Nextcloud powering the digital workspace of tomorrow: 2024 in review

At our core, we at Nextcloud have remained true our vision: empowering collaboration without compromising on privacy. This year has been a testament to that commitment. Together with the passion of our global team and the support of our community we have not just build the best open-source collaboration tools, but expanded our dedication to open source itself.

In this annual wrap-up, we want to take a moment to celebrate this year’s achievements. Join us as we continue to reimagine what’s possible – shaping a world where open source, privacy and connection come together and drive progress for the greater good. 

~ Nextcloud team

Charting global growth

Nextcloud is used around the world by private individuals, communities, enterprises, and governments. In 2024, millions of new users gained access through hundreds of new enterprise customers. In the wider community, exact numbers are difficult to come by but there are some 400-500K servers online and this number also continues to grow steadily.

Public 2024 data shows many deployments of Nextcloud in USA, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, The UK and many other locations across continents.

These numbers convert into the change Nextcloud brings about, contributing to a more connected, privacy-respecting, transparent, and safer digital world – where we interact with government services, access our education, cast votes in elections, fill forms on websites and call our colleagues and friends through video.

Change starts with people

This year, our team has grown significantly, reflecting our success. With 20% increase in size we are now 118 strong united by a shared vision across 23 countries. That includes 7 interns who get a chance to learn the ropes at Nextcloud. While we have expanded into a bigger office space in Berlin, we remain proudly remote-first, reflecting the flexibility and global collaboration that define our culture.

A spirit of fellowship: Nextcloud community

As an open-source project, Nextcloud thrives not just on code but on the people behind it. Thanks to all the contributors, maintainers, and enthusiasts at the DNA of our project, Nextcloud has grown into a top-choice platform for those who value privacy, security, and transparency. Now let’s dive into some facts!

38k+ GitHub commits 🧑‍💻

Made this year by the Nextcloud team and community.

11.3k+ new forum members 🤓

+8,4K new topics and +41.7 new posts on the Nextcloud Community forum.

100+ security experts thanked 🩺

Our engineers responded to reports in 5 hours on average, with 100% response efficiency.

100+ languages 💬

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

Shaping collaboration of tomorrow with Nextcloud Hub

The efficient Nextcloud Hub 8

Launching Nextcloud Hub 8 under the “Regain control over your time” theme, we made it all about efficiency. With Nextcloud Assistant 2.0 bringing innovative AI features, interactive widgets connecting our apps further, advancing chat and sharing tools and ambitious architecture undertakings, this release gave you more control than ever before.

The connected Nextcloud Hub 9

Our latest release brought a major visual redesign to the platform, resulting in a slicker experience all around. But it’s not all about the looks – with a growing stack of federation features, automation centralizing under Nextcloud Flow, and further efforts to elevate performance and scaling, Nextcloud Hub 9 made headlines this September as an “Explosive release”.

Nextcloud Talk: the open-source answer to Teams

In an unrestful world of today, dependency on centralized, opaque systems under strong foreign influence is a ticking clock. It is time the open-source world had a real answer to Microsoft Teams. Nextcloud Talk is the only open-source conferencing hub that seamlessly integrates chats, video meetings and webinar functionality in one powerful, unlocked application.

We are wrapping up 2024 with a strong standalone release of Nextcloud Talk, celebrating its reinvention within Nextcloud’s product portfolio. New desktop application, new AI features, new streaming capabilities, simplified and mindful collaboration, and reinforced security (again!) – meet the new Nextcloud Talk.

Standing ground against Big Tech

In an attempt to slow down the antitrust case backed by Nextcloud and other members of the Coalition for level playing field, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from the Windows ecosystem. Such “malicious compliance” is one of the common instruments in the Big Tech arsenal used to resist the limiting market regulations. A legislation like EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) could protect fair competition further, once it targets Microsoft’s cloud products that squeeze numerous local providers from the market.

With this struggle still far from over, some results of our common efforts are evident. Earlier this year, Germany has officially recognized Microsoft as a tech giant and made it “subject to extended abuse control”, three years since the formal antitrust complaint.

When the global IT so evidently lacks digital sovereignty and resilience, we naturally consider the fight for a fair trade a part of our mission.

AI with ethical integrity

Like we said in one of the early introductions to our AI tools, some AI is hype and some is substance. And we want to give you the substance. Speaking of, Nextcloud does become a better version of itself with the evolving AI stack.

The back-end, the UX, the features, and the models you can use to power up Nextcloud Assistant – this year our engineers and contributors have done work to be proud of. From context-aware features with Nextcloud Assistant 2.0 and chat UI and platform-wide integration in Nextcloud Hub 9 to new open-source AI models – you can enjoy a fully AI-powered workspace.

And most importantly, you stay in control of this powerful technology. To build the system that you can rely on and keep your data yours, you can refer to our Ethical AI Rating and decide what AI you want to use in Nextcloud Hub.

