Nextcloud alternatives

I was in the same boat, hating Nextcloud for its poor performance, but then I moved it to an SSD and now it is really fast, well, fast enough to be acceptable.

Don't forget things like integration with collabra (spelling) and so on. There are a lot of little touches that make Nextcloud a pretty nice environment.

Like most, I started out looking at Nextcloud, but ultimately I ended up not liking it, preferring discrete solutions to Nextcloud's all-in-one approach.

I went with Filebrowser for my fileshare app and microbin for pastebin functionality. I'm also looking into adding Syncthing to the mix for syncing files between computers.

Some detail and caveats:

Filebrowser:

Has a really good user permission implementation, complete with regex-based filtering on view permissions so you can set up users to have both shared access to certain folders and give them their own private storage space that other users can't access. It's accessed via web UI so there's some occasional UX awkwardness, but it's fully functional (including drag and drop uploads and batch downloading). It also supports share links configurable to expire.

The biggest downside is it has no OIDC implementation and one doesn't appear to be on the roadmap. The reasoning for this is that it has auth header support, which identity providers like Authentik should be able to use to provide SSO functionality. But that authentication mode is difficult to enable in a docker environment for some reason.

Microbin:

One of a thousand pastebin apps available. I chose it because I like the way it can format share links as url.domain/animal-animal-animal (e.g. paste.mydomain/giraffe-raccoon-flamingo). You can also set it up as a link shortener; give links via QR code; set up multiple levels of privacy, expiration, and encryption options for users to select on their pastes; specify how long a paste can persist on the server before it is burned or deleted; and you can choose whether to force users to log in before being able to upload a paste.

The downsides to these features is that some of them are difficult to configure because of various dependencies (the URL shortener in particular is tricky depending on how you have your reverse proxy set up). Also, as with any pastebin app, the utility decreases with the amount of security you enable. If you just want to be able to send pastes to others, you can easily enable the most secure options (like requiring auth to upload a file). But things become more problematic if you want to provide it as a place for others to upload things to you. As far as I know, it is fairly safe and doesn't automatically access any uploads, but there's always a potential for exploits. For what it's worth, I haven't seen any spurious uploads when I've had it up, but I do only spin it up when I need it or know someone needs to send something to me.

Comment deleted by user

Just search for "nextcloud" on this sub and all you will see if people wanting to move away from nextcloud, which says a lot. It is a great all-in-1 solutions. It takes some time and effort to optimize it. It is a painful process if I am honest. And there are still issues from time to time.

I use nextcloud for auto photo uploads from phone, calendar, tasks, contacts and file syncing.

But over the past 3-4 years of using nextcloud, there has always been some issues, and they happen at the worst possible time. Many times, files just would not load on phone apps. Things getting out of sync, offline file feature is a joke.

So then about 7 or 8 months ago I decided to try syncthing - it is great for distributed file syncing. Mostly it just works and it is fast.

But it only does one thing and it does it well. Nextcloud is a jack of all trades, but master of none. Now I am thinking about moving slowly away from nextcloud too.

I am in the same boat as you. I'm going to give it one more shot, but from what I can tell is unless I can get all the collabra and onlyoffice integrations working smoothly it's bloated and I don't like it for most things.

I went with a basic webdav and obsidian for notes. Photos I do a combo of Immich and PhotoPrism. I mount my Immich camera roll as a folder in originals and have a cron on the container which reindexes occasionally.

There are too many features I get from other apps to make the NextCloud ones sensible.

Like you main thing I haven't been able to the find is file sharing.

In my case I opted to set up a CF Tunnel and WARP my phone. So my LAN stays my LAN wherever I am which has lowered the need for a lot of the file sharing features.

There is filestash and pingvin, both are pretty limited but for basic storage and sharing they work. To just get the file share aspects of nextcloud there's owncloud but since it's the mother of nextcloud I find it to be touchy and glitchy.

Like you I found seafile underwhelming, particularly since I do not want to sync most of the time.

I find nextcloud tries to do too much so on things like photos and notes it doesn't do enough, and relies so much on it being the way, doesn't allow for great integration of other methods and services. I can edit and view my notes in NC but not as notes for instance, I tried making my NC notes folder and obsidian note folder using NCs dav and NC just made it look like a mess on their side. I feel you, I really do.

I like next cloud but added, postgres, redis, minio and a few other things and goes like a rocket, I unppinned the releases so I get automatic updates too and so far so good although it'll probbaly bite me at some point