Open-source Google Drive alternatives

Nextcloud Server is a platform for keeping your files, contacts, calendars and other data on a server of your choosing. Content is synchronized across your devices, can be shared with other people for viewing or collaboration, and stays under your control rather than with a large cloud provider. It grew out of the ownCloud lineage.

Functionality can be expanded through hundreds of apps in its App Store, including Calendar, Contacts, Mail and Video Chat. Security measures include encryption mechanisms, a public bug bounty program and two-factor authentication. There are several ways to get a Nextcloud: sign up with a provider, install the server yourself on your own hardware or with a ready-to-use appliance, buy a device that comes with it preinstalled, or find a service provider to host it for you.

The server is written in PHP and JavaScript under the AGPL-3.0 license. Nextcloud GmbH also offers an Enterprise edition aimed at public sector, education and company users. It suits households, schools and organizations that want to replace commercial cloud storage and office suites with something they run themselves.

Cloudreve is a self-hosted file management and sharing system with support for multiple storage backends. You can keep files on local disk, on a remote node, or with providers including OneDrive, S3-compatible services and several Chinese clouds such as Aliyun, Tencent, Huawei and Qiniu, and clients transfer data directly to the provider.

Everyday file features include drag-and-drop upload of files and folders with parallel, resumable transfers, batch download, compressing and extracting archives, WebDAV access across all storage providers, and background downloads through Aria2 or qBittorrent using one or more download nodes. Media metadata can be extracted so files can be searched by metadata or tag. Multiple users and groups are supported, and share links for files and folders can carry an expiry date. Videos, images, audio and ePub files preview online, and text, Markdown, diagrams and Office documents can be edited.

Cloudreve is written in Go and licensed under GPL-3.0, with a project homepage, online demo, documentation and Telegram and Discord communities. It suits individuals and small organizations that want a private, Chinese-ecosystem-friendly alternative to commercial cloud drives.

Seafile is a file synchronization and sharing platform written mainly in C. Beyond keeping folders in sync across devices and sharing them with others, it describes a newer way of organizing files using extensible file properties and flexible views. Topics also tie it to wikis, Markdown, knowledge management and document management.

The project's homepage could not be fetched while preparing this entry, so the details here come from the repository description, its topics and general knowledge of the product. Seafile is known for client apps on desktop and mobile, libraries as the unit of syncing and sharing, and an emphasis on reliable syncing of large numbers of files.

The core server is open source, with its license listed as 'Other' on GitHub, and the vendor also sells a professional edition and offers hosted service. You can run it on your own servers, which suits teams and organizations that want private cloud storage under their control.

Filestash began as a Dropbox-like file manager that speaks many storage protocols, including FTP, SFTP, S3, SMB, WebDAV and IPFS along with about twenty more. It has since grown into a wider file management platform built around three products: a web client for browsing files in a browser, a native client for syncing data to devices, and gateways that expose storage over other protocols.

Its architecture is plugin-driven, so anything beyond the lean core lives in a plugin and requirements are met by adding or writing plugins rather than forking. The web client is written in vanilla JavaScript, and APIs and gateways can expose data over SFTP, S3, FTP, WebDAV, MCP and AS2. Authentication integrations can go as far as delegating login to a WordPress site and using its roles for access control.

A workflow engine automates actions on files by chaining steps on events, ranging from Slack or email notifications to managed file transfer pipelines. Filestash is written in Go and released under the AGPL-3.0 license, and repository topics point to uses in document management and archiving.

Nextcloud All-in-One, often shortened to AIO, is the official installation method for Nextcloud. It provides easy deployment and maintenance, packaging most of what an instance needs into a set of containers that are managed from a simple web interface.

The bundle includes Nextcloud itself, a high-performance backend for Files, Redis and APCu caching, PostgreSQL as the database, and optional components such as Nextcloud Office, Talk with its TURN server, a recording server, ClamAV antivirus, full-text search, a whiteboard, Imaginary for previews, and a backup solution based on BorgBackup. Updates, daily backups and restore from an archive are handled from the AIO interface.

