Nextcloud

Nextcloud GmbH is based in Stuttgart and was founded in 2016 by Frank Karlitschek, who forked the project from ownCloud after leaving it. The company builds Nextcloud Hub — file sync and sharing, plus Talk for chat and calls, Groupware for mail and calendar, and Office through Collabora or ONLYOFFICE — and releases all of it under the AGPL.

Its business model is unusual and worth knowing before you compare prices: Nextcloud GmbH sells support subscriptions, not hosting. You either run the server yourself or buy a managed instance from a certified provider, which means there is no first-party plan to put next to a Dropbox or Google Drive subscription.

The company is privately held and German-owned, with Karlitschek as managing director. Its most consequential customer is the German public sector — Nextcloud is the file and collaboration layer of openDesk, the sovereign workplace suite commissioned by ZenDiS, and it is deployed across federal and state administrations.