Nextcloud Enterprise FAQ

Self-hosting is the quickest and easiest way to legal compliance with a wide variety of regulations. By keeping data on your company servers, there is no need for contracts with other companies or complicated audit processes.

You still have comply with security and compliance requirements demanding you take appropriate security measures. A Nextcloud Subscription delivers security patches and consulting based on our expertise and Security Bug Bounty Program, helping Nextcloud customers to make sure this requirement is met.

Compliance Kit

To better deliver on the needs of our customers, they have access to a special Nextcloud Enterprise build pre-configured, optimized and hardened for the special needs of large scale, production-critical enterprise deployments. Nextcloud Enterprise provides the following key benefits:

Improved reliability: Nextcloud Enterprise receives additional quality assurance to provide the highest degree of reliability and offers a longer life cycle.
Improved scalability: Nextcloud Enterprise is pre-configured and optimized for the needs of large scale production at enterprises, rather than home users.
Improved security: Nextcloud Enterprise customers get priority access to security and stability fixes to guarantee smooth operation out of the box.
Certified integrity: Nextcloud Enterprise is a guaranteed proven, certified code base for legal compliance like GDPR and HIPAA.

Nextcloud is used on anything from a raspberry pi for family calendar syncing to delivering secure team productivity for hundreds of thousands of employees at the German Federal Government, running on a large cluster with Global Scale. Those large enterprise deployments have vastly different needs from the hundreds of thousands of community users that deploy Nextcloud at home.

To better deliver on the needs of our customers, we make a special Nextcloud Enterprise build available to them. This build is derived from the same 100% open source code base from Github but pre-configured, optimized and hardened for the special needs of large scale, production-critical enterprise deployments.

100% open source

With Nextcloud Enterprise, we follow the model made popular by Red Hat, SUSE, MariaDB and many others with a fully open source, enterprise focused product available for customers.

Nextcloud continues to be developed and improved as it is together with our large community of contributors and its releases continue to be the first to deliver new features and improvements to users.

As home user, nothing is different, and Nextcloud should continue to be equally suitable for private or small business use. If you are working at a larger enterprise and want to know if Nextcloud Enterprise offers you relevant benefits, you can contact our sales team.

Contact us

Nextcloud Enterprise is supported by a Nextcloud Subscription. Your Nextcloud subscription enables you to successfully deploy and manage your servers. Our open approach gives you direct access to Nextcloud engineers, the latest knowledge and best practices. We provide technical expertise, guidance and collaboration with phone and chat contact. Pro-active security support helps you identify and address vulnerabilities and harden your servers to protect the safety and integrity of your data.

With the Nextcloud Enterprise subscription you get:

Access to our Enterprise portal with associated services and benefits
Full lifecycle support with up to 5 years security and stability fixes
Technical expertise and help covering project inception to production and user growth
Help to scale your Nextcloud installation to large amounts of storage and large numbers of users
Security and hardening consulting and early access to security patches
Influence on the roadmap of the open source project
Our entire engineering team is dedicated to supporting you
Help and advice if you decide to (pay somebody to) develop a custom app or changes
Optional support for branding Nextcloud and its clients
Optional support for integrated video conferencing and communication features based on WebRTC
Optional Online Office capabilities which can handle a wide range of industry-standard file formats
Optional Outlook integration
Access to consulting for custom capabilities
Nextcloud consulting goes beyond technical expertise, offering strategic advice for organizations. We analyze your challenges and help you implement a comprehensive, cost-effective and compliance-aware solution which reduces complexity and risks while delivering the highest security and privacy protection.

We provide support in English and other languages through our partners, contact us for details.

Every interface through which you interact with your users or customers should be a representation of the brand behind you – a brand that stands out from the competition. Our support engineers will make sure Nextcloud represents your brand by helping you configure the web interface and providing you with branded clients if needed.

We offer you DIRECT access to our engineers to ensure you always get the best answer as quickly as possible, rather than walling off support from the expertise at engineering. Like a dedicated, on-site engineer, our entire team is dedicated to your success first!

This not only makes sure you get faster, better support than anywhere else, it also ensures our engineers are confronted with customer issues and wishes daily, keeping their work closely aligned with the needs of our customers.

As customer, you thus do not have to hope a junior support team member manages to explain your request to an engineer: you already talked to the engineer, directly, and they are already working on a solution. Learn more on opensource.com.

Just like we believe engineers should work with customers directly to ensure their development stays aligned with customer needs, QA and testing are an integral part of the job of our engineers.

This ensures a direct feedback loop, resulting in them writing better quality code, if only to avoid having to spend too much time testing and debugging. To get their work done as efficiently as possible, our engineers are organically motivated to automate exactly what should be automated, no more and no less.

As our unique approach to management relies strongly on internal motivation instead of management overhead, and external pressure, our integrated approach to support and QA guarantees alignment between customer needs and engineering effort.

Learn more on opensource.com.

