Nextcloud and PHP again #

I've been running Nextcloud since years. It works, my family uses it, contacts/calendar sync fine, for the photos I've migrated to Immich recently. WebDAV is there when I need it. And yet, every few months I get this itch : "surely there's something more modern than a giant PHP monolith in 2026 ?"

So this time I actually took a weekend to look for a replacement. Short version : there isn't one, not really. Long version below.

OxiCloud : cool idea, rust promises, painful reality ... #

OxiCloud catched my eye because it's written in Rust. On paper this ticks all the boxes I want : modern language, single binary, presumably lighter than a full PHP + Apache/Nginx + MariaDB stack.

Reality on FreeBSD was a lot less fun. Compiling it took forever. And I mean forever, not "a few minutes longer than expected". My little N100 box chewed through dependencies for what felt like hours before I even got a binary out of it. Rust compile times on modest hardware are already a known pain point, and OxiCloud didn't made it any easier.

note Compiling on FreeBSD
A good chunk of "modern" self-hosted projects are built and tested exclusively on Linux/glibc, so FreeBSD ends up being the platform where every missing crate feature, every non-portable dependency, and every assumption about the target OS surfaces first. It's not necessarily OxiCloud's fault, it's the tax to not running mainstream Linux.

Once I finally got it running, the interface didn't win me over either. It's functional, but it feels like an early prototype rather than something I'd want my family to use daily. I finded it flat out confusing to navigate, I struggled just to find my way back to a specific folder, which is a bit of a problem when the whole point of a file management app is exactly that. No hate, it's a young project and I get that UI polish comes last. But for a "Nextcloud replacement" candidate, the file browser experience matters a lot, and this one just isn't there yet.

And then there's the memory footprint. I was expecting a lean Rust binary to sip RAM, instead it was setting at around 1G, well above the ~600MB Nextcloud uses on the same box. Probably possible to tune that down with the right build flags/config, but out of the box that's not the "lightweight modern alternative" I was hoping for.

Also, injecting my test data was more annoying than expected. I just wanted to drop a folder of test files straight on the filesystem like I'm used to do with Nextcloud's data directory, but that's not an option here. Everything has to go through the API endpoint, so rclone/WebDAV it is.

note No database though
One genuine advantage of both OxiCloud and Cloudreve over Nextcloud : no external database required. That's what annoys me the most with Nextcloud, dragging a MariaDB instance around just to store files. Cloudreve does use one, but only for users/assets management, and it happily runs on SQLite.

Cloudreve : actually promising #

Cloudreve was a much better experience. Written in Go, single binary, ships fast, and the web UI is genuinely nice, clean, modern, snappy. It supports multiple storage backends (local, S3, OneDrive, and more), has a proper admin panel, and WebDAV is supported too.

Cloudreve also has by far the nicest UI, and the file preview integration is really well done. Open a .txt or .md file and you get a proper preview with syntax highlighting, not just a raw text dump. Small detail, but it's exactly the kind of thing missing everywhere else.

It's also clearly the most mature contender when it comes to admin/UI management. You can create users directly from the interface, with OxiCloud and OpenCloud you have to go edit a config file on the server for that, and there's a lot of options and settings to tweak without ever touching a terminal. The whole product just feel pleasant to use.

For a minute I thought I'd found my replacement.

Then I looked for clients. And that's where it fall apart for me.

warning No native Android / Linux client
Cloudreve doesn't ship an official mobile app or a native Linux desktop client. You get the web UI (which is good) and WebDAV as a fallback. That's fine if you only ever touch your files from a browser, but I want automatic photo upload from my phone, and I want a sync client on my desktop that just works, not a WebDAV mount I have to babysit.

I could probably hack something together with third-party WebDAV apps on Android, but that's exactly the kind of "workaround on top of a workaround" setup I was trying to get away from by looking for something new in the first place.

But there's a catch, and a pretty significant one for me.

warning Your files don't stay your files
Cloudreve doesn't just store your files as-is on disk, it renames them on the filesystem as part of some kind of internal blob storage system. I didn't dig deep enough to fully understand the mechanism, but the end result is that you can't just go look at /data and find your files sitting there under their real names like on Nextcloud. That's a dealbreaker for me, part of the point of self-hosting is being able to grab my data straight off the filesystem when I need to, not trust yet another storage abstraction to hand it back to me correctly. It does have a trash bin though, which is a nice touch (Nextcloud has one too, and it's saved me more than once), but I'm guessing it's only workable because Cloudreve owns and rewrites your files in the first place.

