Nextcloud vs. Proton Mail

While searching for tools to satisfy a quickly scaling online startup, we found Nextcloud is well suited for today's remote collaborative team. Nextcloud has just the right toolset for a collaborative workspace including video, chat, many file formats accepted, and intuitive user interface. Comparatively other popular tools like Trello were distracting with more features than functionality. Working with Nextcloud is much like having a workspace with all your content and tools available anywhere on any device, without the ads, distractions, and irrelevant functionality. We will continue to utilize Nextcloud as a remote workspace for evolving and scaling teams.

Incentivized

Good if you like privacy and not having your data mined for advertizing and AI training.

• File sharing (internal, public or federated).
• One software, many activities (files, address book, calendar, chat, edit, email) ...
• Groupware, sharing between users or groups is really easy and finely controlled.
• Integrations and many apps.

• Secure encrypted email hosting
• Connection with Outlook works well
• Works well on all platforms: web, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS
• Low monthly cost for email plus all the associated apps

• Slow in comparison to other solutions
• May be complex for the start since there are lots of apps and features
• May be not focusing on core topics

Incentivized

• Exporting email (which I like to do for archiving) is awkward and slow.
• Proton Mail Bridge (which allows access from other email readers like Outlook) sometimes has synchronization issues. Lately these just resolve themselves.

Mostly intuitive and easy to use. A bit harder if you stick with two passwords (one for the account and one for the encryption).

I never needed support as everything always worked fine. The documentation on Nextcloud website is extensive and clear. The community is very active on the forum and should support you if you don't already find what you are looking for.

PIM and file sharing are the same as you get in Google's Drive/Calendar. With extensions, you can also implement web meetings (e.g., by using Jitsi), but this comes with more administrative effort. In the end, this comes down to how big of a user/customer base you are supporting. For small enterprises, Nextcloud stacks up very well against its big competitors. At a large scale, you will have increased maintenance and resource costs which you need to check against licensing fees for the cloud providers.

Proton had a wider offering of products like vpn and drive. I ended up paying for a yearly subscription, I liked it so much.

Incentivized

• It allowed us access to our files from any device over the internet.
• It helped manage and organize our file sharing with third parties.
• It provided a secure wrapper for accessing files.

• Easy to link with my business domain and email.