Ready for mission-critical, enterprise deployment

Enterprise support for Roundcube

Since Roundcube joined us, Nextcloud began to receive requests from large hosting companies for support. In August Nextcloud introduced the first official offering of enterprise support for Roundcube! It is tailored specifically for mail providers running large instances with thousands to millions of end users. We also offer our services to help businesses, universities and the public sector, but our offering makes the most sense for larger installations.

Process automation at scale with Nextcloud Flow

Shortly before Nextcloud Hub 9, Nextcloud has presented the first automation-enabled open source platform for implementing the Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz, OZG) in Germany and similar use cases in other countries. The Nextcloud Flow toolbox provides administrations with a digitally sovereign tool for offering and automating public services online and for exchanging the underlying processes among themselves.

BITV 2.0 certified Nextcloud

Nextcloud Enterprise has been awarded a German BITV 2.0 certification that is based on WCAG 2.0 benchmark. This means that the enterprise and public sector users can be confident in the accessibility standards of Nextcloud. The platform is designed with all users’ needs in mind, suitable for people with limitations and requirements for non-standard input devices and additional measures like a screen reader. Contact your sales representative if you require the certification.

Award-winning achievements 🏆

Platinum CloudComputing-Insider Award

The IT Awards celebrate outstanding IT solutions across various categories. This is our 8th nomination, bringing us Platinum.

World Summit Award Germany

Nextcloud has been recognized with the World Summit Award Germany in the Government & Citizen Engagement category.

Connecting globally, inspiring locally: 2024 events

25 events 🗓️

10 events took place in Germany, and our Q4 has been the busiest. On our checklist are FOSDEM, it-sa, GITEX Global, Smart City Expo, Smart Country Convention and many others.

76 webinars 📺

Through our free webinars, Nextcloud users learn about solving their individual challenges and using new Nextcloud features and acquire skills in deployment and administration.

Nextcloud Community Conference 2024

This September, we hosted our annual community gathering in Berlin once again. With attendance beating all the records, we certainly scaled up – and so did the program! Our guests – about 200 open-source enthusiasts, Nextcloud lovers, and team – were joined by speakers of a great caliber: computer scientist, author and spokeswoman of the Chaos Computer Club Constanze Kurz, and professor Björn Lundell, a researcher and Software Systems Research Group lead at the University of Skövde.

As always, Nextcloud Community Conference is a platform for our community to showcase their projects and discuss modern day wins and challenges of open-source! You can find the recordings of all the lightning talks in a dedicated YouTube playlist.

Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Paris, Munich and Frankfurt

Nextcloud Enterprise Day is gaining a momentum each year. Our flagship event for the public sector and enterprise sphere, In 2024 it gathered hundreds of enterprise and public decision makers. Featuring keynotes by leading voices across industries, product announcements and roadmap sneak peeks, and ample opportunities for networking and optimizing your platform, it provides a premier setting to explore and advance privacy, digital sovereignty, and digitalization.

This year, we hosted Nextcloud Enterprise Day in three cities:

Nextcloud Enterprise Day Munich

Nextcloud Enterprise Day Frankfurt

Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris

Each year, Nextcloud Enterprise Day events grow in relevance among enterprise audiences, evident in rising attendance and enthusiasm. In 2025, we aim to amplify their impact by exploring new formats and locations.

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More reasons to develop for Nextcloud!

With our developer program, you get an opportunity to create apps for hundreds of thousands of Nextcloud servers deployed across the globe. With our App Store, you get free promotion and an opportunity to publish apps for both end users and businesses.

Create new apps or build on top of the Nextcloud platform using 11 available app tutorials. This year, we added 2 new tutorials: a ‚hello world‘ app tutorial and a guide to using Github Codespaces as a developer environment.

Other important improvements for developers this year include:

• Getting help from Nextcloud translator community with Transifex
• New mechanics in AppStore: donations, enterprise support
• Support for AI apps
• Support for external UI injection

New integrations

We designed Nextcloud to fit effortlessly into your existing workflows – by offering a wide range of integrations with popular tools and platforms, and an ability to create unique Nextcloud-ready apps in any programming language. This year, we introduced integrations with popular apps XWiki and Paperless-ngx, added new AI models to power up Nextcloud Assistant, and enabled enterprise support for a range of apps, working together with teams behind them.

New app integrations:

Paperless-ngx

XWiki

Enterprise support for apps:

Mailvelope

Dovecot

Stalwart

New AI models supported:

NeuralBeagle14 7B

Smaug-72b

LLama3

Let’s make it awesome in 2025!

If you made it this far, we hope this hefty read has brought you a personal reason to celebrate alongside us. From millions of new users choosing privacy to an ever-expanding deployments of servers worldwide, Nextcloud continues to connect people and organizations without compromising control over their data. And our story as a community-driven project is told by people. So today we thank ✨you✨ for being a part of it.

Cheers to reaching new heights together in 2025!