Nextcloud momentum continues amid industry awareness of GDPR and data leak risks, doubles customer base in 2018

A lot is happening in Nextcloud and once a year it makes sense to summarize and talk about how things are going. In our press release we shared that the momentum of Nextcloud continues, with our company more than doubling our customer base in 2018, gaining some major customers like the German Federal Government, cities like Bern and dozens of manufacturing, finance, health, education and research organizations across the world. We do this, growing organically, by focusing on building the future of enterprise team productivity technology!

Nextcloud has become the leading self-hosted content collaboration and secure file exchange solution by most metrics, here showing Google Trends search volume versus 4 smaller competitors selling proprietary solutions.

We quoted our head of sales, Andreas Rode, saying about the growth of our sales:

Strong execution in our sales team has more than doubled our customer base and we added three more team members in the last few months. Customer demand in secure, self-hosted productivity solutions continues to grow and we look to expand our team further to provide the market with the best possible solution.

Attention for privacy and compliance

While 2018 was a great year for Nextcloud, it was a bad year for privacy. Or perhaps good, given the unprecedented amount of press and political coverage of privacy violations and the introduction of the GDPR. These developments have have brought Nextcloud to the attention of a larger audience as the easiest way to regain control over sensitive data. With website traffic nearly doubling to over 300.000 unique visitors per month, the interest in Nextcloud was overwhelming and coverage by major outlets like Le Monde in France and Der Spiegel in Germany helped draw a new audience.

Alexa showing growth in website visitors

Every one of the last four months of 2018 set new a record for website visitors and 2019 is set to continue that trend. Our forums saw thousands of active users every month post 150-200 messages per day, we had 500 new twitter followers every month, our conference grew by a third to over 200 people – 2018 showed stunning growth for Nextcloud.

The largest self-hosted productivity ecosystem

The Nextcloud ecosystem has grown to be the largest in the self-hosted productivity market with well over 200 apps built by over 150 different private developers and businesses. In the Android app store users can now find 17 Android apps which interact with or are developed exclusively for Nextcloud, like an SMS app, three bookmark handling apps, two password managers, a Deck Kanban app, several notes apps and more. Over 500 individuals contributed to the Nextcloud code base during 2018. The launch of Nextcloud Include with funding from the Reinhard von König Preis for innovation received by Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek brings support for growing diversity and creativity in the community. Integration announcements with third party technologies like Rocket.Chat, Moodle, Storj.io, Mastodon and others make it easier for customers to deeply integrate Nextcloud in their infrastructure.

Big releases with new capabilities

Major releases in 2018 of Nextcloud 13, 14 and 15 delivered unique capabilities including granular end-to-end encryption in the clients, a self-hosted audio/video chat solution with Nextcloud Talk and the unique Video Verification security feature. Nextcloud was made accessible to an even larger audience thanks to Simple Signup which integrates easy signing up to a Nextcloud instance at a Nextcloud Provider in the Nextcloud clients, and was used by thousands of people in the first few months.

Nextcloud 13 with Nextcloud Talk, E2E encryption and a big performance boost

Nextcloud 14: Video Verification, Signal & Telegram 2FA and GDPR compliance

Nextcloud 15 introduces Nextcloud Social, security and video chat while editing documents

Frank said about our development efforts:

Our focus on building innovative technology while delivering customers direct access to top engineering knowledge has enabled us to continue grow and service a quickly expanding customer base. Nextcloud has established itself as the defacto standard solution for self-hosted productivity. With the tech preview announcement today of Virtual Drive integration in the Nextcloud Desktop Client and our Customer Advisory Board, Nextcloud continues to lead the market in innovation while delivering value to customers.

Announcements today

As Frank alluded to, today we also announced the upcoming Virtual Drive technology in the Nextcloud Desktop Client and the establishment of a Customer Advisory Board to help align development with the needs of our most valued customers.

You can learn more about these in their respective announcements:

• a Virtual Drive for Nextcloud Desktop Client
• Announcing the Nextcloud Customer Advisory Board

As always a HUGE thanks to everybody who helped make this success possible! Nextcloud wouldn’t be where it is without the incredible support of our community. So give yourself a pat on the back for this one, YOU made private and secure file sharing on the internet possible!

And yes, we’re very happy with the almost 6500 🌟 on our github project 🤩