I have installed Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi and use it for file syncing and to host CalDAV and CardDAV entries. The main driver for this was that I am working in a very heavily regulated industry where using Cloud services for business purposes is basically forbidden, ruling out a 3rd party Nextcloud provider as well as the usual suspects.
I am preparing a training for my fellow workers, of which the majority is non-technical. I am a tinkerer and I have an extensive IT background so setting up Nextcloud was a lot of fun for me, but nothing I could recommend to most people. I therefore had a look at Synology NAS appliances and found that they easily cover the same features, and then some, so this looks like a good solution for most people.
Would you agree with this statement, or are there basic (functional) differences between the 2 solutions that I am missing?
What confuses me is that I see posts of people installing Nextcloud on Synology. Whats the use of that specifically? The only reason I could imagine is that the Synology hardware is out of support and Nextcloud is a way to make the box more useful, but again I might be missing something.
Some people may think synology software is bloated and nextcloud is not or they’re just nextcloud fans.
Nextcloud is made for server OS but can work on desktops , so i think your correct for non technical people synology/qnap may be easier.
Nextcloud is still better product.
fyi nextcloud can be setup for a multiuser environment like sharepoint and you could be the admin and create group permissions etc…to control who can share what with who. That way you wouldn’t have your data scattered around a bunch different synology devices.
Yes that was my feeling also. I would advocate for a Nextcloud server as a company-wide solution backed up by the IT department, and Synology as a private/personal solution for the non-tech individual.
For a company, you have much more influence on what happens to data with Nextcloud. You don’t depend on specific hardware (you can upgrade or change it), the software does not expire, … and you should have the experts that should know how to set it up. The nice thing about the commercial NAS solution you buy the hardware and can easily set it up, with Nextcloud it is a bit more difficult (Nextcloud Pi should make it not too difficult in combination with a Raspberry Pi, but you need to buy it and an external drive).
For me it was a pretty simple reason to install Nextcloud on Synology NAS. If you compare the contacts app on both, you will “immediately” see that Synology app has only basic fields to synchronize with mobile systems or Outlook and Thunderbird. In modern systems a contact has three e-mail addresses, a private and work address and maybe a third, and so on. So there is plenty of more fields in Nextcloud 3rd party app for contacts and this is why I use Nextcloud on Synology. This combination is pretty good together with Android DAVDroid or native iOS synchronization possibilities.