Nextcloud vs. ownCloud vs. Zoom Phone

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.

I'd easily recommend ownCloud to small businesses or teams within organizations. I've not used ownCloud in large deployments, so I'd hesitate before suggesting it in a situation where more than 10 users need support. That said, ownCloud is easy to set up and multiple instances could be used to service a large user base.

Incentivized

I think it works well for offices that have multiple locations. Being able to give each person and office their own extension makes it easier for colleagues to connect with each other, plus it's a costs savings for each of the offices

Incentivized

• Remote collaboration platform with just the right tools.
• Ease of access from any device, anywhere.
• Solid templates for development teams to collaborate without distraction.

Incentivized

• Attention and dedication to making the product a world class product with continual product updates.
• Ease of use from an administration standpoint, and a very Clear UI.
• The price -- you can't beat free!
• Mobile applications are great.
• Integration with public S3 cloud providers like AWS S3 and Wasabi S3.
• 2FA authentication is supported and works great!
• Marketplace Add-Ons: I love this! For example, I can install an add-on that natively opens raw images. I am a photographer as well, and being able to quickly view the CR2 Raw Files direct from the camera is fantastic! This was made possible by a marketplace add-in.
• Embedded Media Players: Photos, Music, and Video files can be viewed and played right in the browser window.
• Sync application to keep local files on a computer updated with the files on the server.
• Access control and permissions -- shareable links!

Incentivized

• Having our Phone system all in onc place. Call, Text, Voicemail. with live transcript
• Zoom Meeting AI companion - taking notes, creating action items, and summarizing the meetings then email immediately afterwards
• Scheduler - being able to send links to team members or vendors to book a time that works best for them that is linked and synced to my calendar.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Inability to easily collaboratively edit the same document by several people. Some advances have been made with Collabora (Libreoffice online) but it is still very sub-par compared to Office365 and desktop/online Office editing Sharepoint or OneDrive documents.
• Apps for Calendar and Contacts are not part of the basic core, and although now quite supported they cannot still be easily deployed in common email clients such as Outlook or Thunderbird, separate CalDAV and CardDAV plugins need to be installed. Embedding an email solution and plugins for major email clients so they can work just by entering username and password would be good.
• Risk of moving important folders/files to another location just by random drag-and-drop on Windows. Sometimes this breaks public links that cannot be restored anymore. Reverting such mistake by any of the users is impossible automatically.
• When some user deletes some data in a shared folder it is put into recycle bin of the owner of the folder. The user who deleted cannot himself/herself revert such action as he/she does not see the recycle bin (trash) of the owner. Also, there is no log in the recycle bin who deleted that file or folder.

Incentivized

• We needed to link each of our team members' personal emails to the Zoom account so we have to filter VM notifications out of our personal accounts.
• It'd be nice if you could set business hours through the webpage to include a lunch break so that you don't have to manually go in to edit.

Incentivized

Integrated into our network. System wide access. Staff are comfortable with the product

Incentivized

It's easy to use and easy to maintain. It also provides many useful programs and plugins to make work even more productive; just check what's available and how you could use them to your advantage. Also, check the Nextcloud Files app on your phone, which makes everything available at the touch of your fingers.

Incentivized

OwnCloud is easy for me to use, and I believe it would be for others too. The barrier for most people will be the set up. For a technology professional like myself, ownCloud's setup is pretty straightforward, but it's not the sort of thing most casual users will be able to handle. Also, it's on the user to maintain the service. These can be taken care of by paying someone to do it for you.

Incentivized

Zoom Phone has a very sleek design which makes it very easy to operate and use both in the setting up of and interacting in a meeting space. That being said, certain features can seem a bit crowded while trying to screen share or display video which somewhat defeats the purpose of the application as compared to a standard conference call.

Incentivized

Compared with other cloud services, ownCloud has been the most efficient. It doesn't create a noticeable drain on resources and very quickly syncs across all my devices. I'm usually able to save a file on my laptop and by the time I walk over and sit down at my desktop machine, it's already there. I don't need to wait as often as I have with services like OneDrive.

Incentivized

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.

Regarding the community edition, there is a reasonably good support on the IRC, forums and in the issue section on Github. Perhaps a much more individual approach would be available if the premium support was chosen and the instance of the server was provided by the Owncloud company that also offers some premium extensions, not available generally. However, we did not need this level of support yet.

Incentivized

I haven't had any sort of issues with Zoom as of yet to have to call Support. That right there makes me think it's a good product. Simple and easy to use. Nothing confusing or glitchy that would make me have to get in touch with them. Straightforward so I'm not trying to figure out a specific workflow.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The paid cloud services are expensive if you need a lot of data. You're giving your personal and business information to a data-hungry organization. Local NAS solutions are too slow. We run ownCloud on an older business PC and the performance is outstanding, even for remote access, due to local syncing.

Incentivized

The main reason why we switched to Zoom Phone is because our VOIP system inexplicably went down for almost a month and no one could figure out what was wrong. Lumen was charging way more than Zoom Workplace, but could not get the system to work.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Software is free so if you are going for a hosted solution anyway, it's hard to beat
• One of the easiest way to make sure your data is secured without compromising on features
• You need to manage the infrastructure and software

Incentivized

• Calls actually come through, resulting in our users trusting our phone system again
• Improved internal communication
• Users can be reached anywhere, so they do not have to stay at their desk to wait for important calls
• Voicemail is processed faster because it is translated to text

Incentivized