Nextcloud Talk
Video Calling Germany
Self-hosted team chat and video calls integrated with Nextcloud. Alternative to Google Meet and Zoom Meetings.
Details
Nextcloud Talk is the chat and calling app inside Nextcloud Hub: persistent rooms, one-to-one and group video calls in the browser, screen sharing, recording, a lobby, breakout rooms, and public links that let guests join without an account. Because it runs on your own Nextcloud server, calls and messages never touch a third-party provider, and files from the Files app can be shared straight into a conversation.
The constraint that decides whether it will work for you is architectural. The default signalling is peer-to-peer mesh WebRTC, and Nextcloud’s own documentation notes that the optional High Performance Back-end already helps at three participants by halving required upload bandwidth, and matters more at four and above. Running larger calls therefore means deploying that back-end — a separate Docker service with its own STUN and TURN servers — rather than enabling a setting.
Nextcloud GmbH also sells no hosted plan, so there is no first-party subscription to weigh against Google Meet or Zoom. You self-host, or you buy from a certified provider.
About 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.