It is designed to work behind existing reverse proxies, Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale. The project is written in PHP, licensed under AGPL-3.0, and runs on your own hardware with Docker. The maintainers are actively looking for contributors to help with development.

ownCloud Core is the server component of ownCloud Classic, a self-hosted platform for file storage, synchronization and sharing. It is the foundation on which apps such as Activity, Calendar and Contacts are built, and is written in PHP and JavaScript.

It ships with servers for WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV, an app plugin architecture, backends for external storage, support for encryption, user and group management, and a REST API. The server runs on PHP with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite, and is also available as a Docker image on Docker Hub. Its topics point to federated sharing and enterprise use.

ownCloud Classic is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and installation is covered by the official manual. For the next-generation platform, the project points to ownCloud Infinite Scale. Contributors follow a rebase workflow with signed commits and DCO sign-off, and enterprise support is available from the vendor. It suits organizations and individuals who want to keep files on their own servers instead of a public cloud.

FileBrowser Quantum is a self-hosted web-based file manager that lets you reach and manage your files through a responsive browser interface. It is a large fork of the original File Browser project, packaged as a single small program that is meant to be simple to install and configure.

Compared with the original, it adds support for multiple sources with include and exclude rules, and sign-in through OIDC, LDAP, JWT, proxy authentication or passwords with two-factor authentication. Configuration lives in a config.yaml file. Search returns results as you type and supports size filters, while thumbnails cover office documents, video, album artwork and 3D models. WebDAV, granular permissions and customizable sharing options with expiry are also provided.

The server is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0. The maintainer states the repository will always stay free and open source. A version 2.0 beta was announced in the README, and documentation is available in English.

The Nextcloud Android app is the mobile client for Nextcloud, a platform people run to keep their files and data under their own control. It lets users work with the content on their Nextcloud server from an Android phone or tablet.

The app is written in Kotlin and Java and released under GPL-2.0. Builds are distributed through Google Play and as APKs from GitHub, with signing certificate fingerprints published so downloads can be verified; the F-Droid build is signed separately by F-Droid. Support questions go to the Nextcloud Help Forum, while bugs and enhancement ideas are tracked as GitHub issues and translations are handled on Transifex.

The syncthing-macos project is the official native macOS application bundle for Syncthing, an open-source, peer-to-peer tool for keeping folders synchronized across your own devices without a central cloud server. The bundle packages its own Syncthing instance and wraps the background process, so it feels like a normal Mac app rather than a command-line utility managed through a browser.

A tray menu lets you open the Syncthing web interface in your preferred browser and manage the app from the menu bar. The README notes that Syncthing version 2 is the supported version since 23 February 2026 and requires at least macOS 12, while version 1 is deprecated and will not receive updates. The wrapper is written in Objective-C and Swift and described as frugal and simple.

The macOS wrapper is MIT-licensed, and the bundled Syncthing is open source as well. It runs entirely on your own Mac, with no vendor-hosted sync service, which suits people who want private file synchronization or backup between computers and phones.

The Nextcloud Desktop Client is an app that synchronizes files from a Nextcloud server with your computer. It is available for Windows, macOS and Linux and is the companion to a Nextcloud server that you run or use.

Official downloads, daily builds and release lists are available from the Nextcloud site, and user, administration and developer manuals are on the central documentation site. Contributors can follow the repository's guidelines and code of conduct, help with testing by installing daily builds, and report bugs in the issue tracker.

The client is written mostly in C++ with Qt6 since version 3.14, with Swift components on macOS, and builds with CMake and compilers such as clang or gcc. Windows 10 and 11, macOS 13 Ventura or newer and Linux are supported, and the build instructions use KDE Craft. The code is licensed under GPL-2.0.