A brave year for digital sovereignty: Nextcloud 2025 Wrap-Up

2025 is wrapping up, so let’s hit the “pause” button and look back at what we’ve been up to, where it got us, and what lies ahead.

Millions of people started using Nextcloud in 2025. This big jump only happens for a reason, and we are here to find it. If you spent this year with Nextcloud, as a user or customer, admin, contributor or a technology partner or provider, you will certainly enjoy this written journey.

We remembered every small detail for you: every release, every event, the headlines that were especially sharp, what you liked reading and watching.

And if you are reading this only by chance, it’s a great opportunity to see how important privacy and digital sovereignty have become, and the progress being made towards a better and safer digital world.

Enjoy!

Nextcloud Team

We are dreaming bigger

Let’s begin with how the impact of Nextcloud has grown in 2025. With over 500K servers running worldwide, it is very motivating to see our work make meaningful impact. Big government projects giving national ministries and institutions control of their data back, small teams using Nextcloud for valuable initiatives in the world, or home users choosing privacy when storing and sharing files away from Big Tech clouds.

With the rising global uncertainty this year, the interest in Nextcloud from potential customers has tripled. We have demonstrated that sovereign alternatives to Big Tech, and an end to global digital dependency, are not only possible, but already available.

In some of the countries, the digital sovereignty momentum is especially high. For example, in the Netherlands, we’ve had two record-breaking Nextcloud Enterprise Days this year. The inquiries from local businesses and the public sector have increased eightfold. In France, numerous organizations in the public sector boast 6-figure Nextcloud deployments.

And there are even more countries waking up to the need for digital autonomy, choosing Nextcloud as their online workspace solution. In 2025, we’ve shaken hands with many new customers in Europe’s public sector, such as at Austria’s Federal Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism (BMWET) and the administration of the City of Stuttgart in Germany.

People’s project: Growing international team and culture

This global success can only scale with the growth of our collective. In 2025, the Nextcloud team grew by 27%, and we have many more members joining next year.

With its strong roots in the open source community, Nextcloud is a people’s project, which is reflected in our core values. Coming from 26 countries and incredibly diverse walks of life, our team has shaped our culture to be fundamentally democratic, dialogue-driven, and inclusive.

We know that investing in people is the best way to use our resources. That’s why we hire from our community, support and encourage our employees to participate in the open source life, and to grow professionally.

We are growing further and looking for new people in some of the key positions, for example, Senior C++/Office Engineer and Content Marketing team lead. If you are inspired to join Nextcloud and help bring autonomy and freedom to even more people, let’s talk!

At the forefront of digital freedom, as always

Introducing the Digital Sovereignty Index

Digital sovereignty topic is getting more and more recognition in the world. At the same time, it’s actively becoming a marketing buzzword and, even worse, getting appropriated by tech giants.

So what does digital sovereignty really mean? And in how far is your country digitally sovereign?

Numbers always bring clarity. By launching the Digital Sovereignty Index, we could show how countries compare in actual digital independence.

You can also dive into our methods and check how our tracker works. And of course, there are some limitations and caveats. Do you have some ideas on how to overcome them? We love a good contribution or suggestion, so get in touch right away!

€250M for digital sovereignty by 2030

Achieving digital sovereignty is a long game. We support numerous political initiatives that aim to create digitally sovereign offerings for Europe, yet we believe that support from private projects can have a quicker impact. So this year, we announced our own “Sovereign 2030” initiative to invest €250 million in digital sovereignty by 2030.

Our key investment areas:

• Growing our international workforce
• Empowering the broader open source community as well as our own Nextcloud community
• Strengthening partnerships and expanding the ecosystem
• Educating and informing the public about privacy, security, and digital sovereignty

Channel Partner Program

Access to local resellers and service providers is the first step to making digital sovereignty an actionable plan for people, companies, and governments. Alongside our investment initiative, we launched the Channel Partner Program to enable local companies with expert support and sovereign solutions on fair, beneficial terms, while ensuring they can control their roadmap and pricing.

Discover Nextcloud Channel Partner Program and read more about what its launch means to our resellers, service providers, and customers in our blog.

We did it: Awards in 2025

Platinum in CloudComputing-Insider IT-Awards

Nextcloud receives a Platinum Award at CloudComputing-Insider IT Awards for the fifth time.

