Likelihood to Recommend FreeNAS is well suited for most storage serving scenarios, whether it be for an office file server, backup destinations, data replication across the internet, or as backend storage for virtual machines. It can serve various types of clients via a plethora of standard protocols and can easily integrate with existing infrastructure using LDAP authentication and so on. It's pretty simple to use (it helps to have at least a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) and almost maintenance-free. One scenario that springs to mind that it may not be appropriate for (yet) is as S3 storage. However, S3 functionality was added in a recent release and may have improved greatly since then. I'm sure it will eventually work very well for this.
Read full review For a SOHO business, this solution is ideal. You don't need to administrative overhead of other products like GSuite, and it saves licensing costs. The maintenance effort is minimal as long as you use their default applications. Migrations to newer versions can be done with a few commands and run automatically. If you're planning on using Nextcloud in large deployments with many users, you'll start to see higher costs on your resources and maintenance. There will be a point at which Gsuite becomes easier to manage.
Read full review Pros The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy. The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance. Read full review Remote collaboration platform with just the right tools. Ease of access from any device, anywhere. Solid templates for development teams to collaborate without distraction. Read full review Cons Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage. Most of the good and required features are not available in free version. Read full review Slow in comparison to other solutions May be complex for the start since there are lots of apps and features May be not focusing on core topics Read full review Support Rating There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.
Read full review I never needed support as everything always worked fine. The documentation on Nextcloud website is extensive and clear. The community is very active on the forum and should support you if you don't already find what you are looking for.
Read full review Alternatives Considered FreeNAS effectively uses all resources really well and it is highly recommended for in premises NAS. It has unlimited ROI as it is really free and open-source. The only payment we need to pay is when we need any support from those guys. FreeNAS helps us to effectively do our work with the legacy systems as it manages all the components really well. FreeNAS although rebranded to TrueNAS will still be there until our legacy systems run.
Read full review Nextcloud stacks up pretty well against
Mattermost and
ownCloud . I really appreciate the fact that Nextcloud seems to integrate with other products pretty seamlessly and allows for extensibility that our product team can extend and improve functionality without a tremendous ramp-up time. We once used
ownCloud in previous years, but they went the wrong way, and have found Nextcloud to be the right direction over time.
Read full review Return on Investment Low-Cost Network Attached Storage Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys Read full review It allowed us access to our files from any device over the internet. It helped manage and organize our file sharing with third parties. It provided a secure wrapper for accessing files. Joe Foran Director Of Information Technology and HIPAA Privacy Officer
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