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.
It is the most appropriate tool to quickly share documents with someone you don't want to give access to your company's own online library, yet you have to share files. It's great that there's no need to create a user, nor for uploading or downloading files. Just have in mind that the documents on the link have an expiration day!
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!
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.
With the free version, you are limited to 2GB of file transferring. Likely if you are sending lots of files, you'll be upgrading to Plus instead.
Download links expire after a certain amount of time. It's important to download each link immediately and not forget where you left the downloaded files.
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.
I am generally very satisfied with the service. The free version alone takes care of 90% of my needs. The same holds for a lot of other people. It's a very smart business model as it gained mass market appeal (e.g. personal use) and thereby carries a lot of trust. I also never had issues using it.
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.
WeTransfer is extremely reliable 99% of the time. There has been twice in 4 years that their service was unavailable due to server outage for several hours.
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.
I've only reached out to WeTransfer support once, but they were prompt, courteous, and answered my question. I assume that future interactions would be the same, I'm looking forward to being a long term customer.
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.
While Dropbox does offer features that WeTransfer does not in terms of collaboration & organization, WeTransfer is the better option for simple file transfers. In my experience, WeTransfer is much faster for uploads & downloads. The premium version of WeTransfer also offers a lot of customization options that Dropbox does not.
When we've had our BETA testing programs for our products, we always used WeTransfer to send our BETA version of our products. Doing this using WeTransfer was free and we also didn't have to worry about unauthorized people later down the road downloading these versions as WeTransfer deletes the files after a small number of days.
