this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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107
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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[–] SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

Nextcloud's biggest issue is performance, and PHP, while not a problem per se, doesn't help. PHP is not designed for huge applications that need to have processes running in the background; it only runs when a request is made then stops the process, therefore it needs to load itself from scratch on every single page load.

This is because PHP uses something called CGI; the webserver (usually nginx or Apache) calls an external PHP binary to generate a page. With Go (or pretty much any other language), the app is its own server and can keep data in memory and do stuff even when no request is coming.

[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a bunch of technical debt passed off as features, too. Like, Nextcloud runs background tasks as a cron job which is something I've never seen with other hosted services. It's probably a holdover from before containerised applications were ubiquitous but honestly it comes off as jank.

Also, I wonder if there would be an argument for a Nextcloud fork that doubled down on PHP by utilising something like Laravel to put all the rendering on the server side. Right now it uses VueJS which is fine, but PHP is really best suited for server side rendering that you just can't leverage when using a front end framework in JavaScript.

[–] yoshman@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Like, Nextcloud runs background tasks as a cron job which is something I've never seen with other hosted services.

Drupal also uses crons to run repeated tasks. By default, Drupal cron cleans out stale database records for a few tables and breaks old caches. It can be extended by the developer, though.

It's probably a holdover from before containerised applications were ubiquitous but honestly it comes off as jank.

PHP is pre-container and pre-virtualization, so I guess you can think of it as a hack way of getting garbage collection. To be honest, the cron's translate pretty well to k8s cronjobs. You just use the same image as the app and override the command with the cronjob command.

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[–] superkret@feddit.org 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have no experience with Opencloud, but Nextcloud is borderline unmaintainable in my opinion. I welcome any new player in this space.

[–] themadcodger@kbin.earth 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, I love NC but boy is it a pain. If there were a similar but less bulky, less clunky option that wasn't a pain to maintain, I'd be all over that.

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[–] Clearwater@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Nextcloud is more featureful (more apps like notes and hardware 2fa support). That is currently holding me to NC.

OpenCloud (fork of OCIS not original OC) is very similar when it comes to core functionality, but is missing those few apps I do not want to let go of.

Also note that nextcloud stores files in a very natural manner, where your file names and directories are stored the exact same on disk as on the interface. Opencloud does not do that. This is particularly handy if one day the app just explodes and refuses to run. With NC, you can just copy the files off the disk. Not so easy with OC.

[–] HandwavyHeisenberg@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes OCIS (owncloud infinity scale, a complete rewrite of the owncloud project) has a convoluted file structure and I guess OpenCloud has the same way of storing files.

This is the main drawback I see as well, but it isn't a deal breaker for me. The way they handle the files allows OCIS and friends to work without a DB, in a stateless way I guess? This means that the entire setup is fully deterministically defined from a single file. This makes rollback very easy. So my rationale is that the files remain accessible even if a particular version decides to implode.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You can enable the POSIX driver on OCIS and get a more traditional filesystem layout. It still retains the "everything is in the filesystem" model as well.

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

You can enable the POSIX driver on OCIS and get a more traditional filesystem layout.

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[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What are the apps that you would miss? I basically only use my NC as a Google drive and docs replacement, so all it has to do is store docx files and let me edit them on desktop or mobile without being glitchy and I've really wanted to consider OCIS or similar.

That second requirement for me seems hard because of how complex office suites are, but NC is driving me to my wit's end with how slow and error prone it is, and how glitchy the NC office UI is (like glitches when selecting text or randomly scrolling you to the beginning).

[–] jrgd@lemm.ee 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ocis/OpenCloud can integrate with Collabora, OnlyOffice but don't currently have things like CalDAV, CardDAV, E2EE, Forms, Kanban boards, or other extensible features installable as plugins in Nextcloud.

If you desire a snappy and responsive cloud storage experience and don't particularly need those things integrated into your cloud storage service, then Ocis or OpenCloud might be something to look into.

[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Ah I see, I guess at least that would help with the main UI, but I'm already using collabora through the collabora code server in next cloud so it sounds like I'll probably have the same document editing experience with OCIS/opencloud. I used to use onlyoffice but after I tried out their mobile app, it started blocking me from editing documents using the next cloud app (which seemed to use the only office web UI) so I was forced to switch unless I started paying for onlyoffice.

[–] Clearwater@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

While I do not make heavy use of these two, I like having my contacts and calendar synced and accessible on both my PCs and phone.

I actually use the notes app, and have a yubikey. For notes, I could just use the regular markdown editor, but I like way the app lays everything out. For the yubikey, NC by default uses yubikeys for passwordless login. I use an app which uses them for 2FA instead. I also use apps which allow me to view hashes and metadata from the files tab.

