The 2016 fork in two minutes - why Nextcloud split from ownCloud, what happened to both projects afterwards, and why that history still decides your choice today.
Nextcloud and ownCloud are not two companies that happened to build similar software. Nextcloud began as ownCloud - same founder, same original code, same community - until a disagreement about how the project should be run split it in two in 2016. Knowing that story takes two minutes and explains almost every difference you will meet afterwards.
ownCloud started in 2010 as an open source answer to Dropbox: your files, on your server. It grew fast, a company formed around it, and enterprise customers arrived. With money came the classic open source tension - how much of the project serves the community that builds it, and how much serves the customers who pay for it. Features, governance and transparency all became arguments. ownCloud's own writing about this period is unusually candid: governance concerns, transparency gaps, disagreements about the relationship between company and community.
In 2016, founder and CTO Frank Karlitschek left ownCloud and forked the code as Nextcloud. A significant part of the engineering team and the community's momentum went with him. Because a fork starts from the same code, early Nextcloud was so close to ownCloud that it could upgrade an ownCloud installation in place - the split was about direction and governance, not about one side having better technology on day one. ownCloud survived the shock, kept its enterprise customers, and kept shipping.
Nextcloud spent the decade going wide: files grew into the Hub - chat, calls, calendar, mail, office, and hundreds of community apps - becoming the default self-hosted suite. ownCloud spent it going deep: serving very large institutions, and then quietly rebuilding its engine as ownCloud Infinite Scale in Go, because the PHP architecture had a ceiling at the scales its biggest users needed. Late 2023 brought the next chapter: ownCloud was acquired by Kiteworks, with the code remaining open source. Some community members feared the project would be closed or hollowed out - ownCloud's own blog admits the communication in the following period was poor - and in 2025 the project was forked a second time, in miniature. Kiteworks has since formalised an open source program office, published a governance charter, harmonised new licensing under Apache 2.0, and dropped the contributor licence agreement in favour of a Developer Certificate of Origin.
The video compares what those two directions produced - watch it with this timeline in mind and the differences stop looking random.
Watch Full VideoIt started that way in 2016 - a fork of the ownCloud code by its own founder. A decade of separate development since then means the two now differ deeply: Nextcloud is a broad collaboration suite, while ownCloud's strategic product is a ground-up rewrite in a different language.
Nextcloud is developed by Nextcloud GmbH together with its community under the AGPL. ownCloud is stewarded by Kiteworks, which acquired it in late 2023; ownCloud Classic is AGPL and ownCloud Infinite Scale is Apache 2.0. Both codebases are public.
Closed, no - the released code is open source forever, and a company cannot unpublish it. Forked, yes, always - that possibility is exactly what keeps both projects honest, and it is what happened in 2016 when the community lost confidence.