On June 2, 2016, Frank Karlitschek, founder of ownCloud, left the ownCloud project together with most of the developers. In the same year, the newly formed team released its own cloud solution, which was to focus more on collaboration, under the name Nextcloud. To this end, the software has been continuously expanded over the past few years - today, the platform contains over 200 different apps that enable features such as real-time communication, task management, document editing and mail management directly in the Nextcloud environment. Apart from the precarious financial situation, disagreements about licensing also played a decisive role in the separation. This point of contention becomes clear in the main distinguishing feature of both open source clouds. While ownCloud users can now use some features exclusively in the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition, all Nextcloud components are available under the free AGPLv3 license.
In what respects the two cloud applications differ and what features distinguish them in general is what we will look at below. First, we look at ownCloud and Nextcloud individually, then we highlight the respective pros and cons in a direct comparison of ownCloud vs Nextcloud.