this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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106
Nextcloud (PHP) vs OpenCloud (Go) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by dengtav@lemmy.ml to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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As Nextcloud advanced with progresses making it competitive in fully integrated government and corporate workflows, OpenCloud is getting more and more attention.

The fact, that both are collaborative cloud plattforms, designed to be selfhosted and mainly developed in/around Berlin from FOSS-Community-Surroundings, makes one ask about the differences.

The main difference I see, is the software stack

  • Nextcloud, as a fork of ownCloud, kept the PHP code base and is still mainly developing in PHP
  • OpenCloud, also a fork of ownCloud, did a complete rewrite in Go

Until know, Nextcloud is far more feature complete (yes I know, people complain, they should fix more bugs instead of bringing new features) than OpenCloud, if we compair it with comercial cometitors like MS Teams.

I like Nextcloud!

I deploy it for various groups, teams, associations, when ever they need something where they want to have fileshare, calendar, contacts and tasks in one place. Almost every time, when I show them the functionality of Nextcloud Groups an the sharing-possibilities, people are thrilled about it, because they didn't expect such a feature rich tool. Although I sometimes wish it would be more performant and easier to maintain, so non-tech-people could care for their hosting themselves.

Why OpenCloud?

Now, with OpenCloud, I am asking my self, why not just contribute to the existing colab-cloud project Nextcloud. Why do your own thing?

Questions

So here I expect the Go as a somewhat game-changer (?). As you may have noticed, that I am not a developer or programmer, so maybe there are obvious advantages of that.

  • Will OpenCloud, at some point, outreach Nextclouds feature completeness and performance, thanks to a more modern approach with Go?
  • Will Nextcloud with their huge php stack run into problems in the future, because they cant compete with more modern architectures?
  • If you would have to deploy a selfhosted cloud environment for a ~500 people organization lasting long term: Would you stick to the goo old working php stack or see possible advantages in the future of the OpenCloud approach?

Thanks :)

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 17 points 6 days ago (2 children)

So really your only reason for possibly not liking next cloud is that it's PHP, correct?

What is the problem with PHP? I keep asking it and until now every response has been near me worthy. "Don't like PHP because some function calls are not consistent.", "don't like PHP because 20 years ago it had Manu unsafe practices!", that sort of nonsense.

What is the problem with PHP, for you?

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm not OP, but here are my reasons:

  • needs a webserver to be configured properly, in addition to the application itself - most other projects handle the server itself, so I can simply reverse proxy to it
  • recent security audit found a variety of vulnerabilities - PHP has been known to have a lot of security vulnerabilities, and it's commonly targeted due to popularity and the prevalence of these vulnerabilities; using literally anything else reduces the likelihood that you'll be targeted by script kiddies
  • since it doesn't run an active server, things like WebSockets are wonky - AFAICT, Nextcloud solves this by using a separate Rust binary, which is weird
  • using the templating feature (i.e. the whole point of PHP) takes a lot of resources vs client-side rendering, so the main sell of PHP is architecturally suspect
  • I don't use it, so if I needed to fix a bug, it would be a lot of work; I'm a lot more familiar with other languages, like Go, Rust, and Python

There are a bunch of other reasons I strongly dislike PHP, but hopefully this is enough to show why I generally prefer to avoid it. In fact, Nextcloud is my only PHP-based app, and I'm testing out OCIS now (will probably try OpenCloud soon).

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 16 hours ago

  • PHP doesn't have a built in web server because it doesn't need one, makes development a whole lot easier as each page is it's independent process. No worries about memory loss, state corruption, or other issues. IMHO it adds to its security and ease of handling

  • It's super fast and easy to setup and get going

  • Web sockets work just fine, I use them daily on dozens of servers doing hundreds of requests / sec all day every day

  • They did an audit and found issues? Great, I applaud people searching and finding issues. Shall we do the same for Rust, go, or chuckle JavaScript?