Blauer Engel ecolabel for green IT

Nextcloud becomes the first cloud software platform to earn the Blauer Engel ecolabel.

Nextcloud Awards: Who is shaping the future of digital independence?

This year, we launched Nextcloud Awards to celebrate changemakers in digital sovereignty: people, organizations, and projects that are actively working towards a future where users themselves, not corporations, control their data.

Accepting nominations in two categories in 2025, and joined by a team of expert jurors, we announced the winners:

• Category “Implementation Role Model”: Schleswig-Holstein
• Category “Special Award 2025: digital sovereignty awareness in times of geopolitical changes”: CódigoSur and Signal Foundation

Three breakthrough releases

Our team of engineers has been working all year round to make Nextcloud apps smarter, faster, and smoother. This year, we have seen three big releases that changed the way teams collaborate.

Integrated and modular, Nextcloud Hub 10

Nextcloud Hub 10 celebrated what makes Nextcloud architecture unique: smooth integration of all of your tools with modularity that lets you choose how you work and what you use. All-round UX and performance boost, enterprise-grade security with E2EE calls and web encryption, usability improvements in Nextcloud Mail, Talk, and Teams, Nextcloud Assistant 3.0 and first AI agent features, and lots more.

Resilient communication and collaboration with Nextcloud Talk “Munich”

In times of uncertainty, organizations seek resilient tools for their communication and collaboration needs. With a stand-alone Nextcloud Talk release, launched live at the Nextcloud Summit in Munich, we gave our strong answer: a modern, digitally sovereign platform for work chats, meetings, and webinars, with lower barrier to migration and extended telephony features.

Ready in no time, Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn

Now, the big hit. Our latest launch, Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn, not only comes under a new name but has an entirely new feel. Through refreshed branding, subtle design improvements, and great maintenance and performance effort, it combines under-the-hood and all-around visual improvements.

We focused on what matters and made it meaningfully better: more intuitive and easy-to-adopt UI, more automations, and more focus. That’s the user side, but if you speak code, a great deal of admin improvements, new frameworks, new config presets, and 6X faster file uploads.

Figuring out how to do everything you need to do is intuitive, and it’s a snap to delegate permissions without accidentally turning every user into an admin.

Foss Force

Read story

Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn feels significantly faster and more responsive across the board. File uploads technically have the ability to be up to six times faster thanks to the improvements in chunked uploads, which also makes transferring large files much more reliable. And as you saw, the entire platform is snappier due to a 15% reduction in database queries.

TechHut

Watch video

New crisp branding

With Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn, we gave our branding a fresh touch. Working across product UI, interface branding, and our graphic narrative, we wove the new visual code into Nextcloud end-to-end. Find out more in the Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn release blog.

New integrations

Nextcloud is one unified platform for all collaboration needs, and it’s not limited to Nextcloud Hub. Our ecosystem is growing, offering new ways to collaborate via familiar tools in an integrated environment.

Documenso

Simplify document signatures with self-hosted, open source alternative to DocuSign.

OpenProject

Simplify project file management and sharing by connecting Nextcloud to the world’s leading open source project management tool.

XWiki

Connect XWiki-based wikis, search content in them and share pages easily via Smart Picker.

Zulip

Integration app for easy file sharing in Zulip now lets you search public and direct messages via Unified Search in Nextcloud Hub.

Overleaf

Work with LaTeX files to create and publish technical documents.

Integration updates

Updated integrations with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Discourse, Google and more.

Community life highlights

55K+ GitHub commits 🧑‍💻

Made this year by the Nextcloud team and community.

+10K forum signups 🤓

+6.4K new topics and +31K new posts on the Nextcloud Community forum.

$110K bug bounty program 🩺

Our team worked with 100 security experts, with 100% response efficiency.

107 languages 💬

Thanks to the translator community, Nextcloud is available in 107 languages, 41 exceeding 50% completion.

Nextcloud Community Conference 2025

With record-breaking attendance of 400 guests, we had a blast at our annual community gathering in Berlin this September.

A few highlights:

• Michael “Monty” Widenius, creator of MySQL and MariaDB, joined us with a keynote, “Building Trust with MariaDB: Open Source as a Path to Digital Sovereignty”.
• Daphne Muller, Manager Alliances, Ecosystem & Support at Nextcloud, presented “From policy to practice: implementing the EU AI Act for open source software”.
• The “How to contribute” panel and “Voices of the community” roundtable let us sit down together and discuss what being part of the community in 2025 actually looks like.
• And of course, the weekend was packed with lightning talks from fans, contributors, and creators of Nextcloud integrations, hands-on workshops, lots of networking, and after-hours activities.

