Nextcloud 2023 Wrap-Up

Post date

December 21, 2023

Incredible company growth 🌍

Nextcloud GmbH is set to exceed its growth goals this year with already over 60% higher bookings compared to 2022, adding hundreds of new Enterprise customers and partners. We are very proud to continue our growing streak, achieved in an organic, sustainable way, without relying on external investors. We are deeply grateful for the trust you’ve shown us and we will continue to prove you made the right decision!

To accommodate our growth had to change offices, and in both Berlin and Stuttgart, we now have new, bigger and more centrally located offices. In Berlin, you can find us pretty much next to the Friedrichstrasse station in the heart of the city. In Stuttgart we moved less far, only a few blocks from where we used to be at Rotebühlplatz. Of course, most team members continue to work from home from all over the world!

We are now over 100 team members spanning 20 countries, all working remotely or in our offices in Berlin and Stuttgart. With a third of them joining us in 2023, we witnessed an impressive team growth!

Notably, eight team members are working students who joined Nextcloud to start their career early in the software industry, gaining valuable experience and knowledge alongside their studies.

Welcoming talent from all walks of life, Nextcloud is dedicated to seeking bright minds all across the globe. This year, team members from seven new locations joined us: Cameroon, Finland, Georgia, Hungary, India, Taiwan and Wales (UK).

Nextcloud Team Group Photo June 2023 — Nextcloud crew at the Enterprise Day in Munich

A thriving community 🧬

Of course we are more than a company! Nextcloud’s success would not be possible without a healthy, thriving community of contributors behind Nextcloud. In 2023, we have seen many lines of code weaving the world’s leading open-source collaboration platform.

25k+ GitHub commits 🧑‍💻

Done by the Nextcloud team and community.

9k+ new forum members 🤓

+7.8k new topics and +36.6k new posts on the Nextcloud Community forum.

100+ security experts thanked 🩺

With 100+ reports resolved this year, our Security team demonstrated an incredibly swift response time: 2 hours on average.

76 new app uploads 🧩

Numerous new integrations submitted, ready to use in Nextcloud.

Technology 😍

All these amazing people worked together and made tons of changes to Nextcloud itself, bringing our users not 1, not 2, not 3 but FOUR releases!

Growing pace with Hub launching 4x 🚀

Nextcloud smart picker AI image generation

Hub 4

Hub 4 brings ethical AI to Nextcloud, introducing content generation features backed by pioneering open source AI models. Smart Picker arrives in multiple core apps, offering easy sharing of multiple items like files, cards, tables, locations, Collectives, and much more. It is also the first time the Tables app appears in Hub, along with Notes as a core app.

Hub 5

Hub 5 earns Nextcloud Hub the title of the 1^st self-hosted AI-powered workspace with numerous features and AI models joining the stack. The ecosystem evolves: Tables receives elaborate formatting tools, chatting and conferencing in Talk is much more intuitive, and new integrations like Notion, Outlook and Teams become available.

Hub 6

With Hub 6, the whole platform advances towards a smarter collaboration suite. Nextcloud Assistant arrives in Hub, introducing a sleek AI interface and diverse in-app text processing tools. Multiple improvements in Talk, Dashboard, Groupware and other apps provide better focus and a healthier online working culture.

Hub 7

Finally, with our latest release, we make Hub even more interconnected and synergetic. Cross-app features like Unified Search and out-of-office message highlight this version’s focus on integrity, while user-focused platform-wide improvements and ongoing investment in AI augmentation further elevate Hub experience.

High-profile achievements

Cloud Computing Insider Award

For the 7th time in a row, we were nominated for a Cloud Computing Insider award. This year, we won Gold in the Cloud Content Management category.

European SFS Award

In 2023, Nextcloud’s founder Frank Karlitschek accepted the European SFS award in the Name of Nextcloud, its community and team.

European Award by Acteurs du Libre

Held at Open Source Experience Paris, the Acteurs du Libre award ceremony welcomed Nextcloud on stage to receive the European Award in collaboration with APELL.

Pioneering ethical AI 🧠

This year, Nextcloud has been committed to introducing and advancing AI capabilities in Hub, embracing transparency, choice and fair technologies. Ethical AI has become a highlight of 2023, with our efforts to help our users make informed decisions while having access to the best-in-class solutions. With dozens of AI integrations available in Nextcloud to this day, there are options matching everyone’s needs: remote or local, established or emerging, universal or leading in their niche.

Welcome Nextcloud Assistant

Nextcloud Assistant is a 100% open-source AI assistant that doesn’t prey on your data! It offers a friendly, native interface to an AI model of your choice, hosted locally or remotely. Use it in Mail to summarize threads, in Text to analyze and generate content, in Talk to augment your conversation, or anywhere in Hub via the toolbar to perform quick text related tasks.

Ethical AI Rating

With numerous AI models and services available in Nextcloud, we want you to to be aware of the risks you take. Our Ethical AI Rating, labeling apps based on code transparency, deployment model, and availability of training data, helps you build your AI stack with confidence.

