Nextcloud near to doubled bookings in 2020, invests in expanding for 2021

Nextcloud closed 2020 with record numbers, increased its growth rate, nearly doubled order intake, increased its customer base by over 50%, and is expanding the team quickly to handle the growing demand. Continued innovation with a strong focus on meeting the real-life needs of modern organizations during the move to remote collaboration over 2020 has been key to this growth.

The business maintained profitability and financial independence using an organic growth strategy. The higher expansion rate was fueled by increased security awareness and a growing movement to bring back critical business applications on premise. The release of Nextcloud Hub in January 2020 to glowing reviews in the press immediately doubled incoming lead flow, emphasizing the interest in the new capabilities it delivered and setting the stage for continued growth in the new year.

2020 has been a difficult year for many organizations. We have been fortunate to be able to help many in the transition to remote work and all our efforts were poured into further improving Nextcloud to support the day to day work of our customers. 2020 has further increased our lead in the market and we look forward to significant expansion in 2021.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud

Continued growth supported by industry fundamentals and strong delivery

The release of Nextcloud Hub early in 2020 tripled the download rate of Nextcloud and doubled lead flow, showing strong interest in the market. During March and April, those numbers rose by another 4x as many organizations kicked off projects with Nextcloud to enable remote work during the first lock-down. Much of the rest of the year was focused on delivering on these projects and supporting customers with the increased need for real-time, remote collaboration. Nextcloud Talk in particular saw incredible growth, increasing bookings over 100 fold over 2019, which was already a strong year for Talk. Nextcloud Hub 19 delivered a wide range of technical improvements in Talk, further supporting this growth.

With a 50% growth in customer base and a near doubling of total bookings, Nextcloud managed a healthy growth in average subscription value. A continued strong focus on subscriptions over consulting and an increase of the minimum base subscription to 100 users is expected to further improve these numbers over 2021. The sales team has expanded by 50% to service new customers and this growth rate is planned to continue.

The rest of the team is also growing quickly, as we noted in the blog post we put out earlier today. More than a dozen team members joined us in the last 3 months!

After crossing the 100M pulls threshold in 2019, the Nextcloud Docker image passed the 500M benchmark in 2020. With an estimated 50% growth in the installed base, a 40% organic growth in website visits, 34% growth in community code contributions, and a 40% increase in Nextcloud apps to nearly 300, the wider Nextcloud ecosystem continued its healthy development. Google trends shows search interest in Nextcloud averaging almost 5x over its closest competition. With over 3000 code contributors over its lifetime and more than 700 in the last year as well as over 300 apps, Nextcloud is the largest self-hosted productivity platform ecosystem.

Partnerships key to success

The Nextcloud Conference was the incredibly successful virtual venue for Nextcloud Hub 20, a release build in collaboration with over half a dozen partners. The collaboration with industry vendors will continue, both on a technical level with deeper third-party integration in Nextcloud, and in business, as exemplified in our partnership announcement with European IT services giant Deutsche Telekom in early 2021.

The release of Nextcloud Hub 21 today, with the innovative High-Performance Back-end for Files and significant collaboration improvements, will further extend the technological and market lead Nextcloud has over its competition.