  • You're unfamiliar.with the language. <<< Yeah, that is the standard reason for hating PHP, it's not

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

PHP apps always feel old.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

So does your comment, what's your point? Are you really trying to tell me that an app developed in PHP 15 years ago still feels old? Because doh.

Next cloud feels old to you?

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 13 hours ago

Nextcloud really does feel old.

[–] Lem453@lemmy.ca 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

This is what you're really looking for:

https://github.com/owncloud/ocis

Full rewrite in Go. Lots of features. Much better performance. More stable than nextcloud.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 days ago (3 children)

OoenCloud is a fork of this.

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[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Tried OCIS a while back and its way faster than NC syncing files, even the initial sync was so fast I didn't trust it was fully done (but it was).

That being said, OCIS is missing several key features I daily use: namely proper DAV support (contacts, calendar, todo, journal, etc) as well as integrations for stuff like SeedVault for mobile backups.

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[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

While I dont see OpenCloud replacing Nextcloud anytime soon, I always welcome new projects, especially like this to the open source community!

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

I don't think it's trying to. If you need the features Nextcloud provides, you should use Nextcloud. However, if your needs are a bit more modest and you mostly just need something that stores and retrieves files, then OpenCloud/ownCloud OCIS is probably the better bet. It's a lot faster, scales a lot better, and it's recent, so it doesn't have all he baggage Nextcloud does.

My use case is very simple, I just want to store, retrieve, and edit files. So I just need to figure out Collabora or OnlyOffice integration, which should be pretty similar to how Nextcloud does it. If I end up needing the other features NextCloud offers, I'll either switch (unlikely) or find projects that provide those features (e.g. things exist for calendar, weather, etc).

[–] ApplyingAutomation@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

It is unclear to me what the license of OpenCloud is. Are they open source? They reference a "trial license" on their site.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago

Server is Apache 2.0, and frontend is AGPL v3, which seems to be the same for ownCloud OCIS, which they seem to have forked from.

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[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Question for the OP or anyone who uses OpenCloud: How does it size up in an enterprise? NextCloud has known capacity for corporate use with SSO, a desktop app, integrations...but it has all the pitfalls of PHP (granted I run it with Nginx/FastCGI and a lot of resources). The thing is, anything not PHP can be run for less overhead in terms of actual cloud costs, so I see a benefit to OpenCloud. But the features have to be there. I know a desktop app is coming soon, and thats just one of many needs.

[–] dengtav@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 days ago

+1 that question, I've also never installed/used OpenCloud, simply because I didn't see the benefit of it until now.

Based on the comments given so far, I have some hope that over time, the Go-approach could give us a more resource saving, but feature full alternative to tangle with, so I will stay tuned :)

For now I will stick to Nextcloud, because it gives me all the features I need and the maintanance, at least for the couple-hundred-user-instances I maintain, is not that bad, as I often read around the web :) But I also can understand, that people wish to have less maintenance struggles and therefor try sth else, wich is good for me, so I can hope for more experience reports in the near future :p

[–] dont@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

Deployment of NC on kubernetes/docker (and maintenance thereof) is super scary. They copy config files around in dockerfile, e.g., it's a hell of a mess. (And not just docker: I have one instance running on an old-fashioned webhosting with only ftp access and I have to manually edit .ini and apache config after each update since they're being overwritten.) As the documentation of OCIS is growing and it gets more features, I might actually change even the larger instances, but for now I must consider it as not feature complete (since people have expectations from nextcloud that aren't met by ocis and its extensions). Moreover, I have more trust in the long term openness of nextcloud as opposed to owncloud, for historical reasons.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm not the biggest fan of Nextcloud but there currently isn't a lot of good alternatives that have the same features and polish.

The issue with Nextcloud is the PHP junk it comes with. Writing something in Go is much better and it is silly to me that Nextcloud puts code in docker volumes. If they could separate out the code and data they would be in a much better position.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

PHP junk

So serious question: what,.in your mind, is junk about PHP?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

It is not really a proper language. It is designed to run to generate HTML dynamically but uses outside of that are pushing it. It is also problematic that Nextcloud mixes code and data. It is also slower than compiled languages like C, Go or Rust.