Working with others on data is core to your business. It determines the productivity of your employees, every day, every hour.
A race to the bottom with clunky, cheap solutions offering more frustration than value does not benefit your organization! We offer a product which not only has the features, but also the stability and ease of use that helps your business be successful. And we support that with quick and quality help, providing direct contact with real and qualified engineers, access to expertise on scaling your server, securing your sensitive data, improvements you really need and want and more. All to make sure your Nextcloud server works as smooth as possible so your team can get work done instead of wait for IT to fix their infrastructure or worry about data theft.
An investment in a Nextcloud subscription is an investment in efficient, productive, happy work for your employees. So we set pricing at a level that allows us to really offer you value, a great experience to your employees and help your business.

We give you what no other company can offer you: the full attention of the engineers developing Nextcloud. Our entire engineering team works part of their time in support, dedicated to provide the best possible expertise in the shortest possible time. Where competitors and service providers might have some dedicated support people, nobody has the expertise we provide you, and before their “customer satisfaction expert” could even start finding out what engineer might know how to resolve your problem, our engineers are providing you a solution.

A Nextcloud Subscription is bundled with Nextcloud Enterprise. Just contact us or one of our partners. Our partners will help you set up Nextcloud and they act as your first point of contact.

Nextcloud’s use of widely used and understood Open Source licenses provides customers legal certainly, protection against vendor lock-in and a guarantee that we offer top notch services. They facilitate an open, collaborative development model, resulting in more reliable and secure software. Open Source protects your business, guaranteeing the value of your investment for the long term. Read more about licensing benefits here and about the protection offered by our AGPL license here.

License compliance for Nextcloud has been validated through OpenChain, a Linux Foundation project. Nextcloud GmbH guarantees its customers license compliance and assists customers with any license-related legal inquiries.

Nextcloud and Nextcloud Enterprise are licensed under the GNU AGPLv3, one of the most widely used Open Source license. Written with input from lawyers and industry leaders from all over the world, it is a clear, balanced and well understood license, providing users a level of certainty no license from any single company can give. Today it is a widely used and broadly accepted license across various stakeholders, including developers, users, organizations and large enterprises. The AGPLv3 guarantees that all users of the software can use, study, share and improve the software without any legal risks. Further its patent clause ensures all users have a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide, royalty-free license on any patents owned by code contributors now or in the future. On top of this, Nextcloud GmbH guarantees that every customer can use Nextcloud and exercise all rights given by the GNU AGPLv3 without violating any patents or copyright.

License compliance for Nextcloud has been validated through OpenChain, a Linux Foundation project. Nextcloud GmbH guarantees its customers license compliance and assists customers with any license-related legal inquiries.<

No. Components of Nextcloud as well as many Nextcloud apps are under a variety of open source licenses. While they are all compatible with the AGPL, many are not compatible with proprietary licenses and thus would nearly guarantee customers would be in violation of those licenses, creating legal risk.

License compliance for Nextcloud has been validated through OpenChain, a Linux Foundation project. Nextcloud GmbH guarantees its customers license compliance and assists customers with any license-related legal inquiries.

No. Nextcloud will communicate with your back-end systems over external APIs. Those systems will not become a derivative work of Nextcloud just because they communicate with it. Therefore you can keep the source code of your back-end systems private and do not have to share it with anyone.

Nextcloud has its license compliance validated through OpenChain, a Linux Foundation project.

No. Logos, company names, etc. are protected by trademarks. The GNU AGPLv3 is a copyright license and does not affect any trademarks. If you put your logo on your Nextcloud it is considered merely as data used by Nextcloud and has no effect on licenses or trademarks.

License compliance for Nextcloud has been validated through OpenChain, a Linux Foundation project. Nextcloud GmbH guarantees its customers license compliance and assists customers with any license-related legal inquiries.

No. As long as you did not make any modifications to the Nextcloud code, existing apps or write your own apps, you do not have to do anything. Note that configuration does not count as modification! If you did make code modifications, then you have to make that code available under the GNU AGPLv3 or a compatible license to the users of the system. The easiest way to do so is to provide a download link. Nextcloud GmbH assists customers with license compliance.

License compliance for Nextcloud has been validated through OpenChain, a Linux Foundation project. Nextcloud GmbH guarantees its customers license compliance and assists customers with any license-related legal inquiries.

Migration from ownCloud to Nextcloud is easy. Our support engineers has already migrated dozens of customers, including some with tens of thousands of users. We will help you move to Nextcloud and optimally benefit from the added scalability, features, stability, performance and security. See our migration page for more details on migration.

We are always looking for competent partners who share our passion for making customers happy! You can join our ecosystem, contact us for more information.

Yes. Nextcloud is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3. This license only defines the rights you have to give the users of the software, but not how they get the software. You can decide freely if you want to sell the software in an app store or through any other channel, or if you want to make the app publicly available. The only requirement is that you license your app under the AGPLv3 or a compatible license.