Your files, your documents, your server. Nextcloud plus OnlyOffice gives a small office the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 experience — file storage, sharing and live document editing — hosted on hardware you own, with no per-user monthly bill.
Most small offices pay per person, every month, forever, just to store files and edit documents together. There is another way: one server in your own office (or a rented VPS) running two free products — Nextcloud for files and sharing, OnlyOffice Docs for editing. This guide is the office-level picture: what the system does, the decisions to take on day one, what running it honestly costs in time, and where its limits are. If you have not installed anything yet, the channel has separate install videos — this page starts where installation ends.
The whole office system in one picture. Two free products do the work, your hardware does the hosting.
One login gives every staff member a private file area, shared department folders, and a proper office editor that opens and saves real docx, xlsx and pptx files. Two or three people can edit the same document at the same time and see each other working. Files sync to office PCs through the desktop app, photos and scans come in from the phone app, and anything can be shared outside with a link that has a password and an expiry date. Calendar and contacts are built in and sync to phones. For a typical office — letters, quotations, spreadsheets, scanned documents — this covers the daily work completely.
There are two products, not one, and they update on their own schedules. Nextcloud is the home base: it stores the files, manages users and permissions, and handles sharing. OnlyOffice Docs is a separate document server that Nextcloud calls when someone opens a file for editing. Both are free and open source for this use. The honest consequence: whoever runs this system is doing a small slice of what Google or Microsoft engineers do for their clouds — applying updates, watching disk space, keeping backups. For a small office that is a few hours a month, not a full-time job, but it is not zero, and this guide will not pretend otherwise.
The setup choices that hurt offices are never technical — they are organisational. Decide these before staff start uploading, because changing them later means moving everyone’s files around.
A realistic month for a 10 to 30 person office: apply Nextcloud and system updates once, glance at the backup report, add or remove a user or two, and answer the occasional "I deleted a file" — which version history usually solves in a minute. Budget roughly two to four hours a month of a competent person’s time once the system has settled. The companion guides on this channel go deeper into backups, sizing and the one-admin risk; the honest summary is that the work is small but it never completely disappears, and the week it gets skipped is usually the week something breaks.
This system honestly replaces Google Drive / OneDrive storage, Dropbox-style sharing, and the document editing part of Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. It does not replace your email hosting — Nextcloud is not a mail server, and its mail app is only a viewer for mailboxes hosted somewhere else. It does not replace accounting software, your CRM, or a proper website. Offices that move files and documents to their own server and keep email where it already is get the savings without the pain. Offices that try to self-host everything at once usually regret it.
The short test: you have between roughly 5 and 50 people, most work happens in office-type documents, someone technical is available and willing, and you would rather own your data than rent access to it. If that sounds like your office, the rest of this guide series walks through sizing, sharing rules, migration and costs in detail. If your team is fully remote across many cities, or nobody can be responsible for the server, a managed service is the honest answer — self-hosting is a tool, not a religion.
The complete setup — Nextcloud with OnlyOffice running as one office system — is shown in the video above. Watch it before you plan your own deployment.
Watch Full VideoYes. Both Nextcloud and the community edition of OnlyOffice Docs are free and open source for this use. You pay for the server hardware or VPS, your domain, and the admin time — not per user, per month. Paid support plans exist if you ever want them, but they are optional.
For files, sharing and document editing, yes, that is exactly what it does. For email, no — keep your mailboxes on Google, Microsoft or another mail host and use Nextcloud only for files and documents. Most small offices run exactly that split and it works well.
A modest modern server (4 cores, 8 GB RAM, SSD storage) comfortably serves a typical office of 10 to 30 people doing normal document work. Heavy simultaneous editing by dozens of people is what pushes you to a bigger machine. The sizing guide in this series works the numbers out in detail.