Nextcloud

Nextcloud is the part of our stack that non-technical colleagues use every day: the shared drive, the calendar, the address book, the document two people are editing, and the video call.

Why we still choose it

Most of an organisation’s sensitive data sits in the shared drive, more than in the database the engineers worry about: personnel files, board packs, contracts. When a procurement questionnaire or a works council asks where that material lives, “a disk in Stockholm, at a company incorporated in Sweden” is a much shorter answer than a transfer-impact assessment.

It also replaces four subscriptions with one system, and storage costs what storage costs instead of whatever the per-user tier charges.

How we run it

We run it on NixOS with PostgreSQL and Redis. We never use SQLite, which is the most common cause of “Nextcloud is slow”. File blobs go to S3-compatible object storage at a European provider, so storage can grow without resizing disks. Collabora or OnlyOffice runs alongside it for co-editing inside the perimeter, with SSO against your directory, enforced 2FA and per-device revocation.

Where it falls short

It is not Google Workspace. Co-editing works well but is less polished, and full-text search across a very large corpus is adequate rather than excellent. On hardware that matches the user count it is perfectly pleasant to use. Put it on the cheapest possible VPS to save forty euro a month and it will make you unpopular.