The Neighbours
Scope: what else could hold your files and calendars — the commercial clouds, the other self-hosted tools in and out of this series — and what each one trades against Nextcloud.
The commercial clouds
Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive sell the same shape without the server: sign up, sync, share. What they trade away is the point of this guide — the files live on someone else's computers, under someone else's terms, bill, and reading of the law. What they trade for it is real: backups you don't run, upgrades you don't schedule, and a support line. For a household that values its evenings over its custody, they are a respectable answer. The honest comparison is not "cloud bad" — it is "whose machine, whose rules, whose problem at midnight."
The self-hosted alternatives
| Neighbour | What it is | The trade |
|---|---|---|
| Syncthing | pure folder sync between your machines, no server | no web page, no accounts, no links — and nothing to administer; this series has a guide |
| Seafile | a sync-and-share server, leaner and faster-feeling | smaller community, files stored in its own block format — the data folder is not just files |
| Immich | the photo specialist of this series | does photos and video superbly; doesn't pretend to be a filing cabinet |
| A NAS's own suite (Synology Drive and kin) | the box you already own, offering the same shape | convenience now, the vendor's roadmap and lifespan later |
| ownCloud | Nextcloud's parent project, still maintained | the two share ancestry and differ in direction and licensing weather; read both projects' current state before choosing |
Two patterns in the table are worth more than the rows. First, the just-files test: Nextcloud and Syncthing keep your files as files on a disk you can read without them; the moment a tool stores your life in a private format, your exit gets expensive, and you should price that in on day one. Second, specialists beat suites at their specialty — Immich's photo handling is better than Nextcloud's, Syncthing's sync is more single-minded — while the suite wins on having one server, one account list, and one backup to run.
When Nextcloud is the wrong door
- Photos are all you keep → Immich, and visit its guide in this series.
- You only want folders kept in step, no web anything → Syncthing.
- Nobody in the house will ever run an upgrade → a commercial cloud, honestly chosen, beats a self-hosted server abandoned at version-minus-six.
- The files must be unreadable by the server itself → none of these; that's end-to-end encrypted storage, a different shelf of tools with its own costs in convenience.
Check: you can say, for the neighbour nearest your situation, what it does better than Nextcloud and what it trades away — and the phrase "just files" means something testable to you now. Chapter 14 turns the same honesty on Nextcloud itself.