Nextcloud

Nextcloud Hub is a self-hosted alternative to Google Workspace and Dropbox: file sync and share, calendar, contacts, mail, Talk video calls, Office document editing and a whiteboard, all on a server you control. Universities, public bodies and privacy-focused companies run it, as do home users. The free plan is the software itself, released under the AGPL with no user limit.

What the free plan gives you

• The complete Nextcloud Hub: Files, Talk, Groupware, Office and hundreds of community apps
• No limit on users, storage or devices beyond what your hardware provides
• Desktop clients for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus iOS and Android apps
• End-to-end encryption, sharing links, versioning and external storage connectors
• Community support through forums and documentation
• Free updates to every new major release

Storage costs are whatever your disk costs, so a small server can hold terabytes for less than one Dropbox seat.

Where the free plan stops

• No vendor support or SLA. If it breaks at 2am, the community forum is your help desk.
• Long-term maintenance branches, security hotfixes for older releases and enterprise integrations are part of the paid subscription.
• You need someone to install, back up and upgrade it.

Nextcloud Enterprise starts at EUR 71.29 per user per year on the Standard tier with a minimum of 100 users, rising to EUR 104.99 for Premium and EUR 204.75 for Ultimate, which adds the AI Assistant, Flow, Whiteboard and 24/7 support options. Smaller organisations are pointed to Nextcloud One, a managed service hosted in Germany, priced on request.

Who it suits

Self-hosted Nextcloud is a good fit for a home lab, a small team with a sysadmin, or any organisation that must keep files in its own jurisdiction. If nobody on the team can maintain a Linux server, the free edition will become a burden and a managed host is the better route.