user see only it’s not there any more. The user have to “know” which folder was selected. Select them again and than the data sync start’s again.
FC desktop client
There is an import/export settings feature, so if you are ready with your “setup” you can export the settings and import them on another client, when something went wrong, …
As NC has great version controling. I would suggest to save the settings somewhere at the cloud and than you have also version control. But now there is no such import export feature.
When we start with NC at out company the biggest keep an eye on was to tell the users, that there is a difference between uncheck and delete an folder.
In general the users have fear that ALL there work was instant at the server and than at the other users. So if a user delete a folder, the folder wasn’t there asap. Sure there is a trash (compare to a network share), but in general there was some psychological issue.
At the NC mail client you have a 10 seconds delay when you send an e-mail. At the desktop client every mistake was within 2 seconds at the server.
FC vs NC behaviour
The filecloud is so slow with sync that you can click pause and check the data from the server.
If you delate a huge amount of files, the sync client ask if you really want to delete them.
NC mobile client also ask, the desktop client didn’t. Sure you don’t want to ask when there was 1 file deleted, but if you delete the project folder, an additional popup help user to feel comfortable
I want to use NC Workflow, to get mail/chat notification when specific files was added to a specific subfolder. This is possible, but for the setup you need regex (powerfull but only usable for coders) and the documentation is very poor.
At FileCloud you have an GUI for worfklows, where you can click and collect the rules.
At least some workflow templates and additional documentation would be nice which you can use and only have to edit e.g. the folder and filename. If I can help here, let me know.
We use OC and than NC, have an external IT company and were in general happy with NC. But we didn’t use the HUB in general and we see that the quality wasn’t that good as expacted. I see there big steps in the right direction recently.
I also have to say NC is free and open source. However a 4 month release circle didn’t fit our enterprise and also our IT company didn’t updated more than every 9 - 12 months. Which mean, yes we had unsupported releases in productive use and it’s our fault when maybe a bug between NC Server and Client happend.
I test now a managed NC from a big NC partner with NC enterprise. We will see if this is the better solution. However I think that NC make big steps forward and when you have different cloud’s in use, you see that NC is way ahead and get better and better.
I lost files at FileCloud and compare to NC only the admin can restore the file. So if you delete a file from a share, than the file isn’t in the owners trash and in your trash (cause you deleted it). In FileCloud a deleted file/folder is stored ONLY at the owners trash.
However the trash bin from FileCloud use the structure of the regular file system, so if you know where you deleted the file, you can easy navigate through the regular folder structure and see the file / folder at the trash bin. This is way better than have deleted files with no structure in your trash bin like in NC.
audit log
In addition there is an Audit log where you can see (from the last week) what happens with the file.
