Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment

  • Many agree with the article’s premise: Nextcloud “feels slow,” especially via the web UI, despite being feature‑rich and widely useful.
  • People still value it as one of the few full, self‑hostable Google Drive / MS365–style suites, especially for files, calendars, contacts, and basic collaboration, but often describe a love–hate relationship.

Frontend performance & JavaScript bloat

  • The large JS payload (15–20 MB, ~4–5 MB compressed) is heavily criticized; some call it “outrageous” for a calendar/files UI and note that Google Calendar uses significantly less.
  • Others argue size alone isn’t the main problem: the real issue is many small requests and waterfall loading patterns (e.g., ~120+ requests for the calendar view, lots of per‑calendar and per‑feature calls).
  • Complaints include: each app as its own SPA with duplicated dependencies, poor bundling/minification, loading everything on every page, and excessive client‑side work for simple CRUD UIs.

Backend / architecture concerns

  • Several describe the core as “encrusted layers” of historical PHP/Owncloud code: lots of DB touches for trivial actions, heavy reliance on Redis/cron to paper over design issues, and fragile performance that needs careful tuning (DB on separate disk, Redis, PHP‑FPM).
  • Some see the modular “app” system and 350+ repos as a source of incoherence and overbuild; others defend it as the reason Nextcloud can replace many services at once.

Client apps & reliability

  • Mobile clients, especially for photo backup, draw strong criticism: reports of WebDAV lockups, stalled or duplicate uploads, confusing behavior when deleting local photos, and even data loss.
  • Many abandon the official clients and use generic WebDAV, Syncthing, or FolderSync for sync instead; WebDAV itself is described as brittle for large transfers.
  • Desktop sync is generally liked and used heavily; many treat Nextcloud more as a NAS + sync engine and avoid the web apps.

Maintenance & “production” use

  • Experiences range from “rock solid for years” (especially small business with a few users and AIO/docker images) to “every upgrade breaks something,” leading some to freeze versions or abandon it.
  • It’s seen as “good enough” for family or small‑company file/groupware use, but not at the polish or reliability level of big‑tech clouds.

Alternatives & specialized stacks

  • Many commenters now prefer “one tool per job” over an all‑in‑one:
    • Files/sync: Syncthing, Seafile, Resilio, OpenCloud/OCIS, Filebrowser, Copyparty, BewCloud, SMB/rsync.
    • Photos: Immich, Ente, Nextcloud Memories.
    • Calendar/contacts: Radicale, DAV servers.
    • Tasks: Vikunja.
  • Tradeoff noted: lighter, faster, simpler tools vs. Nextcloud’s convenience of a single integrated, SSO‑backed platform.