I think Go is really good for web applications with lots of server back end code since it is fast and static while being memory safe and easy to read. The Go syntax is cleaner than PHP and less hard to maintain.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 16 hours ago

it's not really a proper language

Why, oh true Scotsman?

It's slower than compiled languages

Probably, but it requires a whole lot less work to get something done. One developer pays for 20 big ass servers, so if I have to spin up one or two extra servers over requiring way less developers, that is a no-brainer

The go syntax is cleaner than PHP

Go kinda looks/feels like JavaScript to me whereas PHP feels more like C. I find modern PHP syntax to be cleaner than go, but that is a personal opinion. Either way, maintainability has more to do with your developers and coding guidelines than with the language itself.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

I have a bunch of other reasons elsewhere in this thread, but I just wanted to back you up here. Go is a lot easier to deal with than PHP in many ways, and it has a lot of tools to track down issues, while also have a lot better performance. And I don't even like Go that much (used it for the better part of a decade, pretty much since 1.0), and I much prefer Rust. But Go is 100% a good option for this use-case, since it's mostly short-lived requests with relatively simple logic, so the various footguns I dislike about Go aren't particularly relevant (and are way nicer than the footguns in PHP).

PHP feels like it "evolved" with hacks on top of hacks, and it's sort of being cleaned up now. Go feels like it was "designed," with conscious choices being made from the outset, so everything feels a lot more consistent. That makes it easier to spot bogs, performance issues, etc. Go is just the better option here, and it's not close.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Why use OpenCloud instead of ownCloud Infinite Scale, which it was forked from? What's the value proposition?

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Supposedly the team left OwnCloud and forked it. So the value is that the OCIS team will be working on OpenCloud in the future.

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[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

NextCloud being so slow forced me to migrate to Seafile.

Seafile being less one-stop-shoppy made me not use it so much, but whenever I do it is always fast and responsive (unlike nextcloud, where 80% of the time I was looking at the loading indicator). Looking it up now though, it looks like it has a lot of new features I haven't yet tried so I'm probably gonna start using it more now.

Only downside with Seafile is it's deduplication (for me), because it stops me from easily accessing files directly (always gotta use a client). Likely a benefit for most though and I do rarely need to access a file directly on disk, just when I do, it'd be an easy shortcut for whatever I'm doing.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Check out the POSIX driver in OCIS/OpenCloud. It should keep the responsiveness of Seafile, while having a sane disk format.

Or you can try out the Seafile FUSE layer.

I'm in a similar boat, and I've been testing out Seafile and ownCloud OCIS, and I think I prefer OCIS. I'll probably switch to OpenCloud though, since it seems a lot of the OCIS devs went there due to issues w/ management.

Some things I didn't like about Seafile:

  • complicated to set up - I wanted to throw it in a container, and that made it a lot more complex
  • weird codebase - a lot of it's in C, and some is in Go - not sure if they're switching to Go eventually, or if it's a one-off thing
  • they only support MariaDB/MySQL, and I really want to avoid that - OCIS lets me just use the filesystem, which is really nice

But hey, if it works, it works, so don't mess w/ it.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

Thanks for your reply, I will definitely keep that in mind if Seafile fails to meet any critera moving on, but yeah your last point is also right, it would probably be a big pain to migrate out at this point with all my data for multiple users here.

It seems a lot has been modernising recently, I didn't know they were also using Go, but hopefully they continue with it for new code.

[–] idriss@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

NextCloud is straight up unusable to me no matter how much resources I was throwing at it.

OpenCloud seems promising. I would definitely like to play with it a little. I would also like to check check how can I help with a thing or two there.

This seems like a similar story with matrix Synapse vs Dendrite.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

NextCloud is straight up unusable to me no matter how much resources I was throwing at it.

Sounds like you don't have Redis caching properly configured.

That said, OCIS is a lot faster, and OpenCloud being forked from OCIS should do the same.

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