All that makes me not want to switch yet. We'll get there eventually since none of the features I want are ultra complex or super uncommon.

OCIS, last I tested it (a while ago), also lacked the ability to right click files, requiring you to select it with the checkbox and then select the operation at the top of the screen. I sure hope that they've added that feature by now.

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 week ago (4 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 4 points 1 week 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 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

  • 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

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

adds to its security and ease of handling

PHP... security?

Any security you get from running as a separate process/thread is undermined by sloppy language semantics and standard library. The built-in "mysql_" library was atrocious and stayed in the standard library for years (removed in 7.0, ~10 years after the previous release). Errors at least used to be really inconsistently communicated (sometimes need to call another function to check error status, sometimes returns 0 or - 1, sometimes raises exceptions). Types are pretty loose and subtly change type (e.g. when an int overflows, it becomes a float?). Variables spring into existence when you use them, so no warning about typos, shadowing, etc.

The language wasn't really designed, it evolved from a simple templating engine to a full fledged language, and it cleaned up a little along the way. But a lot of the old cruft still remains.

super fast and easy to setup and get going

Yeah, that was always the goal. All you need is a webserver and a directory of scripts and you're golden.

But lowering the barrier to entry comes with costs. It encourages people to just copy and paste crap until it works, I know because that's exactly what I did when I first used PHP (JS w/ jQuery is the same way). This encourages a "just get it working" mindset instead of actually understanding what's going on.

You can certainly write good PHP code, my point is that it actively encourages cludgy code, which means security holes, and the best example is the language and standard library themselves.

Web sockets work just fine

Do they? I assume they hog a whole process/thread for themselves instead of being efficiently managed in something with proper async tooling, so it sounds like it would scale horribly. What happens if you have a million open websockets?

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?

Yes. I would be very surprised if Go or Rust yield even a fraction of the vulnerabilities as PHP. Even if we expand the scope a bit to a full-fledged web server framework. And that's with all the server bits, while PHP only worries about its standard library.

I've used each of those languages. I've built sites in PHP, Go, and Rust, as well as Python and JavaScript (nodejs). PHP is by far the jankiest, and that's including all the footguns w/ Go's concurrency model.

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

@sugar_in_your_tea @phoenixz Hi there! If you wouldn't mind indulging grampa for a minute - I'm a former php4 maintainer for Debian with a story.

One time we found a bug that caused the php interpreter to crash, based on the input passed to a function. We decided it was a security issue, but even that was kind of besides the point. We reported it upstream to the php folks. They (Rasmus!) told us it was not a high priority issue, because apache would simply restart when it crashes - no big deal

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

🤦‍♂️

Oh man, that's exactly the cultural thing I'm talking about. Thanks!

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[–] Lem453@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 1 week ago (3 children)

OoenCloud is a fork of this.

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[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week 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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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week 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 1 week ago (1 children)

PHP junk

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

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week 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 0 points 6 days 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.

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[–] ApplyingAutomation@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 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 1 week 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.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Looks okay to me. Not sure how important the last two are to be honest, but I included them for completeness

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/web/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/web-extensions/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/desktop/blob/main/COPYING

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/reva/blob/main/LICENSE

https://github.com/opencloud-eu/rclone/blob/master/COPYING

The marketing statements on the website say the right things too, but they are secondary to the above, obviously:

Openness

OpenCloud is and remains open source software. This means that you can download and use the source code free of charge and without obligation. We welcome and encourage any kind of participation in the work on OpenCloud in the spirit of open source collaboration.

OpenCloud GmbH also offers paid builds of OpenCloud for use in environments where support, professional services and other services are required.

Who are we?

OpenCloud GmbH is a young company founded under the umbrella of the Heinlein Group and employs a team of developers who are familiar with the project code.

The combination of the Heinlein Group's many years of experience in the open source business and the unwavering enthusiasm of the developers, most of whom have many years of open source experience, provides the perfect foundation for an active project. And we warmly invite everyone to join us!

The foundation

The basis of the project is a fork of a widely used open source project whose components are co-developed by developers from the science organization CERN and other active participants. OpenCloud is now being continuously developed independently by the OpenCloud community and published under the Apache 2.0 and AGPL-3.0 licenses.

In the spirit of reusability of code under free licenses, we are grateful for the strong foundation on which we are building.

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[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 week 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!

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[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week 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 1 week 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.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week 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 1 week 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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[–] idriss@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week 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 1 week 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.

[–] dont@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week 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.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

i keep having issues and bugs on nextcloud. maybe i should try opencloud

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week 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.

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