Are you an enterprise or private user? 8 ways to get help for any Nextcloud matter!

How to get help when you’re dealing with a Nextcloud issue

The purpose of this blog is to direct everyone to ask for help at the right channel.

• Are you using Nextcloud and need help with something from experienced @Nextclouders?
• Did you just hear about Nextcloud and want to give it a try?

We usually receive a lot of questions about Nextcloud: technical or not technical.
This is the right material to read about where you should ask for help depending on your issues or how to get started!

How to use Nextcloud?

Nextcloud is a self-hosted, open-source cloud software developed by the Nextcloud GmbH team and a large community of contributors.

What can you do with Nextcloud?

Who uses Nextcloud?

Nextcloud is a flexible software with capabilities that can be used by small to large companies or governmental institutions as well as by private, home users. There are about 400.000 Nextcloud servers on the internet, each with anywhere between 1 and tens of millions of users!

Anyone can download Nextcloud for free, set it up on their own server and use it for free (you don’t have to pay for a license). The costs you would have are:

• Hosting costs (For a server if you host Nextcloud on your own server or hosting provider costs if you sign up for an account with one of the Nextcloud providers.)
• Subscription costs (For businesses that want the full Nextcloud Enterprise experience)
• No costs (If you manage to recycle your old laptop and use it as a server. Well, in this case, power is power 😉 )

Ways to set up your Nextcloud:

Home users

• Install Nextcloud on your own server. This requires basic technical skills (you can follow the instructions in the documentation page) plus server costs.
• Sign up for a hosted Nextcloud instance, by Nextcloud providers. You don’t need to have technical skills, just sign up for an account. Costs may vary, based on the space you need to use.
• Recycle your old computer and use it as a Linux server. This requires technical skills and doesn’t have any costs.

Businesses and organizations

• Nextcloud Enterprise through Nextcloud GmbH. This is a hardened, business-ready build of Nextcloud, backed by our subscription. Customers thus receive instant support when needed, unlimited access to our engineers, instant notice for security measures, professional services & more. Subscription costs may vary, based on the number of users per instance.
• Nextcloud Enterprise through official Nextcloud parters. This way you receive services like instant support and/or system maintenance and the costs vary depending the partner and services you need.

Note that of course, every company can set up a Nextcloud instance for free, as mentioned above. Yet, the best way to maintain your business’ File sync and share solution is through Nextcloud Enterprise services.

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 Nextcloud Enterprise, a build of Nextcloud with more testing and hardening (a bit comparable to Red Hat’s Fedora vs RHEL – the same features, the same code, different build)
• Access to our Enterprise portal with associated services and benefits
• Full lifecycle support with up to 15 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.

The right place to get help & what to expect

There are several ways and channels to get help when you deal with an issue while using or installing Nextcloud.

Businesses and organizations

All businesses with an active enterprise subscription have unlimited access to communication with the Nextcloud engineers, through our portal. If you don’t have a subscription yet, please contact our sales team here for more deatails.

Private users

Unfortunately, we are not able to provide professional support for Nextcloud instances, installed for home use. But of course, there are several ways, sources and channels available for private users to get help from Nextcloud too, depending on the issue they are dealing with!

Here’s a guide on how to get help from Nextcloud as a home user:

Note that Nextcloud engineers might not get to issues or feature requests imediately. We create the roadmap for our releases in advance, based on the general demand and that feature might have to wait a bit before it becomes real. Of course, if you have the technical knowledge, you can develop that feature or a community member that has the knowledge might choose to do that. Fingers crossed 😀

As support for non enterprise users is mostly community driven and members of the community can help only in their free time, response times might not be instant, and sometimes the community might not have the knowledge to help.

Last but not least…

We hope you find this article helpful, and of course, feedback on how we can improve this blogpost or even our private user help process, is welcome.

If instead of asking for help you’d like to offer us some help, we welcome all feedback, contributions, translations and sucess stories 😀

We’re developing Nextcloud so that everyone has the chance to be in control of their data. We hope Nextcloud works for you and you’re satisfied using it!