Nextcloud

Nextcloud is the directory's flagship self-hostable content-collaboration platform, operated by **Nextcloud GmbH** at Hauptmannsreute 44a, 70192 Stuttgart, Germany. Founded in June 2016 by Frank Karlitschek (founder and CEO; previously creator of ownCloud) together with Niels Mache and approximately a dozen open-source entrepreneurs, the company is privately held and founder-led with no external venture capital. Nextcloud reports **400,000+ deployments** and tens of millions of users at thousands of organisations, and ships as an integrated suite — Files (Dropbox-class storage), Talk (Slack/Zoom-class messaging and video), Groupware (mail/calendar/contacts), Office (with Collabora / OnlyOffice integrations), Assistant (sovereign AI), and Flow (no-code automation) — positioning itself as "the better Microsoft 365 for private clouds." The compliance story is structurally different from every other vendor in this category. **Nextcloud is open source under AGPL-3.0 and designed to be self-hosted by default**, which means the customer becomes the data controller and operator of their own instance — there is no Nextcloud-managed cloud sitting between customer data and the customer (except for **Nextcloud One**, an optional managed offering for organisations under 100 users that is hosted in Germany with 24/7 support). The privacy policy makes this explicit: "Nextcloud software is designed to ensure no user data is transferred to us." For procurement-grade EU buyers this gives complete control over hosting region, encryption keys, and sub-processor footprint — running Nextcloud on Hetzner / OVHcloud / Scaleway / STACKIT or on the customer's own data centre delivers full 5/5 / none posture by construction. The reference customer list reflects this positioning: Deutsche Telekom, Amnesty International, German federal agencies, BWI (the Bundeswehr's IT subsidiary), and a long list of European universities. In 2026 Nextcloud partnered with IONOS to launch **Euro-Office** as an open-source Microsoft Office alternative (stable release summer 2026) and pledged **€250M of digital-sovereignty investment by 2030**. Pricing reflects the self-host-first model. The **Community Edition is free** under AGPL-3.0; commercial Enterprise subscriptions start at €71.29 per user per year (Standard, 100-user tier) ≈ €6/user/month, scaling to €105 (Premium, with consulting and clustering support) and €205 (Ultimate, with AI Assistant, Flow, and 24/7 support) at 100-user volumes. **Nextcloud One** is the managed German-hosted tier for <100 users. Best fit: every EU procurement-grade buyer in the directory; particularly compelling for public-sector procurement, regulated industries, and any organisation that wants a Microsoft 365 alternative under its own control. Together with Hetzner/OVHcloud/STACKIT (hosting), this is the canonical EU-sovereign-cloud productivity stack.