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 :)

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    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.