One thing I didn't check for OxiCloud and OpenCloud is whether they support a trash/recycle bin at all. It's such a basic quality-of-life feature that I take it for granted with Nextcloud, but I wouldn't bet on none of them having it yet.

OpenCloud : the most convincing one #

I also gave OpenCloud a shot, and it's the one that impressed me the most overall. It shows.

The interface has a distinctly "minimal" feel to it, but unlike OxiCloud it's actually clear, I always know where I am and I never struggle to find my way back to a directory. Simple, but it does the one job a file manager is supposed to do properly.

It didn't compile out of the box on FreeBSD though, something related to extended attributes (xattr) handling that assumed a Linux-specific behaviour. Claude Code sorted that out for me with a small patch in a couple of prompts, this kind of "one platform-specific bug standing between you and a working build" is exactly the sort of thing I've come to rely on it for.

Same limitation as OxiCloud though : no direct filesystem copy into the data directory, you're forced through the WebDAV API / rclone to get data in. Given how much test data I wanted to throw at these platforms, that got old fast.

There's apparently a FreeBSD package in the works, which would spare me the compile step going forward. But as long as running it means building from source myself every time I want an update, I'm not putting it in production. Fool me once with a broken build and I'll happily wait for the package.

File preview is where it disappoints me the most though, especially compared to Cloudreve. On .txt/.md files, the best you get is a basic text editor, no syntax highlighting, no proper rendering, nothing. It's about as basic as it gets, and it hurts the eyes a bit after seeing what Cloudreve does with the same files :P A shame, because everything else about OpenCloud felt like the most polished thing here.

Administration also feels a lot less approachable than Cloudreve. Plugin management appears to be a manual affair, and pretty much all the admin seems to happen through the configuration file rather than a UI. Fine for me, I don't mind a config file, but it's a clear step down in maturity compared to Cloudreve's admin panel.

note What about sFTPGo or Filebrowser ?
I know there are even more minimal options out there, like sFTPGo or Filebrowser. I didn't bother testing them for this round though, they're basically just a web UI in front of a filesystem/SFTP server, with no real client ecosystem to speak about. Fine as a quick file-sharing tool, but not really a Nextcloud replacement for my use case.

So... back to Nextcloud #

Here's the thing though, I don't even use most of what Nextcloud offers anymore. Photos moved to Immich a while ago, and at this point I'm basically only using it for plain file management, contacts and calendar. All the fancy apps, Talk, Office, Memories, whatever, sit there unused. So on paper I should be exactly the kind of user a leaner, files-only alternative would fits.

And yet. Updating Nextcloud is a non-event, I have a script that handles it, I've run it for 10+ years without ever loosing data or breaking a setup. I know every quirk of it by now. That reliability and familiarity is worth a lot, and none of the three alternatives above are mature enough yet to make me trade it away.

Nextcloud is heavy, around 600MB of RAM on my box, though for a home instance that's not really a problem, my little N100 doesn't care. PHP isn't exactly exciting in 2026 either, and I probably use 10% of what the product actually offers. Having to run a whole MariaDB instance alongside it is the one thing that keep annoying me, years in and I still haven't made my peace with it. Everything else is just... fine, and has been for a decade.

note What about scaling ?
At home, "heavy" just means a bit more RAM/CPU on one box, no big deal. But I'd be curious to see how Nextcloud holds up at a more serious scale, I suspect at some point you have to start looking into distributed architecture (separate app/DB/cache/storage nodes, that kind of thing) to keep it performant. The Go/Rust contenders above, with no heavy DB stack to drag around, are probably in a better spot to scale horizontally without that complexity. Not something I need to worry about for a home server though.

So for now, "more modern" and "I don't need most of it anyway" aren't good enough reasons to give up a decade of boring reliability. I'll keep an eye on OxiCloud, Cloudreve and OpenCloud though, they're all interesting projects and I hope they mature. Nextcloud isn't so bad after all :D

#self-hosting #Nextcloud #FreeBSD