Featured blog
Comparison
Nextcloud vs other solutions
Nextcloud customers migrate from a wide range of other solutions. Premium customers receive free migration assistance from solutions like Dracoon or SharePoint. Limitations apply, ask your sales representative!
As it is frequently requested, we provide a special ownCloud-to-Nextcloud migration service for free for all our customers.
Learn why you should move over to Nextcloud on our comparison page.
Moving between Nextcloud servers
Moving between services is a capability Nextcloud itself offers with the Data Export/Import feature. Available since Nextcloud 24, this function allows users to export their data in an archive, giving a choice of what to upload and when.
Why migrate?
ownCloud vs Nextcloud
Nextcloud is much more stable than ownCloud
Nextcloud offers significant scalability, security and feature improvements over ownCloud (see a full comparison here) and our experienced support team has already helped several hundreds of customers with sometimes tens of thousands of users migrate successfully.
Nextcloud is fully licensed under the AGPL
Nextcloud is fully licensed under the AGPL, giving you all the benefits of open source and avoiding any risk of mixing a proprietary enterprise edition with open source components.
ownCloud is (…) less feature rich and less developed than Nextcloud
Our customers appreciate expert help from a German, employee-owned company set up to provide a long term relationship between customers and business. Last but not least, Nextcloud has by far the strongest expertise in large scale deployments, as is evident in our work on Global Scale.
Our offer
Migrating to Nextcloud?
Let us help!
We can directly help you migrate to Nextcloud Enterprise or you can look for an offer from one of our partners. We offer enterprises a free migration package including free migration support but also a free subscription for the duration of the rest of the ownCloud subscription. Our Premium subscription offers support for migration from a multitude of other platforms. In case of custom enterprise migrations we advise you to contact our sales team. Home users are invited to share their questions and experiences for support on our forums.
First rate support as well as healthy development happening in public are key to our offering. Employing over a dozen former ownCloud engineers as well as many other experienced software developers, we are in the best position to support you in keeping your data secure and easily accessible to your employees.
Case studies
Migration from OwnCloud
We occasionally blog about our customers and some of these
evaluated or migrated from ownCloud. Read their stories below.
Migration testimonials
Martin Bech, Head of NREN at DeIC
We require a truly scalable and 100% open source enterprise solution from a reliable partner so we decided to migrate from ownCloud to Nextcloud
Dr.-Ing. Thomas Hildmann, head of Infrastructure at the TU Berlin
The migration was like a typical ownCloud upgrade
Stefan Döhler, project manager at regio iT
We are glad to have found a partner in Nextcloud with a healthy community and strong development and support capabilities.
Andreas Heik, Universitäts- rechenzentrum, TU Chemnitz
The recent development of Nextcloud, licensing model and wide support of the community encouraged us in the decision to migrate.
The ownCloud-to-Nextcloud
migration tool
Below is an (earlier) example video of the process. In this video we show ownCloud, switch to the terminal, execute the commands to download the migrator and switch back to the browser to run it.
The easiest way to migrate is using our migration tool. This tool supports migrating to the appropriate Nextcloud release automatically.
As of March 2023: Since ownCloud does not work with any currently supported PHP release (PHP8 or higher) you need to migrate from the latest version of ownCloud to Nextcloud Hub 3 (25) and then further upgrade Nextcloud from there. Nextcloud Hub 4 (26) and newer do not work with outdated PHP 7.x versions. We urge you to upgrade your server and PHP version as soon as possible, as PHP versions prior PHP8 are no longer supported by the PHP community which creates security risks, see https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php
If you run into migration issues, you can search and ask for help on our forums. For custom enterprise migrations, contact our sales team.
You can do the last step manually from the command line, which is adviced on large installations where the time-out on PHP via the web interface can be a problem.
We continuously monitor new releases, test them and enable upgrading but note that ownCloud is backporting a lot of big features to ‘stable’ releases, which threatens stability and might make upgrading harder in the future.
If you need help, please visit our community support forums or contact our Sales team for a custom quote.
Upgrade path
We have developed an upgrade path from ownCloud 10.11 to Nextcloud 25.0.2. Upgrade first to ownCloud 10.11 and then to Nextcloud 25.0.2.
When upgrading from an older version of ownCloud, make sure to enable apps after every upgrade step so they can run their own upgrade scripts.
If you are on a very old ownCloud release or want more details, read our advanced and detailed upgrade documentation in our upgrade documentation. Note that upgrading from a Windows Server is not supported beyond moving over the data.
Settings migration
Nearly all ownCloud settings will be migrated to Nextcloud during the upgrade procedure. That means that internal and public (link) shares keep working, users keep their settings and you will retain app configuration, LDAP and external storage settings and more.
Settings from proprietary extensions from ownCloud which have open source replacements in Nextcloud, however, will sometimes need to be reconfigured. The following apps have a Nextcloud equivalent but need re-configuration:
- File Retention
- File Firewall
- File Automated Tagging
- File Drop
- SharePoint
The open source replacements of these apps in Nextcloud offer at least the same and typically more capabilities. Configuration settings not mentioned in this list will be carried over from ownCloud to Nextcloud during upgrade.
License Compliance
Nextcloud is licensed exclusively under the AGPL or less restrictive open source licenses, removing any risk of mixing incompatible licenses or other legal issues. If you have not made any changes to the code of ownCloud Server and did not develop custom ownCloud applications, you will not need to do anything to be in compliance with the open source licenses of Nextcloud. Note that theme changes or branding are unaffected by AGPL licensing. Find more information in our FAQ. Our sales team will be happy to answer any questions you have.
All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners, which might in no way be associated or affiliated with Nextcloud.
Free migration support
Nextcloud will support your migration from ownCloud
to Nextcloud Enterprise for free as part of our Nextcloud Enterprise services.
