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ONLYOFFICE Workspace vs Nextcloud + Office
Cloud Storage
Hi! I have some Nextcloud experience, but looking at ONLYOFFICE which might be better choice. For small, 3-5 people agency, what is best solution in your opinion? Sharing some pros and cons below is super helpful!
Like many, we looking for file sharing, chat/video conferencing (meetings and chat rooms), document editing, mail/calendar and basic task management. I do want a nice desktop client, and mobile clients, for files but especially for chat / video calls.
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Nextcloud + Office
ONLYOFFICE
They're about even
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I'd say Onlyoffice integrated into Nextcloud would be perfect. You can have the best of both!
Onlyoffice != Onlyoffice Worksapce
Fantastic feedback, thank you all! I'll stick with Nextcloud + Office then ;-)
Tried the online OO workspace, it does lack some features, so that matches. I don't like the limitations on their mobile apps unless you pay... that's not very open source. And reading up on it, they don't really seem to do 'open source' the way most community would like to see it. No pull requests are accepted and such...
Nextcloud sounds like it more closely fits your requirements out of the box. I think Onlyoffice Workspace has chat, but I don't think it has voice/video. Nextcloud comes with a kanban style "Deck" app for project/task management whereas I don't think Onlyoffice Workspace has an equivalent.
Also, the Onlyoffice document editor and document server can be integrated into Nextcloud, so you get some of that functionality. (note, I would set up the document server separately. the one that ships with Nextcloud is super biggy).
Many people say Nextcloud is slow, but I've never experienced this slowness. If you install it on hardware that can handle the base install plus whatever apps you add, then I've always thought it was pretty snappy.
However, I will say that Nextcloud can be extremely fiddly to install and maintain, depending on your chosen platform and install method.
Thanks. Do you have a tip for what install method to use? I've already tried the docker aio, which seems very easy to install and, from what I see, basically maintains itself. I don't know how it is in the long term, though.
PS flair-wise, cloud storage, calendar/contact and audio/video/text chat and project management would all have to be there, maybe there's a all-in-one word for that...
I use Nextcloud really only for files. I have all the other built-in apps turned off. They just aren't as good as other stand-alone alternatives. I miss the integration, but the integration alone isn't good enough to be worth the other limitations.
For document editing, I use LibreOffice with my Nextcloud instance as a WebDAV file location. I do use the Collabora plugin provided with Nextcloud. It's better than I expected it to be, but doing things via the web is not my first choice.
For chat, there's Zulip. For Meetings, Jitsi. For tasks and project management, there's loads; I'm playing with OpenProject. For mail and calendar, I use Mail.app and Calendar.app on my Mac, connected to a Mailcow server with Sogo. For single sign-on tying all this together, I have Authentik.
Complex Nextcloud installs are a lot of work to maintain. For my time and money, I'd just as soon get better tools.
Fair enough, but I'm really not looking to maintain like 5 tools... One, using the All-in-one docker container, is enough ;-)
And honestly, having tried a few tools, Talk seems to do everything Zulip and Jitsi do? And more, at least if you want to share documents in a chat room, or keep notes during a Jitsi call...
For a small agency, ONLYOFFICE's deep integration with Nextcloud could give you the best of both worlds: solid file sharing with robust document editing. One tip: when rolling out either platform, creating quick how-to videos can be a game-changer for onboarding. I use Guidde for that, and it makes the process seamless.
Thanks. Thats interesting tip. About integration, i see lot of complaints about OO losing sometimes data when used in Nextcloud. Did you experience? And, if you have experience with both, is Nextcloud Office not deeper integrated than OO?