We can’t wait to meet you!

Nextcloud Community Conference is a truly special event. If it is your dream to reunite with the fellow Nextclouders, but traveling to Berlin is tricky, remember that we always offer travel support via Nextcloud Include and provide an option to volunteer at the event.

Let’s go even bigger next year. Until we meet again in 2026!

Join the Nextcloud community: Develop, test, translate, love

There are many ways to get involved, from contributing code and developing apps to testing performance and security, and even doing non-code contributions like documentation and translation. Join our growing community and become part of our mission!

Want to start developing apps? Don’t be shy!

If you wish to test your skills and knowledge and get started with coding, why not grow together with a dynamic, growing ecosystem of the leading open source collaboration platform? Enjoy an abundance of developer tutorials, a vast API library a big, welcoming app store.

Moments across the map: events in 2025

28 events

Trade shows and conferences attended around the world

4 Nextcloud Enterprise Days

In Denmark, France and twice in the Netherlands

Nextcloud Summit

Our first global flagship event

Nextcloud Conference

Annual Nextcloud community gathering

Nextcloud Summit: Digital sovereignty revolution starts here

Digital sovereignty is a movement, and we might’ve just created a home base for it. In June, we organized the first Nextcloud Summit, which was an instant success: 400+ participants from over 10 different countries, 20 remarkable sessions, 30 speakers on stage.

The agenda? Catalytic. Some of the program highlights included:

• Keynotes by Dr. Cristina Caffarra, Economist and Antitrust Expert, and Sven Thomsen, CIO of the German federal state Schleswig-Holstein
• Launch of Nextcloud Talk “Munich”, your privacy-first Microsoft Teams alternative
• The very first Nextcloud Awards ceremony
• Customer success stories and tracks tailored for business, government, developers, and the press

We’re looking forward to continuing to build on the digital sovereignty momentum in 2026. Make sure to join us for the next edition of this must-attend event!

Nextcloud Summit 2026: Get your seat now!

Registrations for the next edition of the Nextcloud Summit on June 9, 2026, in Munich, Germany, are already open. Reserve your seat at the Early Bird rate.

Register now

Nextcloud Enterprise Days

Nextcloud is growing remarkably fast in some countries. That’s why we decided to focus the Nextcloud Enterprise Days on the local agenda: best practices from business and the public sector tailored to local regulations and the regional landscape; inspiring regional success stories; speakers and guests the audience values most; and, of course, using the local language as official for each event.

This focus made Nextcloud Enterprise Day truly a must-attend event:

• We’ve been twice to The Hague, the Netherlands, attended by 300 and almost 400 guests respectively, breaking the initial plan of 60. Our most successful Nextcloud Enterprise Day so far.
• Nextcloud returned to Paris, France, with an event which has become our annual winter tradition, this time doubling the number of attendees.
• Our first event in Copenhagen, Denmark, brought together our friends from the Nordics and sparked the long-awaited conversation in the region.

The Nextcloud Enterprise Day has become our most successful localized event format, and we are excited to expand it further. Enterprise Day will be coming to Switzerland, Austria, and Spain early next year.

The ABCs and the deep dives: Nextcloud webinars

We hosted 71 webinars this year, with 6700+ people attending across 137 countries to learn about deploying and using Nextcloud in different settings: from highly secure air-gap environments to education and enterprise use cases. Our most popular webinar this year had 887 registrations!

Our top three most-watched webinars in 2025:

• Nextcloud Hub 10: The secure and private alternative to Microsoft 365
• From Microsoft to digital sovereignty: Practical steps for your organization
• Break free from Confluence: Your complete open source migration stack

Missed something? You can watch numerous webinars, including these three highlighted webinars, on demand. Time to catch up!

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Catch you in 2026! 🎊

New challenges are just ahead. But fortune favors the bold, we know that.

And you are bold: by choosing privacy and digital freedom, and by running your home, your team, or maybe a whole big company to open, fair, and decentralized working tools.

This year, we like to think we moved one step closer to a better, safer digital world. Let’s do a few more steps in 2026. 😉

Cheers!

Your Nextcloud team