Collaboration with the German government

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has made a bet on Nextcloud to foster digitization of the state affairs, including the AI strategy. In collaboration with the State Chancellery, we are developing a language model tailored to unique state administration tasks while keeping digital threats at bay. Announced with the Hub 7 release, the development of Nextcloud Assistant Context Chat is the first fruit borne from this collaboration. Read the full story to learn more.

A leap forward in global tech decentralization ✊

In our vision, data privacy and digital sovereignty don’t go well together with the Big Tech domination. Not only do we make software enjoyed by private users, government and businesses alike, but we also want to tip the scales in the global technological decentralization. In this regard, 2023 has been a success!

What made this year special:

Anti-trust coalition and Digital Markets Act

On behalf of the coalition of the independent European technology providers, Nextcloud has filed a collective anti-trust complaint with German authorities which spiked an investigation into Microsoft’s market domination. In September 2023, the Digital Markets Act went into effect, requiring Microsoft to revise its alleged market-distorting behavior by March 2024.

EU bets on Nextcloud to replace SharePoint

The impending end of support for the SharePoint Server leads to a growing need for alternatives. Government agencies in particular face concerns regarding data sovereignty and vendor lock-in, leaning towards on premise collaboration tools. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) sets the standard for data protection with Nextcloud, being one of the most prominent examples of Nextcloud implementation in the European public sector.

Roundcube joins the Nextcloud family

Earlier this year, Nextcloud and Roundcube announced a merger bringing the open-source email giant under Nextcloud’s stewardship. “The merger not only underscores the collective strength of the open source community, but also highlights our enduring commitment to privacy, security, and user empowerment.” – underlines Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek. Read the story in our blog and join the discussion on the forum.

Moments that mattered: event recap 🗺️

34 events 🗓️

We attended 34 events around the world, exhibiting, speaking, and meeting our community: FOSDEM, Cloud Expo Europe, it-sa, GITEX Global, Smart City Expo, and many other key industry gatherings.

60 webinars 📺

From educating our users about new functionality and administration to the use of Nextcloud in various professional settings, this year’s streams covered a hefty number of practical topics with over 5500 sign-ups.

Browse all events and webinars

Nextcloud Conference 2023

On September 16th and 17th, we hosted the annual Nextcloud Conference under the motto “Trust, Transparency, Together.” Packed with insightful talks and panels, the event aired the announcement of Hub 6, Max Schrems’ EU-US data privacy keynote, Katrin Fritsch’s keynote on green internet, and Simon Phipps’ talk about the Fourth Sector.

Looking back at the marvelous time we spent together at MotionLab.Berlin, we invite you to read the Day 1 and Day 2 recaps. Session recordings are available on our YouTube playlist:

Nextcloud Enterprise Day

This year, we organized two events for Nextcloud enterprise community — Enterprise Day in Munich on June 13 and a special Enterprise Day France on December 5. Often held bi-annually, Nextcloud Enterprise Day helps us understand the needs of the business and government markets, setting the right course for feature development and integration. If you wish to participate next year, stay tuned for the announcement!

New developer program 🛠️

This year, we welcomed the new Developer Program that offers you free promotion and opens a new window of possibilities for growth.! Now you have the opportunity to build apps in any language for tens of millions of Nextcloud users worldwide. What’s more, all core apps are now fully documented with OpenAPI by OCS (Open Collaboration Services). Make use of our documentation and examples to build an app that may just become the next #1 tool of choice!

And, of course, we announced it at our conference and advanced the state of technology with Nextcloud Hub 7: you can now build Nextcloud apps in your favorite programming language! No longer is PHP the only option, but Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, Java – bring it on!

Last but not least — welcome a fully redesigned app store and the new app ecosystem offering a better UI as well as smoother downloads and installation.

Content that you liked the most 💌

Nextcloud 2023 wrap-up is a right place to share your favourite content too! This year, we wrote 126 blogs, published over 90 videos, aired 3 successful podcasts, and created 13 community newsletters — all with the biggest engagement yet.

Plug in: Nextcloud podcast

Most watched: Developer tutorials

Among multiple How-Tos, presentations, and feature updates, there’s a particular category of videos that stands out.

Go to playlist

Nextcloud on field: case studies 📰

Archdiocese of Cologne: More than 4,400 users collaborate on Nextcloud Hub

Learn how the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany enables collaboration for more than 4,400 users with Nextcloud Hub

Download

Sorbonne University implements on-premise solution with Nextcloud

Learn how the University was able to achieve digital sovereignty over their data and user accounts.

Download

The Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration

Discover how the Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration in this case study!

Download

Growing connectivity: new integrations 🧩

Notion

Slack

Pexip

Aleph Alpha

GPTZero

MemeGen

Whisper

Mattermost

Miro

Collaboard

XWiki

Have fun in 2024! 🥳

Every year is a new challenge, yet the world keeps spinning and we remain a team of people who believe in the greater good. That’s why we built Nextcloud, a mighty open-source collaboration engine set to put you back in control over your data and make your working life comfortable. We hope Nextcloud 2023 wrap-up brought you in the mood to celebrate the success we’ve had together this year! Thank you all, and cheers to all the great things that await us in 2024! 😍